[HN Gopher] The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Int...
___________________________________________________________________
The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and
America Doesn't
Author : sschueller
Score : 93 points
Date : 2026-04-05 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sschueller.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (sschueller.github.io)
| deafpolygon wrote:
| if the internet cabal in the US was actually a free market, you'd
| be right!
| poly2it wrote:
| This article would be so much better without the generic AI-
| generated images everywhere.
| sschueller wrote:
| Agreed but I didn't want to just take random images from the
| web that I don't have the rights too and I my artistic skills
| are not good enough.
| LoganDark wrote:
| You could just not generate extra images that aren't relevant
| to the article. I like the charts and diagrams even when
| they're AI, because they serve a purpose. But the extra
| images for flair or whatever are completely pointless and
| even annoying.
| sschueller wrote:
| Ok thanks. I will keep that in mind for my next post.
| heystefan wrote:
| Please ignore them, the images definitely helped
| understand the issue better. Don't anchor on a couple of
| grouchy hn posters.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Hey there were a lot more before the feedback, the
| irrelevant ones have been removed[0]. The remaining
| images in the article are good :)
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652734
| Svip wrote:
| I would go a little further (and apologies for being rather
| blunt): but I find the over-use of irrelevant images to be
| rather insulting, as if I am unable to maintain focus on an
| article, without the frequent shiny object.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily call that further. The images I
| like are relevant because they visually explain things
| that are helpful. The images I don't like are irrelevant
| because they serve no purpose other than to Be Images for
| no good reason.
| 0xsn3k wrote:
| i agree, i do like the article content itself, but the AI-
| generated images (clearly nano banana btw) really kill the
| credibility. even just using stock images with the watermarks
| clearly visible would be better
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to
| the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the
| way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were
| privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British
| Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed
| competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate
| maintenance fees, of course).
|
| 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.
| twelvedogs wrote:
| Australia is still pretty messy, Telstra was privatised and
| pretty much stopped upgrading their network for years around
| the 24 mb ADSL level
|
| Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a
| new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling
| it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre
| to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last
| bit over existing phone lines
|
| Eventually it was returned to fibre to the home as upgrading
| existing lines to run shitty 100mb connections was actually
| much more expensive than just running fibre
|
| We're only now starting to get to the point where fibre is
| fairly available when it could have been ten years ago
| 0xy wrote:
| They stopped upgrading their network because government was
| publicly implying they'd do something nationally on
| broadband.
|
| Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's
| cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do
| 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
|
| Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the
| neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and
| better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been
| sunk by the government, including TPG and others.
|
| TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner
| city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal
| upload speeds to protect our investment.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the
| time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
|
| Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans
| a 1GB monthly cap.
|
| And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c
| per _megabyte_. To be fair, they would let you do things
| like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.
| consp wrote:
| We've had the same issue in the Netherlands as the UK (telecom
| getting free infrastructure), and the end result is them
| blocking every fiber connection for years and then buying up
| all of the ones trying when it suited them. And the cable
| companies had a freebie for decades because they got most of
| their infra for free without the "share space" requirement
| (because only a major part, and not all, was funded by
| municipalities and it took a while to get them all in one
| company), and the cable companies decided not to invest in
| anything. And now we have the fiber-to-the-bottom where they
| are installing as fast as they can, but only with a
| governmental monopoly in place with dubious sharing agreements.
|
| Due to "competition" and "fare ride" my soon to be (it's taken
| over 4 years and likely will take forever..) fiber will cost me
| 22 euro/month more than if I would have gotten the cable from
| across the road ... but the companies have "exclusive" rights
| since they would not have "financed" it otherwise (the quotes
| are all marketing bs).
| ttul wrote:
| In my small island community, I participated in a municipal
| committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the
| island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the
| community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the
| home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670
| Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via
| coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for either
| terrible option.
|
| 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.
| bestouff wrote:
| No it doesn't, and you just proved it. You managed it because
| you could fake you had leverage. But without that you were
| slaves of theses companies, and that's the general rule.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| This. Businesses aren't usually "competiting" in the way
| microeconomics think they do.
|
| Every business owner knows that a race to the bottom with
| other businesses in their market is going to ruin each
| other's life and they don't usually engage in this kind of
| practice (with the notable exception of people with lots of
| capital to wipe the competition out of the market then do a
| rug pull after the fact).
