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.
Building in dense cities is hard because we choose to make it hard. We could (and should) choose differently.
Ironically enough, rural areas now have a ceiling on how bad service can get (because Starlink is a viable alternative). That doesn't work for dense EU/Asian style cities where most people live in 5+ story buildings.
I don't know about New York specifically but I do know laying new duct in central London is more expensive than it should be because the sidewalks are mostly now full. You need to close roads and track down them which is more expensive because you have to go deeper and you pay the city per day for the closure.
The one thing that has enabled fibre deployment here is that the incumbent is forced to allow other ISPs to rent space for a regulated price in thier existing ducts. In Switzerland I believe init7 benefit from the same principle but the incumbent rents the fibres themselves not duct space.
The only thing America needs to do is compromise the property rights of AT&T or build out city owned ducting. It's a bit socialist I guess, but look, it works.
You've also most likely got existing telephone poles that you can dangle your fibre off, and (in farming country at least) you've probably got some handy grain silos to nail a microwave link to.
Here in rural NE Scotland there are several altnets, and it's not uncommon to see a massive cluster of microwave dishes and yagis hanging off the corner of a barn somewhere.
High concentration, and you have saturation issues. Extremely low concentration, and there is not much active elements to leverage on.
Yes, as all rules of thumb, it falls apart in many situations too. But in that case at least the rule of thumb kind of recognize it will poorly scale at full generalization level.
Sort of?
If you're going to provide wired service in rural areas at all, doing it with fast fiber isn't a significantly different maintenance cost than using the old stuff, but it has a high one time cost to transition from copper to fiber. The cost of doing that is more like per-mile than per-customer, which makes the per-customer cost a lot higher where there are fewer customers per mile. There are areas rural enough that nobody would spend the money to run fiber even if there were no regulations at all.
Whereas for NYC it's just unambiguously corruption and regulation destroying competition.
For people whose service degrades or stops working entirely, what do they offer instead?
Wireless. Which has much higher margins and much looser regulations around it.
At least for a while, Verizon was sending very strong signals that they wanted to get out of the wired connection business entirely, so they could do exclusively wireless contracts, including for your home broadband. (I don't know if that's still the case.)
This isn't a matter of "oh, it's really hard and really expensive for these multi-billion-dollar megacorporations to install wires going out to those rural areas!"
It's a matter of corporate greed, pure and simple.
If you think a company could easily do something better than they're doing it right now then start a company and show them how it's done. If that's prohibitively difficult, e.g. because the incumbents have captured the regulators, then you've identified the root cause of the problem and what you need to change to make things better.
The greed comes from the people running the corporation, at many levels.
They're not interested in "doing something better"; they're interested in making the stock price go up faster. Nothing I show them is going to change that.
The thing you're intended to show them (or make sure someone else can show them) is that they lose business to someone else when they don't satisfy the customer, which doesn't make the stock price go up faster.
You can't make them want something else, you have to make doing the thing you want the best way for them to get the thing they want.
There are developing ("third-world") countries that have better overall internet than the US.
Switzerland might be even cheaper with Salt for the fiber, 5G, can be pretty cheap here too, or bloody expensive ( Swisscom )
US just has many excuses that's it.
There were literally regiments drawing up lines as the troops advanced.
The issue lies in willingness to upgrade and cutting costs on end users
European telecom providers typically charged for local calls on a per-minute basis, often with connection/establishment fees. US telecom providers did it on flat-rate bundles at worst.
For the same reason, Europe completely skipped pagers as an interim step between landlines and mobile connectivity outside of specific on-call jobs like Medical practitioners.
Much more of an incentive to divest yourself from a copper network designed for voice traffic that was not cheap, fast, or available in many cases.
An unlimited calls, data and SMS 5G SIM in Ireland runs you about €15/monthly on a Pay-as-you-go basis. You tend to get about 20-50GB of Roaming Data in the EU bundled.
https://www.eir.ie/shop/mobile?simonly=true https://48.ie/ https://shop.gomo.ie/mobile-sim-only https://www.clearmobile.ie/
Europe isn't the developing world. There are countries in SE Asia that put the US to shame in terms of the speed, quality and cost of their internet. I'm literally in one now at a random cafe where I'm getting 400 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up while sipping a $1.75 cup of coffee.
