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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

#661

Post by aetherspawn »

shell0x wrote: post #213
aetherspawn wrote: post #126

Australia 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.

You can upgrade that to 2Gbps if you pay the network upgrade fee (basically you pay for the NTD and house-side wiring), after that it costs around AUD 150 per month, which is kind of reasonable…

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

#662

Post by anonymousiam »

adrian_b wrote: post #389
anonymousiam wrote: post #136

So the author's proposed solution is more government control. Pass.

According to you, having public roads is an example of government control? The "author's proposed solution" is the equivalent for communication of what public roads are for transportation.

I could cite dozens of examples that I've personally witnessed, of governments abusing their position wrt developing and maintaining roads. Projects consume orders of magnitude more money and time than would be required by a private contractor to complete.

In a sense, this is similar to the problem with ISPs in the US, because they must overcome the roadblocks put up by Federal, State, and Local governments (often at the behest of lobbyists from competing businesses).

There's another angle on this that is even more disturbing, and it's not just limited to the US. Governments like to surveil users of telecom systems. Surveillance becomes more challenging as speeds increase. Keeping speeds down is in the interest of the IC.

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

#664

Post by CyberDildonics »

neonstatic wrote: post #659
CyberDildonics wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's oversubscription. You said that already, but repeating something isn't evidence. Oversubscription would be something that happens with cable internet on a node by node basis, so to say the problem is one thing and only that doesn't make any sense. Not only that but people will sign up for hundred megabit to gigabit internet but they only really need to watch some streams that use 3mb each. You can actually figur…

Not a network engineer by any measure - but I think if it was wifi contamination, it wouldn't get worse in the evenings. The routers are on 24/7. Thoughts?

it wouldn't get worse in the evenings

Why not? People come home and start using their internet. They watch TV over wifi, use their PCs, watch videos on their phones, everyone uses what they have at the same time.

Thoughts?

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

#665

Post by eqvinox »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #629
eqvinox wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be making arguments with significantly less of a connection to the actual scenario being discussed. And you're explaining oversubscription to 2 network engineers, one of them having presented at APRICOT and APNIC. I guess I should've focused less on oversubscription and made clear that we know it's not spectrum utilization. For that, we have the equipment to measure, and we did, and it's not the problem.

For that, we have the equipment to measure, and we did, and it's not the problem. It has been a problem for basically everyone living in apartments that had network problems that I've seen. If you measure at the wrong time it's going to look fine. You have to be there when people are watching video over wifi. Again, just because people can't get their full bandwidth, it doesn't mean oversubscription is the actual bot…

Dude, how oblivious are you. You're {man,nerd}splaining. Hard. Did you miss the "network engineer" part? Do you think our first step in debugging performance issues seen on wifi would be anything other than grabbing a cable?

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

#666

Post by eqvinox »

neonstatic wrote: post #659
CyberDildonics wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's oversubscription. You said that already, but repeating something isn't evidence. Oversubscription would be something that happens with cable internet on a node by node basis, so to say the problem is one thing and only that doesn't make any sense. Not only that but people will sign up for hundred megabit to gigabit internet but they only really need to watch some streams that use 3mb each. You can actually figur…

Not a network engineer by any measure - but I think if it was wifi contamination, it wouldn't get worse in the evenings. The routers are on 24/7. Thoughts?

That's why professionals don't call this "wifi contamination", we call it spectrum utilization/congestion. The problem isn't the number of wifi APs, the impact of beacons (i.e. idle APs) is, while not zero, quite limited and only visible in extreme cases. The actual problem is traffic, which consumes available spectrum when being carried.

It's a factor of RF bandwidth, time and space. With some non-obvious parts:

- setting your TX power too high makes you consume spectrum in a larger area, harming your neighbors. Don't yank the TX power to maximum just because it "feels" like that should be better; there is no difference between MCS (= speed/rate) 11 with 10 dBm headroom and MCS 11 with no headroom, you get ≈120Mbit either way.

- conversely, using old APs, devices, or stretching the wifi connection too far consumes excessive spectrum since you'll get a bad data rate and use much more time to convey the same data. Due to this, a repeater can in fact improve performance for devices not even using it, by getting rid of low-MCS traffic.

