Don't look up the 40+ Billion spent trying to get every American service. https://broadbandusa.ntia.gov/funding-programs/broadband-equ...
Don't look up!
Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
341–350 of 464 posts
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#342This 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.
Hi, that statistic probably looked at the full price of the various plans before discounts. The reality is different, all providers offer significant discounts, and you’ll hardly find anyone paying more than 50 CHF a month for 10 Gbps (including streaming TV channels). Personally, I’ve never paid more than 45 CHF a month for 10 Gbps and TV and I currently pay 38 CHF, but I know people with even better deals.
The same goes for mobile service. The expensive plans are the “standard” ones from Swisscom or Sunrise, the two major carriers, but most people use low-cost digital providers that offer excellent plans for less than 20 CHF a month. Mobile prices, however, remain high compared to the rest of Europe and the world. Still, fiber-optic internet is available in virtually every city, with the exception of very small, remote mountain villages.
I’m an Italian who’s lived in Switzerland for years, and fiber-optic prices here aren’t that much higher than in Italy, especially when you consider speed and reliability.
You can find 25 Gbps plans for less than 70 CHF a month.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#343In Catania 10 gbit Internet costs 35 euros/month and is available everywhere in the city and even in a big slice of the small towns around Catania. And indeed public incentives played a big role. But what I believe it is more interesting is that 1 gigabit was common like 10 years ago or even more. Infrastructure is a bit too important to be left to what the market believes will be profitable. Btw the paradox I have i…
Interesting to read. I actually did not really looked into the rest of Italy's fibre build out state, but FWIW here in South Tyrol - basically the other end of the country - there's fully build out fibre access into every municipality since 2013.
And basically every village (outside the cities most municipalities consist of a handful of villages here) got access a few years too, even the ones with sub 1k population.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#344Earlier 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.
> 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.
Sort of?
If you're going to provide wired service in rural areas at all, doing it with fast fiber isn't a significantly different maintenance cost than using the old stuff, but it has a high one time cost to transition from copper to fiber. The cost of doing that is more like per-mile than per-customer, which makes the per-customer cost a lot higher where there are fewer customers per mile. There are areas rural enough that nobody would spend the money to run fiber even if there were no regulations at all.
Whereas for NYC it's just unambiguously corruption and regulation destroying competition.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#345This 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 larger than New Jersey and with a lower population and higher per capita gdp. I assume therefore New Jersey is better than Switzerland in all these metrics, from public transport to internet.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#346* 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…
Your post is unnecessarily pedantic. The point the article makes is that they have a dedicated line to the next router unlike cable (DOCSIS) or GPON fiber where already the bandwidth of the last mile is shared among subscribers.
It’s a lot easier for an ISP to add more uplink and router capacity over time than to rewire to dedicated fiber.
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#347I recently got a 1Gbit fiber and I have been very happy with it. I do not know if I am a heavy internet user but I have DisneyPlus, Netflix, HBO, Prime. I game and those games use a lot of data (80GB is normal now). I don't pirate stuff. I work from home 95% of the time. I do not see ANY reason to go faster. If I download a game and it is large I have to tell steam to cap the speed to 200 Mbit otherwise my machine freezes (I download games to a normal SATA drive and the machine is a Ryzen 9 9900X). I have to option to go to 2Gbit or even 8Gbit but I don't want to buy more expensive switches/routers and network cards for my computers.
Who (not including geeks) would want to go faster than 1Gbit?
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#348I recently got a 1Gbit fiber and I have been very happy with it. I do not know if I am a heavy internet user but I have DisneyPlus, Netflix, HBO, Prime. I game and those games use a lot of data (80GB is normal now). I don't pirate stuff. I work from home 95% of the time. I do not see ANY reason to go faster. If I download a game and it is large I have to tell steam to cap the speed to 200 Mbit otherwise my machine fr…
> not including geeks
Sir, this is Hackernews
edit: Sorry, I could not resist. Just does not feel like arguments to the tune of "my consumption habits do not require X, so who even needs X" really work well at the discussion forum for, ostensibly, geeks and hackers
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#349There 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.…
> That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.
Yes, but please think of the Telekom and Vodafone et al shareholders..
Even if those companies did, eventually, relent to implement it that way, they would possibly find a way to link it to a predatory 36 month subscription or some other ridiculous terms to keep their rent-seeking.
In the meantime, the only option I have in my neck of the woods, is DSL at 4Mbits/s down - 0.5 up. At around 40 euro per month, I believe? Or Starlink..
Re: Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
#350This 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…
If the least populated 3% of Switzerland's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, no one would care because it's just a single frozen mountain.
If the least populated 3% of the USA's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, people would care because it's the entire state of Wyoming. Okay, most people wouldn't care, but some people in Wyoming would.