Our little committee investigated all manner of options, including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the power company’s own signaling).

Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.

A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.

BTW, I am also disturbed by AI-generated images. The ones with the three workers laying cables look highly unrealistic and made me pause for a couple of minutes, wondering if they lay cables that way in Germany. The ones about how households are connected to CO look like you get multiple 720-fiber cables to the same household.

Then in 2014, Google Fiber announced they were expanding here and, all of a sudden, the local telco and cable companies (Centurylink and Cox) started rolling out fiber all over the place -- like pretty much overnight. Then Google backed off, and the incumbents slowed their roll too.

It was a on-the-nose reminder that these companies can move fast when they think a real competitor might show up.

The issue isn’t the splitting. There is no fiber to even split in most places. A lot of places in America had their “network” infra built 50-100 years ago on copper and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it.

I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities.

We got >5 gig fiber fast. We have 700Mbps 5G. I literally watched them string the fiber on the poles.

It’s still not shared, but it’s fast because it’s new. Shared would be preferred, but you need destroy + “new” first, and most people are fine with what copper gives them. Shared may even be cheaper but most people don’t think we need to rebuild anything.

Switzerland is a small, highly cohesive country with strong local governance, high trust, and tightly scoped systems. The U.S. is a continental-scale federation with massive regional variation, different institutional layers, and far more heterogeneous populations.

At that scale, you’re not comparing “policy choices,” you’re comparing system complexity. Many policies that work in Switzerland don’t fail in the U.S. because they’re bad, they fail because they don’t scale cleanly across 330M people and 50 semi-autonomous states.

So using Switzerland as a counterexample to critique U.S. market dynamics isn’t really isolating “free markets” as a variable, it’s bundling in size, governance structure, and social cohesion, then attributing the difference to ideology. I know Switzerland is great, I've been there, but it feels like a bit of an unfair dunk and very much "punching down".

In Charlotte NC, I have 3 choices of internet providers, two of them fiber.

As you are doing with this post, "broaden the base." The vast majority of voters do not understand the issues here. That is your biggest obstacle.

My POV would call this regulatory failure vs free market lie. That way, the enemy is a smaller target.

Path to progress is to get a friendly state (WY, RI, TX) to pass the legislation. Then shop that around among activists in other states.

If people knew they were only getting 1/25 of a shared product, that would get political hackles up.

Thanks for taking the time to think this through and make your argument.

For context:

41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is .064% of the national area.

Some fun distance contexts. Driving end to end in Switzerland is comparable in distance to: Driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, Detroit to Chicago, or New York City to Washington DC.

Despite presence of some very big names (Jio, Airtel), there still is healthy local competition, and the former haven't been able to play any monopoly-related games yet, since it's quite easy to switch. The past few years have been a significant upgrade compared to what I've observed happening in the US. Providers might even start offering 10+ Gbit for consumers in the future, but I doubt there's a market for it right now.

And there are lots of ISPs to choose from, several with 10Gbps symmetrical. Because it's dark fiber that you can literally purchase (I was quoted about $3k to purchase the fiber to the CO), there's nothing stopping you from putting 25Gbps optics on both ends if you are super determined.

The small ISPs have done an incredible job in some cases. One of the providers had 100% perfect uptime for 2 years, including riding through a catastrophic windstorm that took out the local power grid for ~5 days. I still had internet coming into my house while the water and electricity were gone.

I think the very limited power requirements of fiber vs copper is a huge part of what makes this work well in rural deployments. You can power your last 5-10 miles from one box with a battery for days. The fiber itself is also ridiculously cheap. No one wants to steal this crap. It's worthless. I enjoyed seeing the "Fiber optic cable, no scrap value" signs being posted for a while. We don't need them anymore though. The local meth enthusiast community is now fully educated regarding these materials.

With everything about fiber being so cheap, the last remaining problem is simply getting it from A to B. It's amazing how far sideways you can go in a day with one man on a ditch witch. You put 3-4 crews out there for a week and it's gonna get done. I've seen them go from nothing to installed customer terminals in 30 days. Sure, they break every utility at least once getting it installed, but it happens so fast the overall briefness of the disruption is worth it.