|
| The _goal_ of a business is never to capture their
| competitors market share, it 's to make a decent profit at
| the end of the year so that their shareholders (or
| themselves, depending on the size and ownership structure)
| get the revenue they expect.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| As Peter Theil literally said, "Competition is for losers."
| HauntingPin wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if whoever writes these comments
| understands the words their using.
|
| > No it doesn't, and you just proved it
|
| What exactly did they prove? You didn't substantiate or
| explain this at all. Leverage would be relevant if they were
| negotiating a deal. They weren't. The company laid down fibre
| because of what they saw as a potential competitor (municipal
| fibre). The municipality didn't use the threat of fibre to
| come to terms with the monopolistic company. That would've
| been leverage. But they didn't, so it wasn't leverage. The
| municipality created the appearance of competition and the
| monopoly behaved accordingly as if there were a potential
| competitor.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > ...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.
|
| They called in a favor that put pressure on the company
| from public expectations.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| Yes. What do you think happens in a competitive
| marketplace? Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with
| Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own
| console. That's literally competition.
|
| The details of how the "public pressure" came to be don't
| matter, because the monopoly didn't know about that. All
| they knew was there was a potential competitor, so they
| behaved according to that information. That's how it
| works.
| karlgkk wrote:
| Frankly, I think you're trying to poke holes in a
| straightforward concept. And now you've dug your heels in
| and you're trying to justify it. But... let's ignore
| opinions and interpretations...
|
| > Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips
| for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console
|
| This is completely inaccurate in every way possible. You
| even have the order of events backwards (Nintendo
| approached Sony first!). There is in no way in which even
| the most charitable interpretation of this statement
| could bear out. Just about the only correct part is that
| you have some (but not all!) of the relevant parties
| involved.
|
| If you're wrong about such a well documented, cut and dry
| matter of historical record, then what else are you wrong
| about? :)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It seems incorrect to call this competition.
|
| I'm glad you got your broadband but what happened sounds much
| more like American politics than ordinary market processes. And
| in this political environment, corporations can engage in a
| variety of other tactics than placating a squeaky wheel - they
| can outlaw competition, buy off officials, pay for shrill media
| hit pieces and so-forth.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| It's clearly competition. The incumbent company saw a
| potential competitor and acted upon it. That's literally what
| happens when there's competition. It doesn't matter that the
| competitor didn't actually exist if the incumbent behaved as
| if it did exist.
|
| I'm never sure what the point of comments like this is. "It
| seems incorrect". But it isn't. You just don't want to admit
| that competition is good and necessary.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Local municipality power companies put fiber in the ground
| whenever they put power. The result is fiber almost everywhere
| at very low cost. Even along rail and major roads.
| ma2kx wrote:
| Init7 has on its blog another amazing write up
| https://blog.init7.net/en/die-glasfaserstreit-geschichte/
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the US
| which demanded network unbundling, splitting up the
| fiber/connections versus the internet service, demanding
| wholesale rate access to infrastructure. It was good.
|
| Then the courts decided, meh, we just don't like it. We are
| going to tell the FCC otherwise. It all went away. The
| incumbent local carriers have now had monopoly power over huge
| swarths of the infrastructure. No access to dark fiber.
| https://www.dwt.com/insights/2004/03/federal-court-eviscerat...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Telecom_Associat...
|
| Verizon also sued, and said, sure, there's laws for unbundling.
| But, we really don't like them. We aren't going to deploy fiber
| if we have to share. And the court once again said, oh, yeah,
| well, that's fine, we'll grant that: we'll strike down
| congress's law because "innovation" sounds better.
| https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1...
|
| It's just so so so much corruption, so much meddling from the
| court to undo everything good congress worked so hard to make
| happen, that was such an essential baseline to allow
| competition. I remain very very angry about this all. This was
| such a sad decade of losing so much goodness, such competition.
| These damn cartels! The courts that keep giving them everything
| they want! Bah!!
|
| I think it was a other case,
| frmersdog wrote:
| And this is almost certainly the direct cause of the Dot Com
| Bubble bursting.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv0600V5q4
|
| We were bamboozled on a massive scale.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Why isn't france your European example? Its larger and better
| served than switzerland
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Looks like a good article explaining some key concepts like
| natural monopoly.
|
| 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.
| underlipton wrote:
| The ultimate irony being that these people are the most likely
| to vote against social safety nets. "No free lunches" and such.
| tickerticker wrote:
| I wish this kind of perspective (international comparison) could
| be applied to several areas of the USA economy: tax compliance,
| campaign finance, and banking regulation. Good work, OP.
