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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 harder than Switzerland.
- 25G internet is also available in some locations in the United States.
- As another commenter discovered, the average speed test results of US and Swiss internet connections are pretty similar. The average Swiss person isn't connected to the internet faster than the average United States person.
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 twice the area will, all things being equal, also give you twice the workforce to make it happen. In fact the only change a larger area typically makes is better ability to make use of economies of scale, which makes things _easier_.
The only correlation between larger countries and trouble with infrastructure is that a large country is more likely to have large areas with nearly nobody in them, but these areas also typically account for a vanishingly small percentage of the population so they don't really count when people are talking about bad infrastructure.
So I think it is hard to compare small and big. For one company things are easy that are hard for the other and vice-versa.
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.
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 8G, maybe more. I haven't looked that hard. I'm not going to pretend my situation is normal across the US just like you shouldn't assume your situation is normal either. It's a big country and things are different everywhere.
Switzerland is the same: Internet access options depend on where you live. The article sneakily tries to imply that 25G is everywhere, but it's not.
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.
Here's the FCC's map of residential access to ≥1 Gbps fiber internet.
https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?version=dec2...
Of course most areas don't have it, but take a look at the Dakotas. I won't say it's better than NYC, but it may be as good in quite a large number of counties where the population density is ~1/km²=~2/mi². Most of the ISPs in those areas are coops like BEK, Consolidated Telcom, Golden West, etc. that have been making good use of state and federal grants. Gigabit internet is generally $100/month from them (in NYC it's $90/month if I understand correctly).
Would be interesting to compare this to areas of Europe with a similar population density, e.g. Lapland or... well, maybe Lapland is the only one
There are developing ("third-world") countries that have better overall internet than the US.
1Gpbs symmetric is not 'appaling' come on now.
That doesn't really pass the smell-test, especially not compared to other explanations like national differences in regulation and competition.
And that’s without factoring in that fewer subscribers are going to sign up in rural destinations vs busy urban hubs.
This is why the UK had to make subsidies available for rural fibre.
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.
On the other hand, rural areas require to digging a lot of kilometers of trenches just to connect a few houses. Much more expensive per home.
In my country, fiber is run to my apartment building and through the technical shafts. Very easy for the telco: to connect a unit, they only need to branch off from the technical shaft. I imagine the total cost to connect 200 apartment units is much lower than connecting 200 farms or 200 houses in the suburbs, even with the red tape.
Starlink was approximately the same at a similar pricepoint but I switched to NBN because hey, Elon doesn't need my money and at least I have an alternative now.
It's actually easier in some ways. I can build tons of infrastructure to cover tens of thousands of people in fiber for what it would cost to dig up one NYC street for a few days.
It is available everywhere where fiber internet is available. As of May 2026 this is ~50% of all households in Switzerland.
Also, the only ISP that offers 25Gbps is Init7 and they need to have their equipment at the other end of the fiber to offer 25Gbps. I don't think they quite have 100% coverage yet.
Also, about the size of the countries. The underlying model scales, that’s the point. Unless you were talking about political willingness to back large commitments. That’s a another question.
- the size doesn’t matter that much, you also have considerably more money and urban density comparable to us or higher. If you want to start counting reasons it’s harder here: we have mountains to go over, strong environmental regulations, can’t build at night in cities, must stop working on Sunday… no cheap labor, etc.
I don't think anyone is suggesting the US be covered with broadband, just the bits where people live. That then becomes a comparable problem, insofar as Switzerland has comparable size communities (with the exception of the very largest end of US cities whose population exceeds that of Switzerland)
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) trains daily.
( That's over 4.3 miles in length carrying 109,938 short tons for any readers from Liberia, or Myanmar )
Tech-wise Australia also operates the world's first (and still only?) fully autonomous rail heavy haul routes.
Dealing with the ridiculously limited upload speed, the outages, the locked router. The 40 minutes it takes on the phone to get it disconnected. Their constant attempts at upselling you cell phone plans and other terrible tech you’d never consider.
