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Comment by trynumber9 | Hacker News Reader

I guess they don't bother using Speedtest in Switzerland, as the average speed seems about the same as the US: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

Must be a sampling bias or something.

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You know, in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality - and it will fly off the shelves. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true.

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.

There really is this bias — it’s crazy. Not just the name “Swiss,” but allusions to the Swiss flag, Swiss typography, other Swiss branding. It almost looks like some of the products are state run.

(Also, the internet connection actually is phenomenally good.)

> allusions to the Swiss flag,

It is a big plus.

I see red when I read this kind of comments.

Swiss law does require an overwhelming majority of the value of a product be made in Switzerland to use Swiss flag branding, or even Swiss landmarks or other signifiers of Swiss-ness. That's why Toblerone had to remove the drawing of the Matterhorn they've had since forever on the side of their triangular tubes, because some production has been shifted to Poland.

> in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality

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.

I feel it's a little more extreme for swiss companies though, especially outside the country. My aunt who works in Rome in the tourism industry told us of a local company that had 'swiss' in the name, simply because of the positive connotation, even when they don't seem to have any relation to the country.

It's why I feel wary of making business with any company with the word 'swiss' in it's name

"made in" is completely different. A higher price is justified by supporting Americans in some way, rather than somewhere offshore.

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).

That's how we can tell they aren't Canadian.

Feels like it's only U.S companies that do that, because that's what works in the States.

Explain Canadian Tire

https://retail-insider.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/image-...

The cachet of "Swiss" products is a lot higher than US. (Whether this is merited is another question entirely)

Not really.

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.

And Decathlon's bikes are Van Rysel, which does mean "from Lille" (where the bikes are designed) but you wouldn't know it unless you speak Dutch. I don't think they hide anything really, but having a Dutch-sounding makes a connection to the Dutch and Flemish who are well known for cycling.

I've noticed a similar thing when buying products online. Overseas sellers from Asia will package their product as "Designed in Germany" or include a red cross to indicate Swiss design, but may not actually be designed or manufactured in Switzerland. Nice packaging though :)

Plenty of American firms do this too, notably Apple.

Made in China, Designed by Apple in California, lmao

Kind of the ideal setup though. Apple’s design and engineering work has been great, China’s manufacturing can execute on it better than anyone else (see the issues with iPhone production in India).

It’s like saying the ideal car would be designed by Italians, engineered by Germans, and built by the Japanese.

Also a large fraction of the swiss population is old, and the older portion of the population:

- do not like changes

- value loyalty much more than younger people

- consider that bar an important change in income, there is no reason they shouldn't pay x if they agreed on it 10 years before.

If it works and continue working the same as it ever been and at the same price, they don't see a reason to look for something else.

It's nationalism mixed up with marketing.

Nationalism works for domestic markets.

The association with quality manufacturing and precision helps abroad.

Very similar thing happens for "Made in Italy".

For me, the positive connotation of "Swiss" only applies to mechanical watches.

Especially that behind Salt was/is a French company, ohhh the horror.

Happy Swisscom customer here. I decided the price is worth it.

The internet they sell is the same speed as everyone else, gigabit is gigabit. Yes there are ISPs with lower prices, like Init7. DO NOT USE INIT7!!

I signed up for them some years ago back when gigabit was rarer, I liked their price and nerd orientation for things like IPv6. Big, big, mistake. Thoroughly awful company.

The problem: my wife wanted to watch TV. Reasonable. They offer it only via an Apple TV app but no problem, I happened to have an Apple TV already. Their app sucks, ugly MVP level stuff but worse, it just did not work reliably. Video stalls and freezes all the time. I get in touch with support, eventually, after much work and bad support experiences, I get in touch with the one guy they actually have working on their TV. It turns out the entire TV team either quit or was laid off and he was now trying to figure out how it all worked. We did some debugging and eventually figured out that their encoders/streamers were putting packets into the stream sometimes that older Apple TVs didn't understand. No warning about this anywhere. Also: they have no way to fix it. I was just told to buy a new Apple TV.

This is aggravating but I'm trying to be friendly to the small local geeky company that's competing with the big state-owned telco, so I do it. But this doesn't help, there are still TV streaming problems.