I'm watching some Comcast regional sales people absolutely lose their marbles after a really bad DOCSIS provider acquisition in my area. The door to door sales campaign has become completely unhinged. The copper infrastructure is on death's doorstep now. Fiber is going to bury all of this crap in a few more years.

But yes, Swisscom (owners if the old crap copper) do have to let the competitors use it.

I thought spamming your own blog was not allowed here.

I don't know what speeds I'm getting. My streams are not skipping or pausing. The odd large download is quick enough beyond caring.

Badly designed websites of course load badly. That has to do with latency rather than bandwidth, and the staging of the fetches.

It's such a bore.

Granted, Europeans (so me) can be arrogant about these things.

I moved to a new house in the Netherlands at the end of last summer. KPN the FTTH provider was there by chance the day I got the keys to put the fibre in the cable box by my front door, however there was something wrong on the other end and the fibre was dark. The fibre lines themselves are owned by a different company and KPN couldn't issue a work order on my behalf to the fibre managment company since I didn't have an active KPN subscription. The way you get an active subscription is for the tech to connect his diagnostic machine (or a self installing modem/ont) to validate the connection works. Catch 22, can't fix the fibre without an active subscription, can't activate the subscription without a working fibre.

In one of the ten or so phone calls trying to come to a sensible resolution, one of the support people suggested the only way to resolve this was for someone with an active KPN subscription moves to my street so they can issue the work order on their account instead (yea let me get right on that KPN) or to simply get a different ISP that is willing to issue the work order and then switch back to KPN.

I told them to forget my number and went with a hyper local ISP that literally has a cat 6 cable running under the cobblestones from my neighbours house. Unfortunately it's not a very stable connection and the 1gb is more like 30-300mb depending on presumably the bandwidth usage of the neighbours.

Maybe this shows that Switzerland has a sane political system?

So companies that have the ability to lay down, fiber do so in necessary cooperation with other providers to create a large patchwork across the country. This means that network companies have to cooperate with each other to send traffic back-and-forth.

It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this.

And, having worked with the US providers all I can tell you is this: greed, and lots of it. And if they're the only option in an area, they will charge you a literal arm and a leg.

Just a small example: in a mall, there was a single provider Paid ~ 300USD for 5Mbps in 2024. Once we were able to upgrade the equipment and get a cell router, we got to pay about $50/mo for ~ 50-60Mbps. Mall provider not happy.

I have 5gbit symmetric fiber at my house in Texas, and it is only available here because Google Fiber entered the city offer 1gbit symmetric fiber for 60% less than you could get a 300mbit cable link or 75mbit DSL link. Suddenly everyone was building out fiber infrastructure, and I now pay less for 5gbit symmetric fiber than I did for a brief while for gigabit cable (DOCSIS 3.1) which was 1gb/50mb.

The primary piece about this that's relevant is the difference in deployment architecture. P2MP is much cheaper for providers to deploy, but it does lock you in, and more to the point it means even your symmetric links aren't guaranteed to get full throughput at all times because they oversubscribe the backhauls. Still, in most major US cities that now have fiber service, you will rarely see any performance drops. I can confirm that I get close to 5gbits bidirectionally during peak hours, which is a testament to the fact that it was completely possible to have done this a decade ago and it just required some actual competition for AT&T to get off its ass and do it. Unfortunately I don't have Google Fiber at my address because they're now offering 8gbit symmetric in the city.

In addition, requiring fiber to each new home would expand housing costs in the US substantially because many are not located close by to existing fiber networks.

I’m not familiar with Swiss government policy but their government construction efforts are frequently far more successful for lower costs than ours. I cannot say whether Switzerland does it differently but usually in the US if there is surplus to be captured it is captured. As an example, if the Swiss system were to be implemented with US tools it would look like a government project would here: private companies would be invited to build the fiber to each home, and eventually one would win the contract and if the economic benefit would be $1b, they would charge $0.99b to construct it. M

If the government itself attempts to build it, it is constrained by its pension obligations and its desire to remain solvent to not actually have employees on staff. It therefore will use contractors in order to do things and we’re back in situation 1.