Truly, Fios is the most bare minimum. And there are much better options if you can pay commercial rates (stealth.net! Pilot!).
Truly embarrassing and sad.
Installation alone was phenomenal. This is probably largely downstream of NYC allowing a sprawl of overhead wiring in many neighborhoods, but I was deeply impressed by an installation team building out an entirely new fiber line to our apartment within less than 48 hours of putting in the order, for free, climbing through backyards and drilling exterior walls and everything.
They did physically cut the existing Spectrum cable to the apartment for absolutely no reason, so maybe playing fair competitively isn't quite there yet, but all in all, the dynamic between the two providers seems to create very good outcomes for end users there.
Of course, if your landlord does not allow any of that (common if you live in a larger building in NYC) and you're stuck with a monopoly, your experience can be miserable, so this probably really only works as a strategy if you enforce access and accept overbuild as an outcome.
Sonic in the Bay Area. An old mom-and-pop ISP that just never sold out but kept growing organically, that now has a large share of the Bay Area fiber-to-the-home market.
Now you can get 10Gbps fiber in some of their rollouts.
Service is pretty good though.
Out on the west coast I’ve generally been fine with spectrum modulo the upload speed although they’ve did a recent upgrade to 100mbit/s+ due to new DOCSIS standards. I finally got Fiber in SF so I switched but Spectrum was finally kind of good enough for the most part.
At my house now we get 2 gigs up and down with fiber from Optimum for cheaper than the plan we had from Spectrum. We've had maybe two hours of downtime total from outages in 16-17 months, compared to probably 4-5x as much in the same period on average from Spectrum. Some providers really do just suck.
Must be a sampling bias or something.
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 for 70 CHF, which many people buys. But the same people can get 10 Gbps connection at the same place for 40-50 CHF also by simply visiting a competing store, and spending 15 minutes on it. But that won't have the word "Swiss" in it.
(Also, the internet connection actually is phenomenally good.)
It is a big plus.
That's just basic marketing. You'll see that in most countries, I don't believe that it is unique to Switzerland.
For example: in the US you'll see many products that say "made in America" on the box. Those will likely outsell competing products, even if those are cheaper and better quality still.
And similarly: if you try to sell the "made in America" product in a different country it'll likely by outsold by the "made in [country]" products there.
It's why I feel wary of making business with any company with the word 'swiss' in it's name
In France we have a French brand of bikes, from the sports retailer Intersport, called Nakamura...
They actually hide the fact it's a local brand, let people think it's a Japanese brand, to suggest it's higher quality.
This is more like McDonald's putting a maple leaf in their logo in Canada. It changes nothing but, apparently, Canadians like it more (I frequently watch Canadian television and non-canadian companies are frequently adding a leaf somewhere in the advertising).
Made in China, Designed by Apple in California, lmao
Nationalism works for domestic markets.
The association with quality manufacturing and precision helps abroad.
Very similar thing happens for "Made in Italy".
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, it's not common.
I have it myself but recommend to friends and colleagues to use Init7 but 10Gbps instead.
[0]: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-07-10-linux-25gbit-...
Yet, our average is still a mid 230Mbit. Why? People sticking with cable internet out of inertia, people sticking with cable because they have more attractive TV packages. People choosing 100 or 200 Mbit because it's cheaper (e.g. my parents just stick to 200Mbit because they don't need more for web browsing and some streaming).
Same for cellular. My country is only in the 17th position, yet I have 1Gbit 5G cellular with unlimited data for ~25 Euro per month. Most people just don't want to spend more than 10 per month and go for cheap plans/providers.
But such price sensitivity differs a lot per country.
I upgaded to 1000mbps as it is the same price now as slower but only time itll make a difference is downloading a model or huge installer.
Things change, I guess.
https://broadbandusa.ntia.gov/funding-programs/broadband-equ...
I'd rather have a stable 50Mbit than 1Gbit and 0.5Mbit international peering with packet loss.
