Earlier quoted context omitted.
US has the largest railway on earth by a large margin
Largest freight rail. Public transport for normal people is still shit compared to Europe.
And especially China. And Japan.
Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
221–230 of 464 posts
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#222I don't care about fancy numbers, I care about high quality peering.
I'd rather have a stable 50Mbit than 1Gbit and 0.5Mbit international peering with packet loss.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's fair to critique this article not covering this, but I also think this is largely a red herring. The vast majority of the issue in the US is suburban, where density isn't really a problem. The US has a lot of rural areas, but they represent a tiny fraction of the population. As a comparison, Australia has roughly the same land-mass as the contiguous states, but with less than a tenth of the population. It has it…
Rural and suburban line burial isn't a hard problem to solve. It's easier to put in lines in rural and suburban locations than it is to put lines in urban areas. You don't have to, for example, shut down a road when putting in rural lines. It's a mistake to think that population density has anything to do with the difficulty of getting high speed internet. It's nearly completely unrelated.
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Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. Kind of amazing that we're calling 1Gbps fiber "appalling". Every thread about internet access attracts people with unique situations. NYC is a dense city that's hard to build in and has to deal with a lot of regulation. I don't live in NYC and I'm not even in a dense area, but I have my choice of fiber providers up to at least…
Rural area? Hard to build. Dense city? Hard to build. Got it. Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor.
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Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in NYC, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and yet Verizon Fios 1 Gbps is my only option. I tried to upgrade to Fios 2 Gbps, but it's not available. Spectrum only goes to 200Mbps; no other providers in my area. I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. If we're this bad in NYC, imagine what someone in rural America goes through.
It is harder to install fiber in densely populated areas than in some backcountry farm. Imagine tearing open a busy street in NYC for a few weeks to install fiber vs. digging a trench in the dirt next to the farm road. Which one do you think costs more? For which do you think you need to jump through 1001 bureaucratic hoops?
I cannot comment on the cost in the US, but in the UK it would be the farm that’s more expensive because the cost is relative the distance. You still have to file the same government applications to close a dirt road as you would a busy city street. But you would have much more miles of road to file the application for, plus the actual expense of the engineering work, for rural destinations.
And that’s without factoring in that fewer subscribers are going to sign up in rural destinations vs busy urban hubs.
This is why the UK had to make subsidies available for rural fibre.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#226This article came up before. It's heavy on the clickbait, if you couldn't guess from the title. Some important points that they leave out: - 25G internet isn't available everywhere in Switzerland. It's just the fastest tier available in some locations. - The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much hard…
Chicago here, 2gbps via coax (so probably 40 or 60 down) is the max I can get.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#227Who told you US telco sector is a free market?
I think the people who think "free market" will fix any problem are the same exact people who think that it would be a great idea if companies are allowed to own their own fiber or put thousands of satellites into orbit. They will see it as a problem of regulations that it is too cumbersome to put fiber into the ground as a company, and advocate for deregulation, "micro trenching" and privatization, that in order to…
> Its the exact cancer of an ideology that made US and European infrastructure a joke.
The cancer isn't deregulation or regulation but rather regulatory capture.
Making the barrier of entry to the market so high that nobody can compete with existing players. Nearly every dysfunctional market in the US could be made better by deregulation, not because regulation is bad but because it's badly regulated.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#228Thus the prices in switzerland are higher than anywhere else. I don’t know about you, but I’d have no use of 25gbits/s
Hate to sound like a cable company, but same. I have 8/8 available to me for barely more money, but I just don't need it. Sites don't load faster, movies don't play clearer, and I don't have a huge family. 1/1 suits me fine.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
…and 640kb RAM is more than enough.
I get that but in all seriousness if they're saying "the free market" doesn't provide what people want it's worth asking if most people (remember, not HN readers) actually want 25 Gbit internet.
You have to think longer term.
Today’s 1Gbit is tomorrow’s 25GBit.
It takes some time to actually install it. So, better to plan for the future.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article makes it very clear that the fiber to the house is a natural monopoly and should be public infrastructure, just like communism. Once the fiber reaches a central office, access can be sold and metered off to a free market, just like capitalism. What most of us in the "free world" are suffering with is blood sucking parasites that own the pipe into the house and charge prices aligned with that fact. It's an…
Why would fiber to the house be a natural monopoly?
Because the fixed cost of deploying infrastructure (digging the fiber to the house) is extremely expensive compared to the marginal cost (of serving data over an already installed fiber). 20 different companies all digging their own fibers to the same house would be tremendously wasteful.