So I tell them, look, we tried, but your service just doesn't work. Please give me a partial refund and cancel my contract. This is where the hell really starts because I get an extremely rude email saying that actually if I check the fine print the TV service is offered for free and the entire cost of the contract is only for the internet service, therefore there's no expectation that the TV service will work at all and they accept zero liability or responsibility if it doesn't.

Also, Init7 only bills annually, and "your shit doesn't work" is not considered by them to be a reason to cancel. And because I was working with their TV guy to try and get their own problems fixed the billing period had just elapsed, so they forced me to pay the entire next year up front for a service that was broken.

I told them this was totally unacceptable behavior and probably illegal, their answer was I should take them to court.

At this point I investigated who these cowboys are a bit more and discovered their CEO flaming random customers on Twitter, in again totally unprofessional ways. He's since decamped for Bluesky which says it all.

In the end I didn't take them to court, I just told them I'd warn anyone I met away from their shitty company, sunk the 667 CHF penalty (I will NEVER sign up for yearly billing from an ISP again), and switched to SwissCom.

What a giant difference. A massively more professional outfit with identical feature support and speed. They cut you in on savings if you agree to talk with their LLM support bot first before escalating to a call center, but "Sam" actually works so this turned out to be a good deal. Their TV app is much better, and reliable. I switched phone service too and often have reception where other people don't. Every interaction with them is easy, zero complaints.

Lesson learned: paying for "Swiss Quality" is sometimes worth it even inside Switzerland. Also with smaller firms you're just sometimes signing up with assholes and don't even know it. I still think their "TV is free so it doesn't have to work" trick is probably illegal, I don't know how you can get away with that.

Everything is swiss quality when it works. My mobile subscription is at Swisscom, but I downgraded it to call/text only PAYG years ago. First I wanted (mobile) internet connection on my phone. I checked on their website, they had some monthly package for 10-or-so CHF, which I wanted.

The customer service never heard of it, and signed me up for a 5CHF/day package without asking me. That was a lot of fun doing it back - initially they were also pointing to random points in the contract. But they could never find the part where I actually asked them to subscribe me to something that I didn't want.

Afterwards they could never make 4G/5G internet work reliably around my home (which is pretty funny, because they have a tower literally above my head, and another 40 meters away), it kept going unresponsive for 30-40 seconds at random times. I did ping-pong with their customer service for about a months before I gave up, cancelled internet part and switched to PAYG.

At least they still send me spam - I keep clicking the unsubscribe link, but they are not bothered by it.

I just want to illustrate that there are bad experiences with all providers.

I wish my country India was like that, because we are totally opposite. Anything made in India is considered very bad quality and will not fetch a good price even if better than imported goods.

I ran speed tests a lot more when I had internet that varied from 5-20MB depending on the day/weather/etc. Now I'm on >1GB it's so rarely a concern that I don't bother. I suspect this skews the data significantly.

Most people use Speedtest when something going terrible wrong and they have packet loss, extreme latency or something similar. Or before renting out their appartment on AirBnB.

That says as much about socioeconomics (price sensitivity, laws that prohibit calling for upselling, etc.) as actual speed. E.g. in my country, the last time I looked over 95% had a fiber connection to home and the major providers offer 1Gbit (for connections still on AON) or 4 to 8Gbit (on XGS-PON).

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 did an internship in Switzerland in 2007 and mobile data was 14 USD/MB while I had unlimited data in the US. The place I was staying in Zurich had only 128 kbps ISDN while I had a symmetric gigabit line in my US dorm room. At that time I thought Switzerland was the most backward country ever.

Things change, I guess.

25Gbps is available but not common. Most average people will buy 10Gbps P2MP from Swisscom, Sunrise, Salt etc., the really big companies with marketing all over the cities. Then they'll use WiFi with the default modem and not reach anything like 25Gbps.

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-...

Since its 2026 now we have easier alternatives.

https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/cloud-gateways/efg?subcategor...

https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq

You're not missing anything. The article is trying to imply that 25G is everywhere in Switzerland, but it's not. They just picked the fastest available speed and ignored the fact that some places in the United States also have 25G internet available.

Or like your apples is what people have chosen and the oranges is what is available to buy if you want it.

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.

The funny thing is, it works on people outside of Switzerland too. There are actual Americans fooled by this blatant marketing in this very thread.

The limiting factor on speed-tests when you have 10-25 Gbps internet is WiFi. That’s what this is more likely showing.

Brazil is surprisingly good. What are they doing right?

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