I can download from Usenet at consistently around 10Gbps and I've determined the limiting factor is the combination of client/server behavior and TCP windows. With some customization I've saturated the 25Gbps pipe.
Online games (e.g. League of Legends, Path of Exile) typically have a ping of around 8ms.
BGP.tools may be inaccurate for upstreams.
Liberty Global is fine.
Having been telling this to my family and friends whenever they want to upgrade to 1Gb/s, but to noavail. They rarely ever take the suggestion (ah well, to each their own).
That's not really the point of the topic though right, it's that in the UK I have the choice of a billion different ISPs, including (I think stupidly) three different fibre providers (I literally have two fibre connections to my house because I changed ISPs and they ran on different fibre networks), and in the US all I hear about is streamers complaining that they are all stuck with the same shitty ISP as there is no choice, in a country that supposedly champions choice.
I lived with about 5 people and our internet was 500mbps and it was more than enough.
Looking at the network monitor the only need for anything really above 100mbps was when people wanted to download something. For daily needs, surfing, browsing, the odd download you don't need a lot. And that's with everyone streaming, scrolling, gaming etc concurrently.
Btw, what network monitor are you using? Was it just a diagnostic tool in your router's admin page? Or is it something special like dd-wrt? Because seems like it's kind of hit or miss if a router's stock admin includes a reliable network monitor.
The main benefit, though, is if you have many simultaneous connections running, all using a lot of bandwidth.
1. Who is initially paying for the physical shared infrastructure?
2. Who is in charge of the maintenance?
Btw the paradox I have is that my local lan is 1 gbit...
I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem. Up until the rise of cell phones, every home had a telephone line as well.
In many ways, the lack of density actually makes it easier for you to install new lines. It's a lot easier and faster to plow through a long strip of grass next to a highway than it is to deal with a built up ubran location (I've actually done this work).
US regulations actually give telecoms a leg up in a lot of ways to expand services. These private companies have utility access to power polls and easement access to common lines. About the only regulation that can get in the way is some cities and states have minimum service requirements before you can start burying in a new territory. That is a give away to the ISPs to tamp down competition.
The reason internet is so crap is because utility lines are all private. For example, in the UK BT owns all the lines and British law allows for line rental from 3rd party ISPs. That's what allows you to get a wide variety of ISPs without having to plow in a brand new line to your location. That shared infrastructure monopolized by a central government authority is exactly what the US would need to have fast internet everywhere. Without that, ISPs have no incentive to increase speeds as new competition is very hard to create or come by.
> Every home in america has electricity and plumbing even though those utilities have the same density problem.
Plumbing yes, but it might not leave the property. About 25% of US homes have septic systems, and some states are as high as 50%. For water, 15% of homes use private wells, which goes to 72% for rural households.
It's not everything, but density absolutely matters for rural households. The US is vast and contains many areas where you are your water and sewer company because there's no municipal option.
That said, your electricity example shows the way. That got to every home through massive public infrastructure projects. And internet could too, far easier than water or sewer.
If endpoints are spread too far out, it's not hard technically to connect them, but it might be very expensive and not feasible economically.
If density is too high on the other hand (say NYC), it's becoming hard to technically connect, because, as you mentioned, there's already a lot of "stuff" there that you have to be careful about. But it might be much more interesting economically.
I think Switzerland just hits a sweet spot between these two. It's dense enough to be profitable but sparse enough to make construction still feasible. So essentially, we're just lucky.
Those utilities are also far older than the Internet, so they should be expected to have more penetration. Also, the fair comparison here wouldn't be "how many American homes have a super fast Internet connection", but rather "how many American homes have the Internet at all".
As a comparison, Australia has roughly the same land-mass as the contiguous states, but with less than a tenth of the population. It has its fair share of ISP and telecoms issues, but not as the US for the most part. Most people live in cities with good internet infra, most of the rest live in towns with at least some choice. Not perfect, a long way to go, but better than the collection of monopolies the US has.