Governments originally formed for this kind of shared task and to enforce no free riding on it. But whatever factors drive US politics, US government purposes are to extract maximally from economically productive classes and redirect it to politically productive classes - through the use of selective government contracts and populist giveaways.

While I think the model of having the government own the Fiber lines and selling access to providers has a lot of potential, it would be very expensive to build this out to even 60% of the US.

The problem in the USA is that we protect an incumbent's profits at all costs. Natural monopolies end up serving the monopoly instead of the community. For example, in Atlanta, natural gas is delivered by Atlanta Gas Light, priced on some theoretical capacity number for the most gas you'll ever need at one time (DDDC). We then pay marketers to supply the gas. AGL gets paid whether or not we use gas, and the marketer gets paid both a monthly fee and a rate per therm. It's the most expensive gas I've had in this country.

I hear 10Gbps is coming soon. The only annoying thing is that ours, despite being terminated the Swiss way, isn’t symmetrical, I think due to congestion on the sea cables?

But that said, it took more than forty years to electrify the entire United States[0]. "The internet", as we think of it, hasn't even existed for 35 years yet. (Yes, I know there were networks before that that the current system arose from, but that's hair-splitting. I don't think the kind of Internet the average person might even consider using existed before, generously, ~1995-1996.) Yet, 95% of US adults use the Internet, implying a penetration at least as high[1].

The median Internet speed in the US is around 250mbps down and is in the top 10 in the world[3].

The problem is that access and speeds are not evenly distributed, not that we can't get 22gbps symmetric down/up. We don't need to give people in cities faster Internet; truly, you do not need that speed to do day-to-day tasks. You don't even need the 1gbps down/150mbps up that I have. What we need to do is make sure people in rural areas can access at least the median speed.

That said, I think we could give it another 15-20 years and see where our country with around 36 times the population and 238 times the landmass is at in terms of speeds.

[0] https://www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/how-the-history-of... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro... [2] https://tachus.com/internet-speeds-usa-vs-the-rest-of-the-wo...

The different levels of governments in the US are corrupt. Sometimes from town all the way up to Federal. Actually its definitely completly corrupt at the Federal level. A politician or Judge has already been bought to make sure a case like the Swisscom lost. Would never happen here.

So before we have any progress in really any industry in the US. We need to desperately clean house with our politicians, attorney generals and judges.

Hey this can be good for privacy in a way at least. Your traffic can be from any of your neighbors. I wonder if you can sniff packets from other households?

To be fair to America here, it's pretty well served overall and is doing a lot better than the past. Average speeds are at around 100 Mbps with extremely widespread advanced 5G networks doing even better than that.

Cellular in particular is an area where the USA still seems to be ahead of most places, although they certainly pay for it. (Even that has gotten way, way better. I'm getting really nice MVNO service with unlimited data and even a decent unlimited tethering plan for less than $30/month)

25 Gigabit is nice but that's so expensive on the client device side to the point where it's basically unattainable for any consumer. Your average consumer primarily uses the Internet via WiFi devices that might max out at 300Mbps practical speeds or lower depending on when they purchased their devices and WiFi access point and their distance from it.

Then you've got the problem of the speed on the other end. 25Gb fiber is great until you realize that the server you are downloading from is only going to give you 1/100th a lot of the times.

I haven't even mentioned the fact that you're now adding CPU and SSD bottlenecks to the equation. I'm pretty sure 25Gb/s is higher than the maximum write speed on my SSD.

I have gigabit fiber at home and the ability to buy faster speeds from my ISP but I find the idea totally pointless when that means I would have to buy $500 in networking equipment (if not more) and possibly rewire my home (currently sketchy Cat 5e that seems to be installed poorly and I'm lucky to have that). I even have the latest WiFi 7 from a highly reputable prosumer brand along with very new WiFi 7 and 6E 6Ghz client devices but the highest speed I see using those devices where I want to use them is around 600Mbps.

I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine.

It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email and web browsing, and everything other than downloading maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large anyway. It's fine for watching streaming shows. Maybe if our kids turn out to be YouTube addicts when they're older we'll upgrade; maybe we won't for that reason.

What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!

