TBF Ziply is very much an outlier. Most urban and suburban places in the US have middling to poor connectivity provided by a monopoly or duopoly that overcharges while engaging in various underhanded tactics.
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.
The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does.
I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
It's fair to critique this article not covering this, but I also think this is largely a red herring. The vast majority of the issue in the US is suburban, where density isn't really a problem. The US has a lot of rural areas, but they represent a tiny fraction of the population.
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.
It appears the author lives in Germany. In my experience, Europeans who haven't visited the US (I don't know if he has or not) often have a hard time grasping just how HUGE the country is. It literally spans an entire continent east to west. In Europe, you can usually drive to another country's border, or the coast, within 4-6 hours (sometimes more depending on where you are). In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state. I heard about one German auto engineer who was visiting Los Angeles. He looked at a map and thought it would be a fun drive to go to Portland and back on a Saturday. He was shocked when his American colleagues told him to look at the map's scale more closely, and that it would be more than 24 hours of driving just to get there and come back.
So yes. Regulations certainly play a part, but so does geography.
The higher the density, the more problematic to dig up the streets to bury the fibre lines. And US streets are much wider to dig the lines.
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
Is that 2.5x number the average of the whole of the US compared to Switzerland? Because NYC probably has higher density than Switzerland, but Oklahoma probably has much lower than even that 2.5x number, and it doesn't make sense to put them under the same umbrella.
As an Australian it's hilarious to hear that. We have less than 10% the density of the USA. And yeah, we blame everything on density too, even though 90% of the country is a desert with noone in it (so no need to lay cable or build roads there), and we are one of the most urbanised countries in the word (IIRC most of the population lives in 3 cities).
Density doesn't really make the sort of difference you might think.
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.
How do you explain the top comment at this time (about Spectrum in NYC)? It can't get denser than NYC. So I guess it's not the density that's the problem.
Why are you using all of US then compare the internet of most US cities and to most cities in Europe and Asia. US has a problem of false advertisement it is portrayed as the free market but reality it is filled with monopolies/duopolies/captured markets in most industries and americans are propagandized to believe stupidly that it is a good thing.
This article isn't about coverage, it's about what goes in the duct if there is a connection. If Comcast can run a cable to your house, then they can put four strands and allow other ISPs access to them.
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.
Except in my very rural and very poor part of the US we got a fiber co-op that formed a few years ago that provides 1 gig direct to home without a problem.
Every story about how the US has awful internet has a comment like this. I suspect that the refusal to believe the US is worse at anything is part of the reason it never catches up in those areas.
People only using aggregate density calculation is so overly simplistic. Inside of each country there are patterns.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I talked to someone laying fiber in Manhattan circa 2020 he said it was $25k / ft. That the permitting process took so long by the time it got approved the people on the city council had changed. That the conduits are so packed you can’t fit another fiber line in it and almost all of them are undocumented. All kinds of union circumvention BS from Verizon aka Empire City Subway who’s supposed to be maintaining this stuff per contract. It’s a shit show.
Fortunately, the referendum failed. I mean, sure it's nice to have a small population, but I think it's also important to try to improve economic migration everywhere.
I actually live in a rural area in the U.S, and was surprised to see that I now have a 2-3 fiber offerings. A few years ago there was just one fiber company, but a utility company helped roll it out and I currently use it on a 100Mbps symmetrical plan (for what I use, it's more than enough).
Author kind of glosses over this, like it's the setup to the point. But it's obvious that THIS is the point. The government did the hard work of running 25Gbit-capable fibre (4 of them!) to each and every house, and the ISP just has to run (25 * NumHouses)Gbit-capable fiber to the POP.
In the United States, which has 250x the land as Switzerland but only 30x the population, running fibre to every house is therefore 1/8th as economical. We have bigger problems. Is Flint, Michigan going to get fibre before they have safe water?
Switzerland has a population of 9M people - the entire country has fewer people than the third or fourth largest US metro area - and a GDP per land area 8x that of the US. What works for Switzerland as a matter of policy, is essentially irrelevant when it comes to governing the US.
There is criticism on how Germany organized the ISP market going around for ages.
Ironically we had a monopoly for building wired connections - that was run by the government.
Then someone had the great idea to open this market for the private sector. Since then we kind of lice in the stoneage in terms of fast internet.
I heart that Scandinavian countries have a similar approach for what is described in the article. Didn't know Switzerland also does it right. That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.
Getting a Spectrum cable modem internet connection in NYC in 2026 is so deeply humiliating.
Dealing with the ridiculously limited upload speed, the outages, the locked router. The 40 minutes it takes on the phone to get it disconnected. Their constant attempts at upselling you cell phone plans and other terrible tech you’d never consider.
Truly, Fios is the most bare minimum. And there are much better options if you can pay commercial rates (stealth.net! Pilot!).
cause Switzerland have more population density and surprise, and smaller territory. Basically, lower infrastructure cost to deploy higher bandwidth backbone.