You don't have to, for example, shut down a road when putting in rural lines.
It's a mistake to think that population density has anything to do with the difficulty of getting high speed internet. It's nearly completely unrelated.
This is backwards in my experience, but I probably have a different definition of urban from you. In my area, the suburban area has mostly underground lines that pre-date fiber, and getting fiber is probably not ever happening. Comcast is all we got. But if I drive 15 minutes into the city, there are fiber lines on every pole, and I could choose from a couple different providers.
I've seen city-level street works in the US and they are incredibly slow compared to national highway work, or street work in Europe. Like 10x slower. And getting the permissions? Impossible
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_boring
So yes. Regulations certainly play a part, but so does geography.
Which US states can you do this in? You can drive across Texas from El Paso to Port Arthur in 12 AFAICT. Alaska maybe?
Now Western Australia where I live ... 36 hours from Cape Leeuwin to Kununurra, and we only have 10% the population of Texas.
I used to have a car like that also.
The average population density is pretty irrelevant here. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_population_map.pn...
Lots of high density cluster and much easier geography (Switzerland famously has lots of mountains in the way).
So the question is "Why do US metropolitan areas not have 25gbit fiber for about $60/month?".
A naive average national density obscures more than it reveals.
That said, how many of these homes have mains electricity? Landline phone service? If they can do that, then they can do fiber. Sure your cabin in Montana might not have it (though the equivalent in Sweden probably would), but the small town probably does.
I’m getting 5/5gbps for $100 CAD in what qualifies as “rural Canada” for tax reasons. But in Toronto there was 10/10gbps for $30.
Who? What? Where? When?
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. Didn't know Switzerland also does it right. That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.
Maybe more importantly, I don't understand what it's supposed to tell me: It mentions that "duplication is inefficient", yet shows no example of duplication. It shows various levels of building density, yet does nothing with it (and neither does the article), leaving me wondering if I'm missing something yet again. Then for the horizontal split: It looks like it's trying to either contrast/compare water and communications infrastructure, but they just look the same, so why present both?
I've got 5gbps symmetric right now and I can barely use it. Steam is the only app that can get close to saturating the connection. There is another fiber provider and a docsis provider available. I live in a fairly rural area. There's more options than I care to evaluate at this point.
This article sounds like it was written pre-2020. Times have changed. At least in Texas ISP markets. Maybe others are still stuck in the old ways.
Where exactly is Ziply available? Their website is vague, but it seems to be at most a small corner of the North West, and it seems like their 50G plan is not as widely available as their 2G plan.
> I can also get 400Gbit in my office…
Sure, but remember that we’re talking about _residential_ services here. Ziply Fiber offers 50Gbps to all residential fiber customers. They also sell IP Transit services to businesses at higher speeds, but we’re not talking about those.
Why is it a lie if Switzerland actually uses a free market and gets bonuses from it? Yeah, the idea with 1 common infrastructure is a positive aspect. It's interesting how they solve an issue with maintenance. But still, low prices and good quality of service are benefits of the free market.
All I see on the Internet is Americans complaining about high prices and enshittification of every product. Is your market not free enough?
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 anti-capitalism in the guise of capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
We could have so much better connectivity, but average people are happy as long as they can watch <streaming-service>.
Do I _need_ 25 Gb internet? Even when I had 1 Gb I never saturated the connection.
Today’s 1Gbit is tomorrow’s 25GBit.
It takes some time to actually install it. So, better to plan for the future.
I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.
A nation-wide-ish utilities business in America is just a different kind of beast relative to whichever European country one wants to compare it to.
<edit> Some commenters have usefully brought up the example of Sweden. Sweden is a larger country than the rural US state of Idaho, and has a large population as well. But I notice that the population density is less widespread than Idaho, to a fair degree, and also has a GDP that is about 10x than the state of Idaho. I think the general idea of scale - given that basic infrastructure favors being nation-wide - plays into this. America is a very large country that makes infrastructure have it's own unique rules to play by. That is, infrastructure tends to favor being nation wide. Large countries have their own calculus to run with when it comes to very sizable scale (not to discount the important impact of regulation!)
