In a fascinating blog post, Stefan Schüller unpacks how this came to pass, in Switzerland, a country known for its impassable mountains and its impossible national telco (Swisscom):

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

Schüller describes the Swiss system as a kind of Goldilocks approach that's midway between two failed systems: the American "free market" system and the German state provision system.

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Most people in the US can't get fiber at all, and if you can get it, it's probably 1Gbit, and available from a single provider (that's nearly my situation in Los Angeles, where I can buy 2Gbit symmetrical fiber from AT&T, who run a shared connection on old Worldcom fiber they've lit up).

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Some (very foolish) people say that Starlink represents a competitive alternative to fiber. This is nonsense - first, because Starlink is another natural monopoly (how many competing satellite constellations can we cram into stable orbits before they start smashing into each other?), and second, because satellite is *millions of times slower* than fiber:

https://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/starlink-nov-2022-data-caps.html

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In Germany, most people also have a single provider, and the connection they get is shared, and caps out at 1-2Gbit.

Meanwhile, the Swiss can get connections that are *far* faster, and cheaper. How did they do it?

For starters, the Swiss recognized what any Simcity player knows: fiber is a "natural monopoly." It doesn't make any sense to build multiple, competing fiber networks - any more than it would make sense to build multiple, competing sewer systems or electric grids.

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In the US, private fiber providers get city permits to dig up the roads and lay their network. If you have two competing networks, they dig up the road twice.

You'd think that the (more regulated) Germans would lay a single network, but they, too, have multiple, competing networks.

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German regulators have a complex set of priorities and constraints: to encourage competition, they promote the idea of competing networks in competing trenches, often just meters apart (rather than on competing services running over the same fiber and/or fiber run through the same conduit - pipe - laid in a single trench).

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This makes setting up fiber extremely capital-intensive, so Germany backstops this system with "essential facilities sharing" - a rule that requires the incumbent (formerly state-owned, now partially state-owned) Deutsche Telekom to offer space in its conduit to smaller ISPs that want to thread their own fiber from their data-centers to their customers' homes.

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This is a good idea in theory - but in practice, DT has largely captured its regulators and so it is free to place all kinds of administrative hurdles in the paths of competitors seeking to use its lines.

The result is that Germans can get fiber from multiple, heavily capitalized network providers who overbuilt redundant systems under the city streets, squandering capital digging trenches that they could have spent on providing faster and/or cheaper connections.

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Meanwhile, in the US, they leave this all up to "the market" (though, of course, there's no way "the market" could get fiber laid down without public participation, because the clearing price for privately negotiated licenses to dig up every street in town is "infinity").

10/

The US is dominated by a cartel of massive incumbents: there's AT&T (formerly a regulated monopoly that was so entangled with the US government that it was effectively a for-profit state enterprise) and the cable giants, Comcast and Charter, who divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "New World."

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These companies generally enjoy regional monopolies, which means they're less interested in making *profits* (money you get by mobilizing capital) than they are from extracting *rent* (money you get from sweating assets).

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For example, when Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its internal bookkeeping system, and learned that the company treated 1m customers who had no alternative carriers as special assets because it could charge them more for worse service and poor maintenance:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/

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This means that US fiber networks tend to be *under*built (the opposite of Germany's overbuilt networks), meaning that even if you're buying "gigabit" fiber, you're probably sharing that one gig connection with your whole block or neighborhood, so you only get your nominal throughput at weird hours when all the other subscribers aren't streaming Netflix.

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