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Comment by alex_suzuki | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 copper - while cable internet is not an option because 2 cable providers fight over who owns the access to the building.

whatever the roll-out in switzerland is, it's heaps better than in germany and most other places.

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

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

Can confirm this guy is Swiss

Has arguably the best infrastructure and system in the world and will still find issue with it. A real Swiss hardly knows the horror show that is the rest of the non-Switzerland world.

yeah, fiber rollout is slow outside of the cities. It’s still better than 95% of the developed world. All perspective.

People endlessly complain that the SBB is 'always' late.

Like if you have a semi-important meeting in Zurich at 9am It's perfectly fine to take a train which arrives in Zurich at 8:53.

And in an unlikely scenario that the train is late, everyone will agree that it's a valid circumstance.

Assuming zero time to walk into office (just saying), one day they will start scheduling meetings at 8:53 because we all do get here at 8:53.

Better to arrive (a couple minutes) late than to leave one minute early.

We also have great chocolate.

Indeed rural areas are not as well covered [1], but in cities it doesn't matter if you live in an old building. As long as your street has fiber (most do by now), when you switch to a fiber connection from your ISP, contractors will connect it to your house (even if you only rent an appartment) and install an optical outlet in your appartment, all for free.

[1] https://map.geo.admin.ch/#/map?lang=en&center=2634455.81,119...

Yeah I used to live in Zurich before moving into the boonies. We were the first party in the house of 8 to want fiber, filled out a form, ISP contacted house owner and everything was up and running in a manner of days.

I now own (or rather the bank does) a small house in a more rural canton, and while it’s possible to apply for fiber, you have to pay a significant part of the cost yourself, last I checked it was more than 5K CHF. Not really worth it. I get 400 MBit/s over copper at home from Init7. When fiber is rolled out in the street, they will upgrade it for free.

Edit: added link to https://www.swisscom.ch/de/about/netz/anschluss/ftthondemand...

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