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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

#361

Post by prmoustache »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #327
rdsubhas wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Switzerland has some of the highest prices in the world for everything. This isn't unique to the Internet.

Yes, comparatively to a lot of stuff (like food for example), internet connectivity is cheap in Switzerland.

To take 2 countries where I have been living in the last 10 years, if you compare internet prices and average income in Switzerland and Spain, Swiss citizens end up in a favorable situation compared to Spanish ones.

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

#362

Post by panick21_ »

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.

People only using aggregate density calculation is so overly simplistic. Inside of each country there are patterns.

Imagine a country with two huge cities and a very long empty desert in the middle. Density can be low but its still easy to connect.

I not totally skeptical that some places are harder to connect then others but given we live in the modern world with algorithms and satellites we should be able to do a better job than top level density.

And I'm not saying this to convince you that Switzerland is easier. Frankly I do think it easier. But because I am actually interested if anybody knows if such work and estimations exist.

Like lets assume all fiber, cable and old phone connections are gone. How hard much would it cost to get every person to some very high speed.

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

#363

Post by fragmede »

laughing_man wrote: post #318
apexalpha wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. 1Gpbs symmetric is not 'appaling' come on now.

I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit. I don't think I've ever been able to use more than about 50 mbit due to constraints on the other end.

If you're downloading AI model files, which are tens or hundreds of gigabytes, or downloading large datasets to fine tune them, and then uploading them to various cloud providers, you start waiting around a lot. Uploading videos to be processed on a cloud GPU to produce gaussian splats and then you have to wait and download the results.

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

#364

Post by swissdom »

prmoustache wrote: post #361
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland has some of the highest prices in the world for everything. This isn't unique to the Internet.

Yes, comparatively to a lot of stuff (like food for example), internet connectivity is cheap in Switzerland. To take 2 countries where I have been living in the last 10 years, if you compare internet prices and average income in Switzerland and Spain, Swiss citizens end up in a favorable situation compared to Spanish ones.

That's right. Swiss wages are at least twice the European average (actually much more than that, but let's keep it conservative). If we exclude home rent and healthcare costs, the vast majority of things definitely don't cost twice as much. Switzerland ranks among the highest in Europe in terms of purchasing power, that's the figure that matters when determining how expensive a country actually is.

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

#365

Post by prmoustache »

not_your_vase wrote: post #32
trynumber9 wrote: post #5

I guess they don't bother using Speedtest in Switzerland, as the average speed seems about the same as the US: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index Must be a sampling bias or something.

You know, in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality - and it will fly off the shelves. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Swisscom is the biggest ISP in Switzerland - they charge high prices for very slow internet. But they have the word "Swiss" in their name, so it's okay to sell 100 Mbps connection…

Also a large fraction of the swiss population is old, and the older portion of the population:

- do not like changes

- value loyalty much more than younger people

- consider that bar an important change in income, there is no reason they shouldn't pay x if they agreed on it 10 years before.

If it works and continue working the same as it ever been and at the same price, they don't see a reason to look for something else.

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

#366

Post by panick21_ »

waetsch wrote: post #19

There is criticism on how Germany organized the ISP market going around for ages. Ironically we had a monopoly for building wired connections - that was run by the government. Then someone had the great idea to open this market for the private sector. Since then we kind of lice in the stoneage in terms of fast internet. I heart that Scandinavian countries have a similar approach for what is described in the article.…

Part of the reason German internet is slow is because German telecom didn't want to invest in fiber. And arguably had it remained a state monopoly they also didn't want to do it. They spent a lot of time on super-vectoring and all this copper optimization.

Now if the German government had forced and paid for the needed investment to upgrade Germany to fiber quickly, yes such a monopoly could have done it quickly. But it seems unlikely to me that this would have happened as an alternative to privatization.

That's always the thing with government run, you can just assume that the government run thing would have done the smartest best possible thing. But this is not always the case and depends on many factors.

Arguably the privatization was better then a badly run monopoly. At lest this way in some regions people could escape the monopoly better.

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

#367

Post by Beretta_Vexee »

eloisant wrote: post #257
Gasp0de wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Don't you already have conduits, or undergrounds where old telephone lines are running already? That's what we used to install optical fiber everywhere in cities France. Really easy, nothing to tear open. And because it's dense, it's cheap per home. On the other hand, rural areas require to digging a lot of kilometers of trenches just to connect a few houses. Much more expensive per home.

Public or shared technical ducts and technical galleries, available to all operators, are a distinctive feature of France. The law strongly encourages the leasing of, or joint investment in, telecommunications infrastructure. All operators have sharing agreements; as soon as a block of flats or a house is connected to the fibre network by one operator, it is possible to subscribe to any operator.

In many countries, the ducts belong to the operator, who is under no obligation to lease or share access with other operators.

It’s not perfect, as technicians from one provider tend to neglect customers of another, and it’s not uncommon to be disconnected by mistake. But it does mean there’s a wide range of options and genuine competition in the services and price. It’s not as if we’re left with ‘Verizon’s the only option here’.

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

#368

Post by ivell »

cogman10 wrote: post #47
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.

Density doesn't really make the sort of difference you might think. Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem. Up until the rise of cell phones, every home had a telephone line as well. In many ways, the lack of density actually makes it easier for you to install new lines. It's a lot easier and faster to plow through a long strip of grass next to a h…

> That shared infrastructure monopolized by a central government authority is exactly what the US would need to have fast internet everywhere.

In case of India, the government lines had higher costs and lower service standards than the private Jio. So it is not always the case that government infrastructure is better. However, there are regulations that require rural infrastructure development which ensures coverage on low profitability regions.

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