What exactly is the point of the LLM-generated infographics in this article? I don't have a problem with LLM-generated content in principle, but the bare minimum an author has to do is to check them for trivial errors such as duplicated labels, inconsistent diagrams etc., and just the first one falls short at that.
Maybe more importantly, I don't understand what it's supposed to tell me: It mentions that "duplication is inefficient", yet shows no example of duplication. It shows various levels of building density, yet does nothing with it (and neither does the article), leaving me wondering if I'm missing something yet again. Then for the horizontal split: It looks like it's trying to either contrast/compare water and communications infrastructure, but they just look the same, so why present both?
We had this in Utah for over a decade now (Approx. 24% of the State) via Utopia, congrats to Switzerland on finally catching up. I believe 10G is around $200/month and you can select from a dozen or so ISPs on the other end.
If you were really gung-ho about proving something to this annoying blogger I'm sure you could convince one of the mom and pop ISPs on the network to throw a 100G optic on both ends. Unlike Switzerland Utah lets you buy the physical strand of fiber outright for around $3k (Hopefully that's not too capitalist for you).
I can get 1Gbps up/down for $50. It is a PON fiber connection. This seems fast enough for everything a computer professional needs to do. I'm not sure what 25 Gbps internet access would actually be needed for.
I gotta be honest here, my building recently (within the past 5 years) got access to fibre internet, I initially chose the option to go for the 3 gigabit package, after a few years I realized nothing I am downloading actually needs this speed. And almost nothing actually supports it either. I downgraded to the 1 gig service half a year ago and I don't miss it.
on the topic of Swiss Internet: everyone I know in Zurich’s home internet gets a mostly-static IPv4. It’s not a promised feature or anything, but my IP didn’t rotate for years. This is super handy for self hosting.
I’m seeing a lot of misplaced cynicism in the comments, much of which fails to deal with the subject matter of the article.
The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that.
Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that.
The essay elegantly articulates the why. Even if the anti-public commentariat doesn’t like Switzerland’s strong governance, even if there is a varying spread of speeds/competition or whatever else is being measured, even if one small country is out-performing a big one on many metrics… it doesn’t change the underlying insights of the essay, insights that the US desperately needs to understand.
109 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 74.4 ms ] threadTheir service area is >15x the size of Switzerland.
(16k sq miles vs 250k square miles)
The overbuilding is a very annoying problem though, I agree.
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.
I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.
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.
Must be a sampling bias or something.
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-...
Fortunately, the referendum failed. I mean, sure it's nice to have a small population, but I think it's also important to try to improve economic migration everywhere.
I actually live in a rural area in the U.S, and was surprised to see that I now have a 2-3 fiber offerings. A few years ago there was just one fiber company, but a utility company helped roll it out and I currently use it on a 100Mbps symmetrical plan (for what I use, it's more than enough).
Author kind of glosses over this, like it's the setup to the point. But it's obvious that THIS is the point. The government did the hard work of running 25Gbit-capable fibre (4 of them!) to each and every house, and the ISP just has to run (25 * NumHouses)Gbit-capable fiber to the POP.
In the United States, which has 250x the land as Switzerland but only 30x the population, running fibre to every house is therefore 1/8th as economical. We have bigger problems. Is Flint, Michigan going to get fibre before they have safe water?
Ironically we had a monopoly for building wired connections - that was run by the government.
Then someone had the great idea to open this market for the private sector. Since then we kind of lice in the stoneage in terms of fast internet.
I heart that Scandinavian countries have a similar approach for what is described in the article. Didn't know Switzerland also does it right. That's the way to do it, will work for Germany as well.
Dealing with the ridiculously limited upload speed, the outages, the locked router. The 40 minutes it takes on the phone to get it disconnected. Their constant attempts at upselling you cell phone plans and other terrible tech you’d never consider.
Truly, Fios is the most bare minimum. And there are much better options if you can pay commercial rates (stealth.net! Pilot!).
Truly embarrassing and sad.
Maybe more importantly, I don't understand what it's supposed to tell me: It mentions that "duplication is inefficient", yet shows no example of duplication. It shows various levels of building density, yet does nothing with it (and neither does the article), leaving me wondering if I'm missing something yet again. Then for the horizontal split: It looks like it's trying to either contrast/compare water and communications infrastructure, but they just look the same, so why present both?
Yes, fine - 'land mass'. (ditto US) But land mass doesn't make corporations lobby and collude
If you were really gung-ho about proving something to this annoying blogger I'm sure you could convince one of the mom and pop ISPs on the network to throw a 100G optic on both ends. Unlike Switzerland Utah lets you buy the physical strand of fiber outright for around $3k (Hopefully that's not too capitalist for you).
The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that.
Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that.
The essay elegantly articulates the why. Even if the anti-public commentariat doesn’t like Switzerland’s strong governance, even if there is a varying spread of speeds/competition or whatever else is being measured, even if one small country is out-performing a big one on many metrics… it doesn’t change the underlying insights of the essay, insights that the US desperately needs to understand.
Why on Earth world you use an LLM for that instead of a spell checker???