|
| 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.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Municipal and co-op broadband in the US needs subsidies, loans,
| replication, and expansion. Where I live has a farmer co-op for
| electricity and internet in a mostly sparse, rural area with
| various residential housing developments scattered around. What
| was GFiber in the regionally-nearby metropolitan area had beta 20
| Gbps internet for $250 USD/mo. 1 Gbps symmetric fiber co-op is
| $100 USD/mo. Prices are high compared to Europe. Possibly not
| high prices compared to Australia.
| chrismcb wrote:
| Because it isn't a free market in the USA. And those that
| regulate it don't seem to care. Or maybe it is those that have
| been granted a monopoly do everything they can to retain said
| monopoly. Things would be different if we actually had a free
| market
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Free market enthusiasts' reasoning is literary the same as
| Communists': when their grand theory fails to deliver its
| grandiose promises, it's nver because their believes where
| nonsensical, but because "it isn't real Communism/free market".
| emtel wrote:
| Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited
| power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would
| help.
|
| Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing
| interests and voting factions, meaning that free market
| supporters have limited power to enact their preferred
| policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a "pure"
| form.
| schubidubiduba wrote:
| Some markets just inherently turn non-free very quickly when
| left unsupervised. Especially infrastructure markets.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| tl;dr: The lie here is the assumption that the US has, or has
| ever had, a free market for wired internet service providers.
|
| 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.)
| LoganDark wrote:
| > tl;dr: The lie here is the assumption that the US has, or has
| ever had, a free market for wired internet service providers.
|
| The point is that "free market" is a lie, not that the US ever
| had one.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than
| [40Mbps] are video game distributors
|
| No? I've been trying to download my MyMiniFactory library[0]
| and I'm currently getting 25MBps over 5 downloads. A single
| download will easily do 15MBps.
|
| [0] Which sucks, even at high speed - they have no API, no bulk
| download, and you're limited to 6 items at a time. I have to
| click through 1000+ items with easily 5000+ sub-items and
| individually download each one.
| dmix wrote:
| In Canada our internet became much faster for cheaper with better
| customer support when the government allowed competition from
| smaller players. Telecom also got better when they allowed a
| foreign competitor to compete against the government mandated
| oligopoly. But the market is still heavily regulated in a way
| that benefits the existing monopolies.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I think Canada is a great example of how not to do it, despite
| some price decreases in recent years. We seem to have (near)
| the worst of all worlds: huge geography, little competition,
| and government regulation that props up the oligopoly without
| driving prices down like Europe. Mobile data is even worse.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| This is about urban Switzerland. Way out in the country, we still
| have crap copper up on poles, which maxes out at 25 Mbits.
|
| But yes, Swisscom (owners if the old crap copper) do have to let
| the competitors use it.
| sschueller wrote:
| Yes, that is sadly still the case but the expansion of the
| fiber build out is now rapidly moving forward. By 2030 +90%
| will have fiber
|
| https://www.swisscom.ch/en/about/news/2024/02/08-weniger-kup...
| abc03 wrote:
| Currently also have copper and Sunrise cable. Just got the
| cables to the house two weeks ago. I'm now waiting for the
| local electricity company to get in-house installation.
| Everything at no costs. So yes, it's progressing fast.
| clcaev wrote:
| This factoring of a market to enable competition by centralizing
| minimal infrastructure seems the bedrock of best governmental
| practice. Are there other examples to lean on? How do we turn
| this into common knowledge?
| gigatexal wrote:
| what a well written article.
|
| 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.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| I'm in Zurich and I have 1Gb. My provider is offering higher for
| no additional cost - I'd have to put in a new modem/fiber-to-
| Ethernet adapter. However my home network is cat-5e and my switch
| is also 1Gb so I don't bother - it's pointless.
| userbinator wrote:
| All connections to the Internet are at some level "shared",
| except perhaps if you get a direct connection to one of the core
| routers. As others have mentioned, this is in a dense area and
| much closer to being in a LAN environment.
|
| 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?
| andy99 wrote:
| What does one achieve with 25 GB internet? Are speeds actually
| usefully faster, or is there some other bottleneck that makes the
| practical speed the same as in the US?
|
| 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?
| hparadiz wrote:
| I can actually get 7 gbit but have no idea what I'd use with
| it. I'd need to upgrade my entire lan just to make use of it.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I routinely max out my 1Gbps connection downloading large files
| for work. 25Gbps would cut my waiting substantially. I'm not
| sure how likely it is that the server would be able to fill
| that pipe, but if such connections were common, they'd probably
| make it happen.
