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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

#531

Post by sophrosyne42 »

zx8080 wrote: post #153
ttul wrote: post #9

In 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…

Either side of the spectre lies enshittification: - more competition comes with margin squeezing and cheapest source for service or goods - less competition brings the monopoly, the dream of any capitalist (owner, not user). Either way comes enshittification, and there's no middle balance, it drifts towards one of the sides always.

False dilemma

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

#532

Post by senordevnyc »

d_sem wrote: post #517

The geographic and demographic orders of magnitude when comparing these two places makes it difficult to extrapolate applicability of best practices. Who's to say the Swiss model scales? Article doesn't convincingly address this. For context: 41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is .064% of the national area. Some fun distance cont…

I believe you mean 0.64%

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

#533

Post by philipallstar »

zeroCalories wrote: post #504
philipallstar wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is all the regulatory stuff that means the bigger you are and the longer you've operated for the better you understand and have relationships with the often pretty inept regulatory bodies that can stop you.

Then as the local government, maybe start by removing that regulation. Or if the regulation is required, you're going to have to pay a premium for people willing and able to put up with it.

The problem isn't knowing the solution. The problem is incentives.

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

#534

Post by scraptor »

phkahler wrote: post #494

Switzerland is 1/6 the size of Michigan and has 90 percent as many people as Michigan (9M vs 10M). With a higher population density I'd expect better rollout of things like internet service. And that's just ONE average size US state - there are 50, some of which are larger with even fewer people. It's not really a fair comparison regardless of which business or political factors are in play.

So what's your excuse for why New York has equally bad internet?

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

#535

Post by folbec »

madaxe_again wrote: post #328
vbernat wrote: post #284

France 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 to…

It is heavily dependent on the history of your area.

I am near Lyon (12km away), I had 20mb then 100Mb coaxial cable very early because the "département" built a public network and eventually leased it to private companies.

I finally switched to fiber 3 years ago when it became available in my street.

The cell network is fairly bad however (even with 2 cell towers less than 1km from my place).

So geography and history count a lot.

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

#536

Post by delusional »

zeroCalories wrote: post #509
delusional wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fundamental problem of value creation and value extraction. Just because the ISP's can't extract the value of adding the additional fiber capacity doesn't mean it doesn't confer that value to the customers. We live in an age of value extraction, what's colloquially known as "enshittification", that can't go on forever. Somebody has to create the value that is being extracted. It's the old Marx quote: "From…

I have a lot of ability. I'm not gonna flex it for others without pay that gives me significantly higher living standards than the average person. Are you going to force me to work?

Thanks for writing a reply. I was wondering why this comment was floating around 0. I realize it's pretty contentious politics on HN, but I figured the philosophical point is at least interesting anyway, and that HN would be able to separate the two. Your reply helps me adjust that assumption.

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

#537

Post by chasd00 »

Aurornis wrote: post #234
dlenski wrote: post #223

I don't understand the desire (fetish?) for high speed home Internet connections at home. I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine. It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email and web browsing, and everything other than downloading maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large anyway. It's fin…

Pulling or pushing Docker images, downloading LLM models, installing AAA games from Steam. There are so many use cases that you won't see if you're just doing email and web browsing with a little bit of video streaming. It's also helpful for off-site backup. I believe off-site backup is very important, and having gigabit upload is very helpful for this. > I don't understand the desire (fetish?) If you don't need it t…

> installing AAA games from Steam.

it's weird how insanely large games are now, like 100's of gigabytes. I can't remember which game my son was playing, maybe DCS or some other milsim but it was around 300gb download. That's roughly 64-65 dvds.

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

#539

Post by glitchc »

toofy wrote: post #202
ttul wrote: post #9

In 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…

> 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.”

In the US, this would likely end with ISPs suing the government, tying the case up in court for years.

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

#540

Post by franga2000 »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #530
franga2000 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I learned that the only thing keeping me on 20/2 ADLS was a few 100 meters of already built but empty cable channel. I easily could buy that much fibre, borrow a fibre splicer and cable puller, patch it up to a relative in one of the already wired buildings and share their gigabit link with my entire apartment building. Half of my building was on the ISP that owned the empty channel, so moving to a co…

This, more than anything, is the cause of limited space utilities monopolies. Companies have to license use of the backing infrastructure, and most often municipalities only give these easements to a tiny number of players. It's a textbook government granted monopoly.

To be fair, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't want five different fibre lines going to every apartment building. That's more construction, more space use and more material costs. Ideally, we'd have one run going to every building, which the ISPs could share. Instead of 5x the fibre to every building, we'd get 5x the buildings with fibre.

To put it another way, the building of infrastructure should be a monopoly, but the use should be free (as in speech, not beer)

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