- don't use wide channels when you don't need the performance. A 160MHz channel means 160MHz width of picking up interference. While chipsets are somewhat intelligent about this, if you're fine with ≈200 Mbit (single MIMO stream) there's no point in going wider than 40 MHz.

- multicast is death. It's a very common wrong belief that wifi requires you to send multicast traffic at the lowest possible rate. It doesn't, but almost all low-end implementations are lazy and do just that. "Lowest possible" in this case means the lowest rate the BSS configured to support. If you have 802.11b enabled, that's generally 1 Mbit/s. Disable that, and you get the lowest 802.11n rate, which is ≈6.5 Mbit/s. If you need to deal with a lot of multicast, disabling some low MCS might also be worth it to raise that even further, but then those MCSes are not available to cover far-away devices anymore. But then again you may not want that to begin with (see above).

- it's highly dependent on building characteristics; thick stone/steel walls block much more RF energy than drywall or wood.

- if you can, just use cables. If it doesn't help you, it might still help your neighbors.

So… yeah, a lot of people consume media in the evening, and that does make it much worse.

P.S.: MCS indices: https://mcsindex.com/

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

#667

Post by pas »

malthaus wrote: post #357
alex_suzuki wrote: post #257

Swiss here. Just a minor clarification on the article: fibre is not available everywhere in Switzerland. Actually the rollout has been quite slow, and chances are that if you live in a rural or suburban area (like me) or in an older building then you might not have fibre, and are limited to (fairly decent) copper.

i'm swiss and also own property in central berlin. while i was having insanely fast internet in all the places i lived in switzerland since the year 2000 (first cable, then fiber), german telekom has still not been able to connect my flat to fiber, even though the street facing building side is and i'm stuck with semi fast but fully overpriced dsl, which on top is spotty because someone decided to install cheap coppe…

finally the coverage is actually increasing ~53% now, +12pp (270k users) during 2025

https://www.berlin.de/sen/web/presse/pressemitteilungen/2026...

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

#668

Post by pm3003 »

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…

Just like every operator promises 95%+ national LTE/5G coverage (they have legal obligations in this regard), but somehow your particular village or town in the lower Alps or in Brittany has shitty data rates for some reason, despite the main street being coloured green on the official covergae map.

Some people in my family got a "zone blanche" subscription from SFR, i.e. LTE with a big antenna, possibly a higher Cat. than regular LTE, because they live too far from any DSL/fiber option.

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

#669

Post by CyberDildonics »

eqvinox wrote: post #665
CyberDildonics wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that, we have the equipment to measure, and we did, and it's not the problem. It has been a problem for basically everyone living in apartments that had network problems that I've seen. If you measure at the wrong time it's going to look fine. You have to be there when people are watching video over wifi. Again, just because people can't get their full bandwidth, it doesn't mean oversubscription is the actual bot…

Dude, how oblivious are you. You're {man,nerd}splaining. Hard. Did you miss the "network engineer" part? Do you think our first step in debugging performance issues seen on wifi would be anything other than grabbing a cable?

Did you miss the "network engineer" part?

I get that you don't want to actually confront what I'm saying by pulling out a label and doing the appeal to authority routine, but that isn't real evidence or information.

You're still ignoring that two things can be true, but it doesn't mean they are both equal contributors when you take a birds eye overview of entire countries.

You also aren't explaining why wifi wouldn't be the primary bottleneck when you're surrounded by dozens of routers with shared walls and everyone is watching multiple video streams.

If you go into an apartment 10 floors up anywhere with internet you see dozens of wifi networks.

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

#670

Post by eqvinox »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #669
eqvinox wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, how oblivious are you. You're {man,nerd}splaining. Hard. Did you miss the "network engineer" part? Do you think our first step in debugging performance issues seen on wifi would be anything other than grabbing a cable?

Did you miss the "network engineer" part? I get that you don't want to actually confront what I'm saying by pulling out a label and doing the appeal to authority routine, but that isn't real evidence or information. You're still ignoring that two things can be true, but it doesn't mean they are both equal contributors when you take a birds eye overview of entire countries. You also aren't explaining why wifi wouldn't…

So sorry, you're right, wifi interference was slowing down the wired ethernet connection on the router that had no wifi.

/eot

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