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Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
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Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#322It's nice to hear about examples where the incombent duopoly telcos finally get off their ass as soon as there's the threat of someone else coming in and installing fiber. Sadly, in my hometown, the competition must not be so intense, since Bell and Shaw/Rogers literally just lie about having it, by renaming their service to "Fibe" Internet or literally "Shaw Fibre+ Gig Internet" when Bell's coverage area amounts to only brand new builds or neighborhoods, and Shaw (now Rogers) doesn't have a real fiber network at all, it's just marginally faster download ceilings with 15mbps uploads.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#323Dumb questions if the fiber is open to anyone, what service does the internet provider actually provide?
They provide layer 2 and 3 of the OSI model[0] and usually other related services like DNS, DHCP, email etc.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#324In my small island community, I participated in a municipal committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670 Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for ei…
I wish there was a way to achieve that same outcome in my internet backwater of San Francisco.
Nearby blocks have symmetrical GB fibre from Sonic but we only have shity 30MB up from Comcast.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#325In my small island community, I participated in a municipal committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670 Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for ei…
I wish there was a way to achieve that same outcome in my internet backwater of San Francisco. Nearby blocks have symmetrical GB fibre from Sonic but we only have shity 30MB up from Comcast.
What speed can you get from Monkeybrains?
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#326My sister lives in Switzerland, in a remote place in the mountain from a small town. Even over wifi the bandwidth at her place is so fast it made my BitTorrent client crash repeatedly. The solution was to disconnect my system by deactivating the wifi, relaunch my BitTorrent software, set a rate limit to the download speed at 30MB/s, and then reactivate wifi.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#327Australia copied the Swiss model and in a very short period of time we went from 2Mbps flaky copper to now you can upgrade most properties to 2Gbps fiber for around $300 one-off fee. I hear 10Gbps is coming soon. The only annoying thing is that ours, despite being terminated the Swiss way, isn’t symmetrical, I think due to congestion on the sea cables?
I highly doubt that. As a German who lived in Asia and now Australia, this is the most incompetent country. They can't get anything right. I live in the city of Sydney and can only get 1 Gbps down and 200 mbps up for 109 AUD a month. I lived in 2017 in Singapore and the internet was already better than that for 1/3 of the price. Australia seems to be pretty backwards in general though.
What a time to be alive to see people put "only" in front of "1gbps". We've come very far.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#328France has 90% FTTH coverage in 2025, with 60% of households over 1 Gbps. One of the incumbents, Free (my employer), deployed P2P fibers in very dense areas but is switching to P2MP for economic reasons (and because this was not a competitive advantage). It's unclear to me if Switzerland plans to achieve this coverage with P2P. What looks great in Switzerland is not that each household has four dedicated fibers to th…
I’m curious as to how those numbers skew rural vs urban, as my experience in France couldn’t be further from fibre - have had a house there for decades, and we went straight from dialup to starlink, as there still isn’t even DSL available there. Fibre… don’t make me laugh.
It’s not like we’re super rural, either - small village, about 8km from two middling towns. The cell network isn’t much better - it’s 5g in the towns, and 2G or nothing as soon as you’re a few km out of them.
There is a fibre trunk running down the main road, 1.5km from the village, but when we enquired France telecom quoted about €250,000 to extend the fibre up to us. We passed.
Edit: same kinda deal with free.fr. If I check availability by address, it fails, as while the commune exists, the village does not, never mind the roads within it. If I enter the land line number, it says it is a mobile number and refuses to proceed.
So: your figures say 90%, but I suspect that’s a theoretical number rather than a real one.
Maybe it’s 90% of the 60% of addresses which got included in the statistics.
Edit edit: Ah hah, yes. I’ve looked at arcep’s methodology. That 90% is inventoried premises (homes & businesses) which:
- could be connected to FTTH, theoretically.
- exist in the arcep database
- are within several km of a live fibre
My home would be counted as “connected” by their methodology, even though there’s a quarter million euro bill to pay to make it so, and several km of fibre to run.
So - the stat is self-aggrandising bullshit, sorry.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#329In my small island community, I participated in a municipal committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670 Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for ei…
this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.” i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing. if a community has been screaming for f…
That's nice in theory, but look at how much money has gone to Verizon in the name of rural broadband, and how much they (haven't) delivered. And the consequences.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
While Switzerland has higher median HHI than the US as a whole, the Bay Area in California does have comparable median household income. In the Bay Area, Sonic does offer 10Gbps fiber internet in some places on new buildouts. I struggled to find a use case for it, except as a WAN between a homelab and a remote datacenter where I could do crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet or stream training data to…
> crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet Is that so crazy? If 10G was the default, you could just plop a cheap NAS at home and nobody would need to pay monthly subscriptions for cloud services.
How is 1G insufficient for running a NAS over the internet?