Many developing countries, however, were able to leapfrog the wired phones stage.
2009 we made it a national strategy that 90% of the population should get internet access via fiber and by 2020 we’d reached 63%.
Here’s a map of our broadband coverage https://bredbandskartan.pts.se/.
The US had a similar strategy and basically paid $400 billion for the same buildout but got nothing in return and no one was held accountable https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5....
AFAICT the required political will just isn't there due to how campaign financing works. Just look at the plain insanity of laws like this https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-....
It's just incredible how so many people in NYC and Los Angeles believe they have the highest standard of living in the US when they in fact are closer to the lowest.
Visitors from abroad also look at these decaying cities and think the rest of the country have their problems.
1Gpbs symmetric is not 'appaling' come on now.
I have a hard time believing there is anything they can do to saturate 1 Gbps connection at home. It's probably just bragging rights on speed test reports, without any relevance to real usage.
Besides that, my two housemates streaming 4k while I'm downloading an iso can definitely hit the cap. The extra headroom is nice, versus just falling over
appalling?
What exactly, in detail, can't you do with a 1 Gpbps connection?!
My home ISP delivers ~22 Mbps and it is totally fine for all use cases.
The problem is that there's zero competition. And while many other countries have 2, 5, 8Gbps available, there's zero reason for Verizon to offer it, despite being a densely populated area.
And 1 Gbps has been the max available for 10 years. It's very likely in 2036 we'll be in the exact same situation.
I wish we had a model like Switzerland, where the fiber is centrally managed, and providers compete just to connect you to the network.
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
- Init7: 1 Gbit: CHF 44/month, 10 Gbit: CHF 77, 25 Gbit: CHF 222
- Salt: 10 Gbit: CHF 49.95. (CHF 39.5 when combined with a mobile plan)
Comcast said they'd run a cable for $71,000 as long as I agreed to a multi-year $800/month contract on top.
Ended up with a $40/month T-Mobile 5G hub which got me ~800Mbps.
Maybe your LAN cables have deteriorated?
Reaching 100 MiB/s should be easy peasy for a PC; in my case (2 10Gbps switches) by using nvme SSDs I reach almost 950 MiB/s and with 4x raidz1 HDDs I reach 450-650 MiB/s.
Until a few years ago I was smoking in my flat and often I had to change lan cables (whatever's in the smoke was sticking to the connectors)
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.
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.
That doesn't really pass the smell-test, especially not compared to other explanations like national differences in regulation and competition.
I live in SF - the densest US city on the west coast, and the densest US city after NYC. We have city-owned "dark fiber" run through (most?) every street. Any ISP can offer service by renting the connection to my house, as long as they service "the last hundred feet" from pole to door and the billing.
I have about half-dozen ISPs that will give me from 1G-5G of service, all under $100/mo - (a great price in America). I pay for redundant >1g fiber connections to my house for less than the price of my parent's 50 mbps bill.
The issue is capitalism. In much of the US, the ISPs have lobbied and enforced "monopolies" by exclusive fiat of the jurisdiction, in some shape or form. 16 US states have laws that prevent the local government from maintaining or providing internet infrastructure like fiber lines, requiring private companies to maintain it all. Any free-market enthusiast will readily tell you that competition brings prices down, but capitalism is crushing the free-market, reducing competition for the benefit of the wealthy.
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.
AT&T, which already had cable here, ripped up the street a few months back and put in fiber. There are two other high speed providers as well.
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 many countries, the ducts belong to the operator, who is under no obligation to lease or share access with other operators.
It’s not perfect, as technicians from one provider tend to neglect customers of another, and it’s not uncommon to be disconnected by mistake. But it does mean there’s a wide range of options and genuine competition in the services and price. It’s not as if we’re left with ‘Verizon’s the only option here’.
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. Or just add better line equipment and use those same fibers already there.
Fast forward 10 years , FIOS still only has 1gbps in this area but my rural town will give me 10gbps fiber no problem. I just can't afford the router right 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.
Very few companies wanna get into deploying their own network (both in the states and europe), but the few that do make money out of it. I would be really surprised if Switzerland is any different.