The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't

by sschueller on 4/5/2026, 6:29:47 PM

https://sschueller.github.io/posts/the-free-market-lie/

Comments

by: ttul

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.

4/5/2026, 6:44:58 PM

by: harrall

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 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.

4/5/2026, 10:55:41 PM

by: dmix

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.

4/5/2026, 9:39:57 PM

by: mft_

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.

4/5/2026, 10:29:40 PM

by: chrismcb

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

4/5/2026, 8:16:45 PM

by: tickerticker

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.

4/5/2026, 7:34:47 PM

by: ma2kx

Init7 has on its blog another amazing write up <a href="https://blog.init7.net/en/die-glasfaserstreit-geschichte/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.init7.net/en/die-glasfaserstreit-geschichte/</a>

4/5/2026, 6:55:25 PM

by: comrade1234

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.

4/5/2026, 10:15:34 PM

by: raw_anon_1111

This article is technically incorrect on so many levels I didn’t even bother to finish it.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 fiber2. All internet is using “shared” connection. The difference is whether it is shared at the last mile or upstream.3. Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile.4. Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland5. 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

4/5/2026, 11:04:29 PM

by: andy99

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?

4/5/2026, 10:20:37 PM

by: clcaev

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?

4/5/2026, 9:59:06 PM

by: zokier

Switzerland also happens to have over 5x population density of USA, and 80% higher household median income based on quick google.

4/5/2026, 10:26:16 PM

by: userbinator

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?

4/5/2026, 10:19:04 PM

by: jeffrallen

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.

4/5/2026, 9:43:09 PM

by: cjs_ac

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.

4/5/2026, 6:44:35 PM

by: jmyeet

First, the "free market", as always, is a myth. There's no such thing.Second, we know why. It's pretty simple. It costs $X to provide a service like Internet. We charge $Y for that service. $Y can be less than $X if it's government subsidized. Typically it's more. As soon as you intermediate that service between the municipality (who owns the land) and the people (who live there), you then have to extract profits for that national ISP.There's a word for this intermediation and rent-seeking: capitalism.We've known for years that all the best Internet in the US is municipal broadband like Chattanooga. It's why national ISPs spend a lot of money to lobby for legislation to make such things effectively or actually illegal. By "effectively" I mean things like granting exclusive franchise agreements.It baffles me how hard people work to refuse to understand this. It's not that difficult.We don't need AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum, etc. They provide no value. They simply make things more expensive because profit. So every time your town or city chooses not to do this they're choosing the profits of shareholders who don't live in that area over the interests of residents who do.Regulation won't solve that fundamental problem (we still need regulation, to be clear). Neither will competition. A network overbuild isn't the solution. We don't need multiple national ISPs. We need one municipal ISP (per municipality).By the way, this goes for every utility. Gas, electricity, water, sewerage. All of them are simply made more expensive by privatization or the so-called "public-private partnerships" (which simply privatize profits and socialize losses).

4/5/2026, 11:19:32 PM

by: burnt-resistor

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.

4/5/2026, 7:56:28 PM

by: joe_the_user

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.

4/5/2026, 7:21:32 PM

by: poly2it

This article would be so much better without the generic AI-generated images everywhere.

4/5/2026, 6:41:50 PM

by: gigatexal

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.

4/5/2026, 10:08:17 PM

by: bethekidyouwant

Why isn’t france your European example? Its larger and better served than switzerland

4/5/2026, 6:56:55 PM

by: deafpolygon

if the internet cabal in the US was actually a free market, you’d be right!

4/5/2026, 6:40:22 PM

by:

4/5/2026, 7:28:19 PM

by: dlcarrier

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 (<a href="https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/</a>) 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.)

4/5/2026, 8:48:06 PM

by: amazingamazing

[flagged]

4/5/2026, 6:42:31 PM

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