If you think about it, other than the "neutral, open" part, it's a return to the traditional phone model, where every home gets a dedicated point-to-point copper pair (or sometimes two pairs), which terminates in a hub (the telco central building) nearby, instead of being shared between several homes (though I've heard that, in the distant past, phone lines were also sometimes shared between households).

Progress is good, and physical connections are well worth the investment due to how long the stuff will last. But I honestly think VDSL2 and cable are still good enough for most people. The typical family and youth are probably on 5G as much as wifi these days.

Does 25Gbps matter? I mean, it's not like your online services are going to be "faster", right?

Is Netflix or any other web endpoint that normal people use going to be noticeably better because a household has 25Gbps rather than 1Gbps?

Doesn't this only matter for many simultaneous users of heavy web traffic?

People all over the world seem to be fighting same little battles and falling into same traps all the time.

There are many known gems that present structure in ecosystems with correct incentives that do work, they should be known/discoverable and they should be consulted when making decisions.

The cable/fiber providers played all areas of government like a fiddle.

Also any workload I have that is bandwidth heavy would be on clouds machines between data centres and generally very fast. Are there reasons why someone at home would benefit from 25GB internet beyond whatever is available?

Is this a case of over engineered central planning instead of a blow against the free market?

There's nothing inherently "wrong" with a P2MP topology for public infrastructure.

Our infrastructure at times goes back 200 years old. We have rules and words in today's networking linguo that go back 70 years old. You can't just go and tell that it would have been better this way. It absolutely would. And I'm happy for Swiss people who can have 25gpbs at a fraction of the cost. But you can't do that with an emerging tech that is trying to replace existing architecture.

Swiss guys built all that after the tech was wide-spread in the world, and they have built it over a very outdated infrastructure. It was a breeze.

US just unable to use this approach. We can't.

Should we come up with a new one? Yes. Should we look at the Swiss solution and try to replicate it. Yes. Is it awesome? Yes. Would it work here? No.

Starlink has me extra excited for exactly this: region agnostic competition.

Get rekt, telecom incumbents

A dedicated last-mile connection gives you a dedicated link to your ISP’s edge network, not a dedicated path across the internet. You won’t compete with your immediate neighbors on a shared access network anymore, sure, but you’re still sharing the ISP core, peering links, and transit links with the rest of their customers.

In practice this usually works well enough, because ISPs engineer their core and peering capacity with low over-subscription, especially for business and DIA customers. So you can often push near line rate anyway, but not because you have a truly reserved slice of the internet. A Switzerland-sized country would need like petabit-scale connectivity to provide actually dedicated 25G links (or even just 1G links) to everyone.

Bet they don't have that in Switzerland.

The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.

makes me very much consider moving to Switzerland. I'd be happy with symmetric 5Gbit internet. Anything more would be overkill imo.

I hated working with ISPs in the states. Ever try cancelling Comcast? You literally get routed to a department whose sole reason for being is to talk you out of it.

I really like the idea, share the lines compete on execution.

One thing the article doesn't mention is in Germany the electricity and gas lines are more or less this approach. I can switch electricity providers like the article author can switch ISPs. It's a common practice to do so about 1x a year to take advantage of customer acquisition incentives.

Sounds like racketeering with extra steps..

There are other things we could do without completely changing the dynamics or policy. We could mandate all home leasing and selling to have Internet Speed labeled. Giving consumer the knowledge and choice. And all future new home to have at least 1Gbps Internet and upgradable to 10Gbps or higher as standard. The market will sort itself out. And give government some space and room to further negotiate terms with companies.

Now the technical question, why no sharing? why point to point? why 4 fibre and not 2 or 8? And the no sharing is a little bit of gimmick, because at the end of the day everything is shared. The backbone has 100Gbps and you cant have 10 labours all using 25Gbps. I also dont think P2P make sense in a metropolitan city like Tokyo, New York or Hong Kong, especially in high rise, ultra high density buildings with limited space. When 50G-PON barely meet demands we are looking at 100G or 200G-PON. Individual fibre is simple not feasible in those settings.