|
| If people don't actually use the extra speed then it's
| effectively free to provide, anyway. If providers could
| advertise 25Gbps while only needing the same capacity they do
| for 1Gbps, I imagine they'd do it just to bring in a few more
| customers. The fact that they don't suggests it would result in
| more usage suggests it would be useful.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| How many times has this argument been made?
| sschueller wrote:
| I heard that argument when I got 28.8k modem back in the day
| when that was quite uncommon.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I think you misunderstood the article, or perhaps didn't read
| it?
|
| So the way the system works is each house has 4 physical fibers
| into it, that go into a central office without being aggregated
| up. Inside the central office any ISP can offer any speed vs
| price option they want, because they just patch you in at layer
| 1.
|
| So of course, most people wouldn't necessarily need to get
| 26Gbit. But if you want to offer it as an ISP you can, and it's
| up to customers to decide if it's worth the price.
|
| One obvious use case would be folks that work with high
| resolution video. Uncompressed 8K is about 8TiB per hour of
| footage. Compressed raw like RED cinema et all are more like
| 1TiB per hour at the high quality settings.
|
| 25Gbit vs 1Gbit for moving 1TiB is 5 minutes vs 2 hours.
|
| A quick google says the 25Gbit service from Init7 is $80 bucks
| a month.
|
| Sounds like an astoundingly good deal vs what's available in
| the US to me.
| manquer wrote:
| Workloads emerge with higher capacity not other way around.
| Lossless media, to virtual reality applications all scale
| better with more available bandwidth.
|
| An average AAA game is 100-200GB today. That is not by
| accident, The best residential internet of 1Gbps dedicated it
| is still 30 minutes of download, for the average buyer it is
| still few hours easily.
|
| A 2TB today game is a 5 hour download on 1 Gbps connection and
| days for median buyer. Game developers can not think of a 2TB
| game if storage capacity, I/O performance, and bandwidth all do
| not support it.
|
| Hypothetically If I could ship a 200TB game I would probably
| pre-render most of the graphics at much higher
| resolutions/frame-rates than compute it poorly on the GPU on
| the fly.
|
| More fundamentally, we would lean towards less compute on
| client and more computed assets driven approach for
| applications. A good example of that in tech world in the last
| decade is how we have switched to using docker/container layers
| from just distributing source files or built packages. the
| typical docker images in the corporate world exceed 1GB, the
| source files being actually shipped are probably less than 10Mb
| of that. We are trading size for better control, Pre built
| packages instead of source was the same trade-off different in
| 90s.
|
| Depending on what is more scarce you optimize for it. Single
| threaded and even multi-threaded compute growth has been
| slowing down. Consumer internet bandwidth has no such physics
| limit that processors do so it is not not bad idea to optimize
| for pre computed assets delivery rather than rely on client
| side compute.
| zokier wrote:
| Switzerland also happens to have over 5x population density of
| USA, and 80% higher household median income based on quick
| google.
| mft_ wrote:
| I have a gentle rule, which is when discussing (geo)politics with
| friends, we should try not to use Switzerland as an example. It's
| just too good, too rational, too sensible, too well run, in
| myriad ways that other countries should be able to emulate, but
| consistently and constantly don't.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I have a gentle rule, which is "if you can do it in one place,
| it is probably possible to do it in a second". The Swiss are
| not a separate species.
| mft_ wrote:
| So one would think.
|
| And yet, living in Switzerland after the UK involved one
| after another discovery of how well-ordered and -run a
| country could be. And then moving to Germany was like
| stepping back even further behind my memories of the UK.
|
| I'm sure you could find examples of countries that do
| specific things as well as Switzerland; but I'm not aware of
| many places that do almost everything so excellently. (Maybe
| Japan, in many respects, but I lack sufficient direct
| experience to adequately judge.)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I don't doubt there are differences.
|
| I doubt they're insurmountable. Again, because the Swiss
| aren't some genetically superior subspecies. Culture can be
| changed.
|
| I see Americans talk about how impossible universal
| healthcare is as if the rest of the developed world hasn't
| largely figured it out.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| It's also too tiny to be representative of most of humanity
| harrall wrote:
| This article gets ahead of itself.
|
| 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 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. They just string
| the fiber along or build a tower.
|
| It's still not shared -- but it's fast because it's _new_. Shared
| would be preferred, but the blocker usually is replacing old
| infra.
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