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Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

stefan.schueller.net

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Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#331

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

Aurornis wrote: post #161

This 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…

Switzerland is small but mountainous.

And just for reference:

  * Delaware: 200 people / km^2
  * Switzerland: 230 people / km^2
  * Massachusetts: 350 people / km^2
  * New Jersey: 490 people / km^2
So you can think of Switzerland as Delaware, but landlocked and full of 4,000-meter peaks.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#332

Post by lava_pidgeon »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #185
lava_pidgeon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an essay not a scientific paper. As such it's more an opinion peace. The first question in my head why it does not compare with Rumania and South Korea. It might be they had a more free market approach (I don't know really). Poland has a strong wireless connection infrastructure and it has there a market approach e.g. The reason the essay from Switzerland compares to Germany as both counties are part of the Ger…

The author is Swiss – your ad hominem attach fails twice. And again, I'll direct you to original point of my above comment and a point made in the essay: if you want to be effective you'll need to look past ideology to see the actually working dynamics of the system. There is no doubt that the Swiss internet service provision system is superior to the US and Germany – no doubt. The essay explains why, an essay you ar…

Ok and you couldn't get my argument: Why not Rumania, South Korea? These countries have also a great quality of internet. On mobile Poland, France and Austria?

This is also a difference between an ideologicopinion piece with a "Ive told you so" and "Markets are bad " to an scientific review.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#333

Post by mrheosuper »

Turskarama wrote: post #254
Aurornis wrote: post #161

This 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…

> - 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 harder than Switzerland. I see this argument come up a lot with regards to all kinds of infrastructure, and the thing is it simply _isn't true_. What matters is population density, GDP per capita, geography, and will. A countries size doesn't matter since…

> A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal

It will never be both objectively and subjectively equal. Even the geographic is already difference, the weather, then there is people, wealth, etc.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#334

Post by stefanfisk »

gleenn wrote: post #196
ElProlactin wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corruption, aging infrastructure... There are developing ("third-world") countries that have better overall internet than the US.

I heard someone argue that because original phones rolled out in the US much earlier and more broadly, we spend all this money on copper wiring. Because Europe didn't have as much, they transitioned to fast cellular quickly. Being first does not mean you will be best certainly.

Dude, this is what Stockholm looked like 1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower.

2009 we made it a national strategy that 90% of the population should get internet access via fiber and by 2020 we’d reached 63%.

Here’s a map of our broadband coverage https://bredbandskartan.pts.se/.

The US had a similar strategy and basically paid $400 billion for the same buildout but got nothing in return and no one was held accountable https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5....

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#335

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

kyralis wrote: post #4

The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does. I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.

Switzerland is half as dense as New Jersey.

It's around the same density as Delaware and Maryland. And it's full of giant mountains, which neither Delaware nor Maryland have.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#336

Post by fransje26 »

Nnnes wrote: post #293
guiambros wrote: post #173

Earlier 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.

> imagine what someone in rural America goes through. Here's the FCC's map of residential access to ≥1 Gbps fiber internet. https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?version=dec2... Of course most areas don't have it, but take a look at the Dakotas. I won't say it's better than NYC, but it may be as good in quite a large number of counties where the population density is ~1/km²=~2/mi². Most of the ISPs in those…

Just for the sake of information, related to the article being discussed. In Switzerland:

- Init7: 1 Gbit: CHF 44/month, 10 Gbit: CHF 77, 25 Gbit: CHF 222

- Salt: 10 Gbit: CHF 49.95. (CHF 39.5 when combined with a mobile plan)

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#337

Post by AnthonyMouse »

matt-p wrote: post #290
colechristensen wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong, there are scaling problems. Have you ever worked at both a very large and very small company? Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?

So why don't you have ISPs that focus on one state or one geographical area. We have that all over in Europe.

To some extent there are, but in many cases it's because the law prohibits that. It imposes build out requirements so that if you want to offer service in the higher density area you also have to provide service over a wide area that includes a bunch of farmland or similar.

In theory this is supposed to be to make sure someone is serving rural areas but in practice it's because the incumbents don't want new challengers showing up to provide better service in the areas where it's profitable to build a competing network and so lobby the government to saddle them with a huge barrier to entry.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#338

Post by hnav »

userbinator wrote: post #149

* Up to 25Gbps... All over a connection that isn’t shared with your neighbors. Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. "dedicated" to where? Because you sure don't get a "dedicated" line to every server on the Internet! That's just not how computer networks work. It's obvious that if you have 1000 homes with 25G links you'll need 25T of bandwidth to be able to handle them all at f…

We're all going to caching appliances deployed on the ISP's network these days anyway.

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#339

Post by fransje26 »

rdsubhas wrote: post #316
Aurornis wrote: post #161

This 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…

Yeah, what a biased piece of reporting. Switzerland has one of the highest Internet prices in the world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-... And don't talk to me about mobile data prices, it's out of the planet.

As posted above, for information. In Switzerland, fresh from their website:

- Init7: 1 Gbit: CHF 44/month, 10 Gbit: CHF 77, 25 Gbit: CHF 222

- Salt: 10 Gbit: CHF 49.95. (CHF 39.5 when combined with a mobile plan)

Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

#340

Post by spacebacon »

serial_dev wrote: post #207
Aurornis wrote: post #199

Earlier 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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