The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't
77 points by vbernat
77 points by vbernat
Review your AI images. They've got errors.
True capitalism requires competition.
No it doesn't. "Free market" is a theoretical model used to understand markets, it doesn't even need capitalism.
The US also doesn't workship free market, it worships capital.
Very interesting insights in Swiss infra though!
I think the wording «true capitalism» is writing towards the USA audience; they were told for a long time that capitalism is good, so the author says that the benefits they were promised actually require regulation to enforce competition.
Yes, but afaik that argument is a superficial one: "capitalism is the opposite of socialism, soviet union was socialism, soviet union bad, thus capitalism good."
The promise of free markets is just efficient use of capital. It says nothing about fairness, welfare, or democracy.
I guess it is just another example that US Americans are great at public relations (and they got that from the Nazis via Bernays).
Looks like a «two can play this game» situation to me. If a word is pushed to positive valence and loss of meaning, why not define it however is convenient! (The content of the argument is fine, though)
The promise of free markets is just efficient use of capital.
… and even that under conditions that nobody bothers listing, that PR people are not competent to list, and that are sometimes false.
"Free market" and capitalism are not synonymous, there are multiple flavors of capitalism.
Nobody actually knows what is capitalism since the advent of modern infrastructure.
When the Founding Fathers were assessing a future federal budget, they expected 15% to be spent on infrastructure (roads and bridges), and 85% on the military.
Nothing like the modern federal budget.
Elaborate please
Capitalism is a system of ownership; markets a method of exchange.
There's a further step which takes markets as a necessary tool of disseminating information efficiently, even in socialist economic systems. See the excellent In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You.
AI;DR
It says
This article is written by me and spell checked with AI. Many of the images are generated by AI and are mostly to break up the wall of text.
Are you not reading it because it was spell checked by AI or you dislike AI images? Or do you believe AI was used to write more than was disclosed?
Most CMS have spellcheck built in for years. But now this is AI so probably need to tear it back out
Many images are AI generated
Come on. AI proofreading is one thing (even though traditional non-AI spelling and grammar checks still work and are way more efficient) but why intersperse the article with more slop?
I don’t want to read articles like this
This is very similar to Stockholm Fibre (Stokab). Shared, public infrastructure, private operators. Works amazing.
If the cost of operating also at a distance is fixed, then this is absolutely the way to go. Should be the same for power lines.
This is different to say train tracks, where operating the train itself is a high cost. It doesn't make sense for commercial actors to run trains in north Sweden – however Sweden does need trains also in the north (or especially in the north).
Another market regulation mechanism must kick in: you can't let private actors cherry-pick the profitable parts of operating a service and leave the rest of the country dark.
There's no coincidence that Sweden has failed Postal Service, Pharmacy, Train, etc. They were privatized and – very predictably – you can only get good service in the south, Stockholm, Gothenburg, maybe Malmö.
It is similar in Singapore. The physical layers (ducts, manholes, cables, switches in each buildings) is owned and operated by a single and neutral entity. Then it provides a wholesale access to the fiber network, to the telcos, big and small. As of April 2026, some of the 10Gbps plans become as cheap as 30 USD per month around.
I didn't know the phrase 'Natural Monopoly' but it's something that always puzzled me. People claiming competition will fix the problem in such niches where the infrastructure cost is so high that essentially can only be done by the state. Roads, railway, power lines... Making this a free market, essentially equates to hand out a huge public asset to private institutions. Usually companies held by relatives of high profile politicians. Even in developed democratic countries.
That said... The article compares internet connections in "most cities" Ina small land locked county transverseable by car in two hours with "most of the us" which is half a continent stretching from ocean to ocean.
Mind you AT&T is the heir of major public investment. They (USA) just stopped building mega projects as a country to late handing them to some privileged capital owner.
The article compares internet connections in "most cities" Ina small land locked county transverseable by car in two hours with "most of the us" which is half a continent stretching from ocean to ocean.
You can compare apples to apples by comparing cities to cities. A decade ago when I moved to San Francisco, I was appalled that ISPs and cellular were both much slower, more expensive and less reliable there than in any city I had lived until that moment. To this day, it is more expensive. Quality and speed got better and acceptable for me once Sonic made it to my neighborhood, but that was years later.
How expansive and empty most of the US is is irrelevant when talking about cities. Public transport in Las Vegas is independent of how far away it is from Los Angeles.
But someone needs to connect those cities which are hundreds/thousands of kilometres apart rather than dozens/hundreds. The cost of that is surely reflected somewhere
The US is also not alone in regards to distance between cities. And a lot of those connections are already there, including with the rest of the world.
Sometimes there aren't good reasonable reasons as to why things are the way they are. Sometimes the reasons simply suck.
I'm not here to defend the US. And truth be told, I have no knowledge about its internet access reality.
Just pointing out that the reality of both countries is very different. Even if comparing only in cities. You still have to take into account the empty spaces between them which require longer lines. And of there is a level of service agreed with local governments to provide access to lower populated areas. It impacts the cost of all users.
