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Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

stefan.schueller.net

371–380 of 464 posts

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

#371

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…

> It's just the fastest tier available in some locations

It's available where I live, and I live in some backwater little town. I think around 60% of the population currently has 25G, and that's expected to reach 80% by 2030.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US annual freight tonnage per annum is much the same as Australia's (1.5 billion tonne /annum, IIRC). Australia has longer, more control complex trains (leading, trailing and midway locomotives). To the best of my knowledge the US has never once had a single train 7 km in length with 680+ cars and a gross tonnage of 99,734 tonne - Australia has set a record with such a train and moves smaller (but still at that scale…

"Australia" doesn't really set records, multinational mining companies do. The records might as well be set on another planet. There is virtually no population, roads or utilities, no agricultural land beyond low density cattle stations that need up to 50 hectares per head, no mountain ranges, no large rivers, and employing people to work on site out there is might be 3x more expensive than the rest of the economy. T…

Like everything, it all depends on your metric.

Again, same freight tonnages as the US .. and with fewer people == vastly greater rail performance per capita, and similar tonnages in absolute numbers.

The US is just another G20 country, and one sliding down the rankings on freedom, and democracy.

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

#373

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…

Happy Swisscom customer here. I decided the price is worth it.

The internet they sell is the same speed as everyone else, gigabit is gigabit. Yes there are ISPs with lower prices, like Init7. DO NOT USE INIT7!!

I signed up for them some years ago back when gigabit was rarer, I liked their price and nerd orientation for things like IPv6. Big, big, mistake. Thoroughly awful company.

The problem: my wife wanted to watch TV. Reasonable. They offer it only via an Apple TV app but no problem, I happened to have an Apple TV already. Their app sucks, ugly MVP level stuff but worse, it just did not work reliably. Video stalls and freezes all the time. I get in touch with support, eventually, after much work and bad support experiences, I get in touch with the one guy they actually have working on their TV. It turns out the entire TV team either quit or was laid off and he was now trying to figure out how it all worked. We did some debugging and eventually figured out that their encoders/streamers were putting packets into the stream sometimes that older Apple TVs didn't understand. No warning about this anywhere. Also: they have no way to fix it. I was just told to buy a new Apple TV.

This is aggravating but I'm trying to be friendly to the small local geeky company that's competing with the big state-owned telco, so I do it. But this doesn't help, there are still TV streaming problems.

So I tell them, look, we tried, but your service just doesn't work. Please give me a partial refund and cancel my contract. This is where the hell really starts because I get an extremely rude email saying that actually if I check the fine print the TV service is offered for free and the entire cost of the contract is only for the internet service, therefore there's no expectation that the TV service will work at all and they accept zero liability or responsibility if it doesn't.

Also, Init7 only bills annually, and "your shit doesn't work" is not considered by them to be a reason to cancel. And because I was working with their TV guy to try and get their own problems fixed the billing period had just elapsed, so they forced me to pay the entire next year up front for a service that was broken.

I told them this was totally unacceptable behavior and probably illegal, their answer was I should take them to court.

At this point I investigated who these cowboys are a bit more and discovered their CEO flaming random customers on Twitter, in again totally unprofessional ways. He's since decamped for Bluesky which says it all.

In the end I didn't take them to court, I just told them I'd warn anyone I met away from their shitty company, sunk the 667 CHF penalty (I will NEVER sign up for yearly billing from an ISP again), and switched to SwissCom.

What a giant difference. A massively more professional outfit with identical feature support and speed. They cut you in on savings if you agree to talk with their LLM support bot first before escalating to a call center, but "Sam" actually works so this turned out to be a good deal. Their TV app is much better, and reliable. I switched phone service too and often have reception where other people don't. Every interaction with them is easy, zero complaints.

Lesson learned: paying for "Swiss Quality" is sometimes worth it even inside Switzerland. Also with smaller firms you're just sometimes signing up with assholes and don't even know it. I still think their "TV is free so it doesn't have to work" trick is probably illegal, I don't know how you can get away with that.

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

#374

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…

Any data available regarding the median or how many with no connection at all?

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

#375

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.

Everyone's mocking you for using more than 1 Gbps of internet bandwidth, but I honestly want to know how you are able to saturate it. I've found on even the fastest internet connections, it's difficult to get more than a few hundred Mbps, from any given sever. Do you have a bunch of people on the network downloading large files simultaneously, or are you connected to servers able to saturate your connection? I have t…

Steam CDN can saturate 1 GBit/S line just fine - and its actually super convenient when a bunch of friends wants to play some 50 GB game you don't have installed at the moment - it will download and install in a few minutes.

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

#376

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?

> Imagine tearing open a busy street in NYC for a few weeks to install fiber Or you can just run new fiber in the pipes that contained copper wiring that has most likely already been swapped out for fiber in the 1990s. Or just add better line equipment and use those same fibers already there.

In theory you would be right. In practice you have to ask all of your competitors for permission to change anything, and all the old copper is still there. They never actually swapped it out for fiber! You cannot take out any of their old copper, even though you’re sure it’s not in use by anyone, to make space for your new fiber.

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

#377

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.

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

[dead]

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

#378
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit. I have a hard time believing there is anything they can do to saturate 1 Gbps connection at home. It's probably just bragging rights on speed test reports, without any relevance to real usage.

I appreciated it for my Google Takeout download - they seemed to cap per file speed, so I could get multiple going. Getting it done quickly was important since google would force 2fa re-auth if you waited literally 30 seconds between files, ~80 4G files

Besides that, my two housemates streaming 4k while I'm downloading an iso can definitely hit the cap. The extra headroom is nice, versus just falling over

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

#379

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…

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.

I have 5 Gbps available in a near-rural area in the southern US.

It's just incredible how so many people in NYC and Los Angeles believe they have the highest standard of living in the US when they in fact are closer to the lowest.

Visitors from abroad also look at these decaying cities and think the rest of the country have their problems.

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

#380
post #265

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.

25Gbps is available but not common. Most average people will buy 10Gbps P2MP from Swisscom, Sunrise, Salt etc., the really big companies with marketing all over the cities. Then they'll use WiFi with the default modem and not reach anything like 25Gbps. 25Gbps requires pretty unusual hardware to use (see [0] for example) and you need to pay a couple hundred francs for installation so even among the geeks and nerds, i…

Since its 2026 now we have easier alternatives.

https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/cloud-gateways/efg?subcategor...

https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq

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