<second edit: sorry! I know this is not cool when it comes to editing, but I keep thinking about this topic due to interesting comments>.
Another key point is what I'll call "distance from density." A person living in a typical European country is not that far from a major conurbation - not all that far from a place of serious population density. High speed infrastructure favors the customer-density of such places. But, when one looks at a variety of far-flung US states, you see that those states' major cities are, well, not all that major.
Looking at my example of Idaho, it's largest city (far to the south) has a population of about a quarter million within the state. Just west over the border is another city in a different state - also about a quarter million. The distance to a business-favoring high-density city for this kind of place is a bit staggering. These areas are truly far from anything the rest of us would call a proper city, with all the efficiency-favoring density (and business density) that it entails.
So sure, nationwide policies in America have to account for all the empty space, but there's also wide swaths of the country that have relatively normal (if still overall low) levels of density. What's stopping MA or NJ from starting a similar scheme to the one in the article? Probably a lack of funding, state capacity, and political will.
If anything, the comparison probably falls apart because Switzerland is filthy rich. Apparently their GDPPC is $126k vs America's $94k, and crucially, I suspect the former is much more evenly distributed. All I have to go off of is visiting once, but it's certainly a very expensive and well-maintained country.
That's the lie everyone in America likes to tell themselves - it's very easy to provide electricity and phone service to all these people, but somehow internet is not.
America didn't achieve near-total electrification until 1960 or so. The farm my dad grew up on didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing until well into his childhood in the 50's, despite urban areas being mostly electrified in the 1920's.
The fact that I have fiber Internet service while living in a forest in a relatively rural area is pretty much a miracle by comparison.
Electricity is genuinely hard and expensive, but we've accepted it as a basic need of modern life. Lighting, fridges, HVAC, kitchen appliances... People die if the electric grid goes down for long enough, but phones and Internet are a bit more of an optimization, a luxury.
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, though, just saying the scenarios are a bit different. Electricity and phone aren't "very easy", we just accept one as difficult but required, and the other (if you mean landline service) was already there and isn't really being maintained anymore.
Look up DSL.
Claiming the lack of healthy competition in the ISP space is because of (geography|population density|[a-z]+) is a prime example of the defeatist attitude in which one seeks to explain/excuse problems instead of even trying to address them. I've started noticing this pattern more and more after Evan Edinger pointed it out in a video (addressing some American comments on his videos): [1]
> We all default to what we know, that is just very natural. The problem is when new information arrives and instead of sitting with it and thinking about it, we immediately reach for any reason that it must be wrong. Because if it's wrong, nothing has to change.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDyPHGZCmNE&t=17m17s
We're one of the most spread out populations in Europe, and yet we have ubiquitous gigabit fibre to even the smallest of villages (I have it in a village of ~12 houses, an hour's drive from the nearest population hub), with a broad selection of providers.
Why? Because Movistar, the former national telecom, is required by law to connect the entire population to fibre, and then rent access to all their smaller competitors.
But then broke it badly when a major lobbyist (Rupert Murdoch) wanted to kill streaming competition for as long as possible.
The ONT is accessible to all ISPs, and you can provision both available ports with different ISPs if wanted. Usually, a change from one ISP to another happens within the day, like number portability.
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 full speed with no oversubscription, but no router or switch currently in existence can do 25T on a single link.
Edit: Do people here seriously not know how the Internet actually works!?!?
Sweden has good fiber to, off the top of my head.
Cool. What's your message here, though?
I got 10GBit/s down and 1Gbit/s up fiber in a medium size city in Germany as a non-enterprise customer. I even went to buy a capable router and SFP+ network cards for our main PCs and NAS to be able to enjoy it fully. A friend in Poland (close to the border near Cottbus) doesn't have an internet line at all and always relied on mobile data until they got their Starlink setup just recently.
