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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

#401

Post by spwa4 »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #249
jimnotgym wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe? I heard that about Asia and Africa, maybe post soviet Eastern Europe, but not Europe in general. We had telephones...

France had Minitel and now, for less than 50, you have up/down 8Gbps with TV etc. 5G is half that price. Switzerland might be even cheaper with Salt for the fiber, 5G, can be pretty cheap here too, or bloody expensive ( Swisscom ) US just has many excuses that's it.

Minitel was a total own goal. Earlier than the internet, further reach. And totally destroyed by the financial model.

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

#402

Post by Hikikomori »

slopinthebag wrote: post #183
mewse-hn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article makes it very clear that the fiber to the house is a natural monopoly and should be public infrastructure, just like communism. Once the fiber reaches a central office, access can be sold and metered off to a free market, just like capitalism. What most of us in the "free world" are suffering with is blood sucking parasites that own the pipe into the house and charge prices aligned with that fact. It's an…

Why would fiber to the house be a natural monopoly?

Why would roads to your house be a natural monopoly?

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

#403

Post by msh »

jjav wrote: post #353
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…

Other than running a commercial CDN at home or something.. what possible need is there for a 25 Gbit home connection? My home ISP connection (in Silicon Valley) is ~22 Mbit. That is enough for just about everything I can think of. We can run 3 zoom calls simultaneously (3 people in the house), stream movies, play online games, etc, all works fine. The only time I wish for a bit more is for huge downloads, but that is…

25 gigabit might be overkill for now as there is not a lot of end user equipment supporting it but 22 megabit would be painful for me.

My family have a number of gaming PC's and a playstation, downloading a game is easily 40-60 gigabytes so the difference between 22 megabit and a gigabit makes a huge change in usability.

22 megabit is also not really enough for 4K streaming (netflix 4K is 15-25 megabits, the better ones is even more).

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

#404

Post by nickzelei »

I’m fortunate where I’m at in the Bay Area to get 10Gpbs for $50/mo from Sonic. Service has been amazing.

It’s a no brainer at the cost even if it’s not saturated. 10 gig equipment is expensive so majority of my LAN is 1gig. I ended up getting some new network equipment and my WiFi caps at 2.5Gbps.

Steam and Usenet are my primary downloads that can take advantage but even my NAS only has a 1gig card as I haven’t bought the 10gig upgrade card.

Majority of homes are most likely fine with 1 gig, but we also don’t know what the future holds for network bandwidth.

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

#406

Post by dzhiurgis »

seszett wrote: post #289
dzhiurgis wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem to be stopping europeans from moving to USA.

Apparently net migration has been towards the EU rather than towards the USA since 2022, but I can't find a better source than this: https://x.com/benbawan/status/2049303326999609846

Your source literally has been community noted as misleading.

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

#407

Post by timcambrant »

mlrtime wrote: post #397
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that makes it even worse because a lot of Switzerland is entirely unoccupied mountains whereas millions of people live in places like Kansas and Nebraska and expect to have internet access.

And they do have it, but it does not need to be 25 gbps. Even if they had access to it, they wouldn't/shouldn't pay for it.

25 Gbps is a silly (but illustrative / clickbaity) take in this context. The more relevant measures as others have pointed out is how well-covered clusters of population are, but also what their broadband quality is. I live in Sweden, where we have extremely well-built out broadband networks, especially in cities. (My professional take is that quality is often very poor, but that is comparing to the rest of the country). We are a small country too, but we have still chosen symmetric active ethernet over the assymmetric PON, we have largely discontinued DSL, our cable/coax offerings have largely been replaced with fibre, and where DSL was not profitable, 4G is generally built out well enough to cover most people. Swedes in rural areas buy Starlink not for their reach, but for redundancy or even price.

I would say most of those things are not true in the US market. The united states IS a much, much bigger country, but my guess is that the median reach, stability, and speed is way lower than the Swedish and Swiss examples, compared to what it could be. The US has way higher military costs, still relatively high taxes, and most of all a stronger buying power. I pay $35/month for 300/300 Mbps Active Ethernet FTTH, and consider that overprized. When I last looked, the median American could generally afford more than that, but had access to less. Sorry, I don't have the numbers at hand.

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

#408

Post by Hikikomori »

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…

>Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?

They told you why your pedantic point isn't relevant and wrong. It is dedicated as its not shared like cable or PON, to the next hop wherever that may be, and anything dedicated is always just to a certain point where it stop being dedicated. That the Internet is not a full mesh topology is rather obvious, we haven't had that since the first few phone lines.

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

#409

Post by danaris »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #344
serial_dev wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

But in rural areas, Verizon, at the very least, is deliberately neglecting their copper, and not replacing it with fibre.

For people whose service degrades or stops working entirely, what do they offer instead?

Wireless. Which has much higher margins and much looser regulations around it.

At least for a while, Verizon was sending very strong signals that they wanted to get out of the wired connection business entirely, so they could do exclusively wireless contracts, including for your home broadband. (I don't know if that's still the case.)

This isn't a matter of "oh, it's really hard and really expensive for these multi-billion-dollar megacorporations to install wires going out to those rural areas!"

It's a matter of corporate greed, pure and simple.

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

#410

Post by Hikikomori »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #11

> Every home gets a dedicated 4-strand fiber line Author kind of glosses over this, like it's the setup to the point. But it's obvious that THIS is the point. The government did the hard work of running 25Gbit-capable fibre (4 of them!) to each and every house, and the ISP just has to run (25 * NumHouses)Gbit-capable fiber to the POP. In the United States, which has 250x the land as Switzerland but only 30x the popul…

Are all Americans living in single person houses spread out evenly over the entire land area?
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