/thread

That's on top of the usual problems with comparing small European countries to all of America. Switzerland's entire population is barely larger than the population of New York City. There are several metro areas in the US with more people than Switzerland.

Switzerland is also very, very small. It's lands mass is equal to about 0.5% of the United States. We only have a handful of states smaller than Switzerland.

There are valid geopolitical discussions to be had, but it's hard to read these articles that single out tiny little European countries and compare them to the sprawling United States and ignore the elephant in the room.

The free market is not a lie, it’s just that a lot of our politicians have lost their faith in it. That lead them to agree to local monopolies. Ziply, however, has broken out of that model and has been growing aggressively. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.

* no fiber in the neightbour I am * internet on mobile: 10M when lucky * all houses have no city water pipe

I'm glad they started to collect blak water (a month ago)

USA: 9,147,590 km^2

Switzerland: 41,295 km^2

That's a factor of 221.5 to 1.

The article initially does a good job of describing the situation, but gets a bit confused when it gets to the history of the US, especially this line "This is what happens when you let natural monopolies operate without oversight." What it's discussing is not natural monopolies; it's discussing public utilities which are granted monopolies expressly through regulation, not despite it. Also, the US has a lot of oversite on wired ISPs. The prices are almost always approved by regulators.

A good example of a natural monopoly is Google search. It's pretty common for people to get frustrated by it, and look for other search engines. There's also multiple companies trying to compete with it. Normally this would mean that users would migrate to the competitors, but Google's search algorithms have been so good that practically every user has stayed with Google.

Natural monopolies are still easily disrupted, if the naturally-occurring barrier changes. For example, Internet Explorer had a natural monopoly, due to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy giving it many capabilities that other web browser didn't have. When the internet market quickly migrated from a feature-first market to a security-first market, Internet explorer was quickly overtaken by Chrome and Firefox. There's a reasonable chance the same thing will happen with Google Search, as the market for it's search algorithm is overtaken for the marked for LLM based web searches, which Google is pretty bad at.

Anyway, the reason Comcast or Charter is the only one that provides cable internet in your area isn't because it's too expensive for anyone else to deploy cables. At the margins they operate, it would be well worthwhile to invest in a parallel infrastructure, but it's downright prohibited almost everywhere in the US. In fact, they may own the rights to lay cable, despite having never laid any. This is the case where I live, for the phone company, which plays by similar rules.

Fixed-wireless internet providers are starting to provide some competition, as backhauls have improve enough that cellular providers can compete with wired internet providers. T-Mobile is currently offering $20/mo fixed wireless add-on plans, with a five-year price guarantee. To complete with the fixed-wireless market, Comcast has launched a service called NOW Internet, which starts at $30/mo with a similar price guarantee and no no add-on requirement.

Speaking of "starting at", a large source of high prices is the common use of FUD to pressure users into paying for more than they need, or can even use. Very few households peak at more than even 40 Mbps (https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/) and the starting price of almost every provider is above that, but must customers have been talked into higher-tier plans.

The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than that are video game distributors, so if you are in the type of household that would like to download game updates in minutes, instead of tens of minutes, while also watching multiple 4K video streams, then comparing other plans may be worthwhile, otherwise stick with the absolute cheapest plan available from all providers that serve your area. (And, if you are big on multi-player gaming, selecting the ISP with the lowest latency will be beneficial, but all plans from a given service will be the same latency.)

1. There may be a territorial monopoly on cable. But there is nothing stopping other companies from laying fiber. There are areas - including where I use to live that had cable and the phone company laying fiber

2. Everyone on the internet is using a “shared” connection. The difference is whether it is shared at the last mile or upstream. If your ISP doesn’t provision enough upstream capacity, the last mile doesn’t matter.

3. Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile.

4. Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland

5. When I did have AT&T Fiber that advertised at 1GB u/d, it didn’t slow down no matter what time of day.

Please don’t suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. M

And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies but then have the state give control of a given market to a single or a couple of monopolists.

The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-dependent small and large business people whose livelihood depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.

The other point that I'd like to bring up is how useful is a 25G connection to your local demarcation point if your speeds to most sites will be far lower in practice because the Internet isn't circuit-switched.

Care to give a rebuttal?