Cherry picking and trying to make a point is cool until it isn't.
Fortunately, the referendum failed. I mean, sure it's nice to have a small population, but I think it's also important to try to improve economic migration everywhere.
I actually live in a rural area in the U.S, and was surprised to see that I now have a 2-3 fiber offerings. A few years ago there was just one fiber company, but a utility company helped roll it out and I currently use it on a 100Mbps symmetrical plan (for what I use, it's more than enough).
I never really thought of it as a subset of immigrants who move to get rich but not adapt. Lisa Su, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Jensen Huang are also economic migrants. Just because they adapted/assimilated more than others doesn't make them _not_ economic migrants.
Yeah, it has super bad internet, but because it’s too big, Europe installed copper wires later, 25Gbit is not really that much in Switzerland, etc.
Millions of reasons, but understanding that the current capitalist system doesn’t work for internet infrastructure.
Why on Earth world you use an LLM for that instead of a spell checker???
The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that.
Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that.
The essay elegantly articulates the why. Even if the anti-public commentariat doesn’t like Switzerland’s strong governance, even if there is a varying spread of speeds/competition or whatever else is being measured, even if one small country is out-performing a big one on many metrics… it doesn’t change the underlying insights of the essay, insights that the US desperately needs to understand.
It might be they had a more free market approach (I don't know really). Poland has a strong wireless connection infrastructure and it has there a market approach e.g.
The reason the essay from Switzerland compares to Germany as both counties are part of the German speaking world and to the US as Americans are very loud on HN , Internet so you need to canter this audience.
That's why I don't like this essay. This very specific sound from "we know it better". This essay doesn't want to find the best way for this type of infrastructure. Ironically I know this sound only from Germany.
Comparing a country with the population of a single city in America is disingenuous. There are probably some cities in America that have faster internet than Switzerland.
This is a perfect example of my earlier comment: you are talking around the subject, cynically dismissing the point of the essay without even addressing it.
The only places that have shit internet are states like California and New York. That's not an "America" or a "Capitalism" problem. That's a problem of living somewhere with a dysfunctional government that doesn't allow anyone to build new infrastructure.
> "That's not a capitalism problem"
It literally is a capitalism problem, as clarified by the essay; capitalism requires competition to work, and the essay eloquently describes how to accomplish competition in internet service provision.
(Also, what are you talking about, California with "shit internet"?)
I could get 25 gbps in Switzerland for CHF 69 pm right now through init7. From what I've seen, this would be considered quite competitive in other countries. In Switzerland this is actually very affordable when compared to salaries.
The article goes to some efforts to show how the Swiss model drives competition which has given us these relatively competitive prices. I'm not seeing how your personal lack of utility for 25 Gbps addresses that, let alone refutes it.
If you were really gung-ho about proving something to this annoying blogger I'm sure you could convince one of the mom and pop ISPs on the network to throw a 100G optic on both ends. Unlike Switzerland Utah lets you buy the physical strand of fiber outright for around $3k (Hopefully that's not too capitalist for you).
What percentage of the US population does that cover?
Instead search for the most similar state to compare with: for example Colorado has similarities with Switzerland.
Does Colorado have similarly affordable 25 Gbit fiber?
> much easier, and cheaper, to wire up a small country than the massive one
If your theory makes any sense at all, then Vermont with 60% of the size and 7% of the population should have amazing internet... does it?
I'm in New Zealand: Our internet isn't like Switzerlands (~1/2 the population in 6x the size). I use Oregon for our benchmark state.
- Quality matters more than speed
- Average speeds are similar anyway
- US is big
- It would be expensive
- Nobody needs multi gig speed anyway
Those are the kind of excuses a "declining" country like the UK would come out with haha
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 population, running fibre to every house is therefore 1/8th as economical. We have bigger problems. Is Flint, Michigan going to get fibre before they have safe water?
Their service area is >15x the size of Switzerland.
(16k sq miles vs 250k square miles)
The overbuilding is a very annoying problem though, I agree.
