Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't

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.

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.

It is available everywhere where fiber internet is available. As of May 2026 this is ~50% of all households in Switzerland.

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.

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)

- 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.

Switzerland has one of the highest Internet prices in the world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...

And don't talk to me about mobile data prices, it's out of the planet.

All other things being equal; it's a lot easier to dig huge amounts of fibre runs (following roads) where there isn't a heavy density of people.

Distance is practically meaningless for fibre optic cabling, but digging up historic cities, digging through mountain ranges, avoiding subways, plumbing and ensuring you have enough cables for the density of humans is hard.

Much harder than running cables between buildings that house 10 people which are 50ft away from each other.

And just for reference:

  * Delaware: 200 people / km^2
  * Switzerland: 230 people / km^2
  * Massachusetts: 350 people / km^2
  * New Jersey: 490 people / km^2

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 so rare (once a month? probably not even) that it's just a footnote.

And at my personal office I have ~150Mbit connection and that is overkill for everything I can think of.

It's available where I live, and I live in some backwater little town. I think around 60% of the population currently has 25G, and that's expected to reach 80% by 2030.

1G is the max available in many large cities in the US, if that. I live in one and that's the best I can get (residential).

My "1G" (fiber) is definitely _not_ 1G most of the time, because it's shared (as the article points out).

US may be larger but also wealthier, more powerful. All the heavy hitting innovation is there.

Broadband isn’t hard. Decision makers simply don’t care.

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.

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.

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.

Things change, I guess.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

The main benefit, though, is if you have many simultaneous connections running, all using a lot of bandwidth.

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.

Yes, but please think of the Telekom and Vodafone et al shareholders..

Even if those companies did, eventually, relent to implement it that way, they would possibly find a way to link it to a predatory 36 month subscription or some other ridiculous terms to keep their rent-seeking.

In the meantime, the only option I have in my neck of the woods, is DSL at 4Mbits/s down - 0.5 up. At around 40 euro per month, I believe? Or Starlink..

Now if the German government had forced and paid for the needed investment to upgrade Germany to fiber quickly, yes such a monopoly could have done it quickly. But it seems unlikely to me that this would have happened as an alternative to privatization.

That's always the thing with government run, you can just assume that the government run thing would have done the smartest best possible thing. But this is not always the case and depends on many factors.

Arguably the privatization was better then a badly run monopoly. At lest this way in some regions people could escape the monopoly better.

Sir, this is Hackernews

edit: Sorry, I could not resist. Just does not feel like arguments to the tune of "my consumption habits do not require X, so who even needs X" really work well at the discussion forum for, ostensibly, geeks and hackers

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.

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.

A naive average national density obscures more than it reveals.

So yes. Regulations certainly play a part, but so does geography.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?".

It's around the same density as Delaware and Maryland. And it's full of giant mountains, which neither Delaware nor Maryland have.

Imagine a country with two huge cities and a very long empty desert in the middle. Density can be low but its still easy to connect.

I not totally skeptical that some places are harder to connect then others but given we live in the modern world with algorithms and satellites we should be able to do a better job than top level density.

And I'm not saying this to convince you that Switzerland is easier. Frankly I do think it easier. But because I am actually interested if anybody knows if such work and estimations exist.

Like lets assume all fiber, cable and old phone connections are gone. How hard much would it cost to get every person to some very high speed.

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.

But then broke it badly when a major lobbyist (Rupert Murdoch) wanted to kill streaming competition for as long as possible.

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.

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.

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

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.

All I see on the Internet is Americans complaining about high prices and enshittification of every product. Is your market not free enough?

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.

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.

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.

It’s a lot easier for an ISP to add more uplink and router capacity over time than to rewire to dedicated fiber.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.