Looking at a city in northern Patagonia, a thousand kilometers from the capital, one provider charges 10USD for 500Mb. In San Francisco Sonic charges 60USD for 1Gb. I'm happy with their service and even pricing, but it is cheaper in other countries and they already set themselves as a "low price, low bullshit" ISP.
The article compares internet connections in "most cities" Ina small land locked county transverseable by car in two hours with "most of the us" which is half a continent stretching from ocean to ocean
You may want to compare to Russia instead. It is as large of a country, land-wise, and it very swiftly went through the whole "last mile" evolution from ADSL, to 100Mbit WAN, to multi-gigabit PON in in the ten-ish years from mid 00s to early 2010s.
Having moved to Switzerland recently, I'm fairly convinced that part of the solution to the problem of the EU not having a lot of startups might just be internet access. I can start a minecraft hosting company from the confines of my own apartment, the 4 fibers mean I can go for 100gbps of total bandwidth if I needed it. Hosting game servers or running selfhosted services is a breeze when you do not have to worry about your bandwidth and fast internet being affordable. Frankly I'm only on 10G internet because I struggle to even genuinely saturate 10G more than a few seconds at a time.
Back in 2008... it was Swisscom, the incumbent itself, that pushed for the four-fiber Point-to-Point model. The company argued that a single fiber would create a monopoly and that regulation would be necessary... Then, in 2020, Swisscom changed course.
I wonder what changed at Swisscom between 2008-2020 that would have made them go from an open model to pushing the monopoly practices.
Freddy Künzler from Init7 has written a blogpost about the history and why Swiss telecommunication infrastructure looks like it is. https://blog.init7.net/en/die-glasfaserstreit-geschichte/
The telecom act of 1996 meant to set up a system similar to the Swiss system. Unfortunately in the early 2000s the FCC decided internet service was different from telecom service.
Well articulated article, I think it makes a very good point about the point is not the degree of regulation, but what is being regulated. Common infrastructure shouldn't belong to private companies otherwise it leads to monopolies. Another important thing is that how the biggest telecommunication company in Switzerland lost the legal battle to become a monopoly. To maintain real competition, you need a decision mechanism that oversees companies.
I wouldn't call having a public infrastructure "true capitalism" but I guess the author is using this language to not put off pro-capitalist audience.
Think about water pipes. It would be insane to have three different water companies each digging up your street to lay their own pipes.
I know right? That's exactly how things work in Greece.
I don't understand the "4 fibers" part. Couldn't there be a single fiber going to each home, but companies still have "physical" access to that single fiber? In the article, the only part I see that's specific to having 4 fibers/outlets is that you can have services from multiple providers at the same time.
The cost of the fiber is tiny; the cost to place the fiber is high.
Four is a choice; I can see three being 98% as good.
What I don't get is how the "4 fibers" enable competition where 1 fiber would not. As far as I can tell, the question of competitive aspects and making the infrastructure common doesn't depend on there being 1 or 4 fibers.
Why is it a good idea to enable multiple simultaneous vendors? Because the cost of switching ISPs is a relatively large impediment to doing that.
If you have one fiber and service from multiple vendors, both sides need to coordinate on VLAN tagging.
If you have N fibers, you can say "Blue is SwissCom, Green is Init7" and everyone can use simpler equipment.
In Switzerland, can I buy service from 4 separate ISPs and bond those 4 fibers? Asking for a friend…
You will have to define bond in some strange way. Can you use all four simultaneously? Sure.
A better question is: Will they speak BGP to you so that you can select the best path for any destination? And are you competent to run it without causing a loop?
I'm not entirely familiar with the history of how it came to be, but in the UK there is Openreach who do fiber (GPON) infrastructure and were forced(?) to open it up to competition. So a consumer gets to choose among dozens of ISPs who handle all the billing, support and routing / IP transit.
However given how high the wholesale pricing is for Openreach (well, BT wholesale who handle the network from Openreach "exchanges"–old phone exchanges mostly, to datacenters) the prices are almost always higher than altnets who build their own infra. Something must have gone wrong!
The Swiss model presented in the article is overly simplistic, it is not viable for an incumbent ISP to connect thousands of "termination hubs" all across the country on their own infra.
Wow.
Any use cases for 25 Gbit that I’m not thinking of?
I went from 75mbit to 100 to 500 and I don’t think I’ve noticed much difference except occasionally faster downloads (that seem to be throttled on the other side anyway). I can get 1GBit with 2 coming soon.
I just don’t have a use case for it.
Family of three, with one in esports. Once your ping time is reasonable I guess I don’t see the point?
Similar to Australia's National Broadband Network FTTP approach, though that has a lot of other approaches. Political games and industry pressure caused a bunch of reductions in service quality, but the idea is fundamentally similar. Australia is also a closer comparison to the US in terms of geography and population distribution, big issues for universal fiber deployment.