Weirdly enough some of the most reasonable offerings in the US can be had in the few rural counties that have built out municipal fiber networks alongside the electric grid. Unfortunately that is once again very much the exception rather than the norm.
According to the article, US has effectively enshrined local fiefdoms for ISPs, so free market competition just doesn't take hold there. In contrast, Switzerland allows competing ISPs direct access to common last-mile infrastructure, and the free market forces there have incentivised better products and better prices.
The free market does work, when given the right rails.
Yes, fine - 'land mass'. (ditto US) But land mass doesn't make corporations lobby and collude
> True capitalism requires competition. But infrastructure is a natural monopoly. If you treat it like a regular consumer product, you don’t get competition. You get waste, or you get a monopoly.
> The Swiss model understands this. They built the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and then let the market compete on the services that run over it.
The cancer isn't deregulation or regulation but rather regulatory capture.
Making the barrier of entry to the market so high that nobody can compete with existing players. Nearly every dysfunctional market in the US could be made better by deregulation, not because regulation is bad but because it's badly regulated.
You have to understand that some things can not be different. Lets take an example that is simpler, that even libertarians might understand: Streets, you can not privatize streets. You can not have a market where companies build streets and compete for customers to use their streets. Because you can not build 5 different streets to the same place. Infrastructure like fiber internet is like streets, you can't have 5 different companies rip open every street to every house and put fiber into it.
The Mad Australian NBN model. The absolute worst method possible.
Switzerland looks like the Singapore ULL model. Glass to the house, with competition for the terminating device. Absolute perfection. Its not anti market really so its a weird place to crow about free markets.
That said, the US is still in a much better position than Aus with local power companies forming coops with ISPs to deliver glass via power conduit. It really is the next best thing. Of course, Australia has power monopolies that make this super awkward.
That said there's nothing wrong with something like Germany, except instead of multiple pits, you just have common pit and pipe. Providers apply for access to the pits and run their own cabling. Australia does this already, but Telstra still owns a large part of the pit and pipe, making it costly, and NBNCo is allowed to police residential competition (The charge being more points than importing drugs) so it never helped us.
Hey this is a great place to look at how many times Australia has fucked its own internet supply.
1. We had ULL with Telstra but tossed that out with NBNCo. 2. We had a small number of PoI's, but the ACCC agreed with the big 4 that this was somehow anticompetitive. 3. We have pit and pipe asset that could be gifted to local government to maintain for service providers. But we leave it owned by monopolies. 4. We could have more ISPs negotiating access to lead ins, but we have power monopolies that make it impossible.
Effectively, stupid nonsense prevents us from picking up anyones good last mile internet scheme.
Density is probably closer to the real reason, but I suspect the big one is homogeneity: Residential internet connections are regulated in so many different ways across the US, so any comparison would better pick one or a few representative markets and then examine these.
I have lived in both Europe and the US. And I have installed fiber internet commercially.
When I lived in Italy, the best internet I could get was DSL, while a few years before, in the US, I had cable internet at more than 3x the speed.
Likewise, there are still rural communities without access to truly high speed internet in the US, as I'm sure there are in Europe.
The big telcos were broken up in the US decades ago. Now you have a few major providers who collude, and a bunch of small regional providers just trying to turn a profit.
The large providers service so many accounts it costs billions to upgrade the infrastructure at their end -- before even rolling out last mile to consumers.
And for the regional providers, its not worth the cost to upgrade both their infrastructure and the last mile infrastructure.
Also, population density is not the same thing in the US as it is in Europe.
US large cities are sprawling. European large cities are not.
It is far less expensive to service a large city in Europe than a large city in the US.
I've always found that argument puzzling. A population 30 times larger also means roughly 30 times the technicians, funding, and resources etc.
Although, you have a very good point that internet speed is not everywhere good in Europe. Maybe that is what you are getting at? One can pick a place Europe with great internet speed, but one can also find places in Europe with terrible internet speed. In that sense it is a mixed bag just like the US.