Mastodawn

If you live in Switzerland you can get a 25Gbit fiber link to your home. That's 25Gbit *symmetrical* - upload *and* download. On a dedicated connection that's yours and yours alone. From multiple providers. It's the *ne plus ultra*, *magnifico*, *wunderschön*:

https://www.init7.net/de/internet/fiber7/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/07/swisscom/#stacked

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Sylocule 1d ago

@pluralistic Spain have a similar system to Switzerland. Fibre to the house and you can use any provider. Most are around 1Gb symmetrical, but 10Gb is available from 1 company.

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Bad News Nobody 1d ago

@Sylocule @pluralistic In Italy we cheaped out and got 1G/300M, and we are stuck with that for decades to come. In big cities there's 10G/2G, but otherwise there's only Temu fiber - and some poor souls are still on VDSL...

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Paolo Redaelli 1d ago

@dukeboitans my family still got 100M/30M and it satisfies our needs quite well @Sylocule @pluralistic
I just wonder what use can a "plain user" do of 25G fiber!

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D2 1d ago

@paoloredaelli

Videoconferencing, whether tied to work or play.

Synchronization of large file systems.

Or, a notable moment when on a 300/30 cable connection 10y ago: Dad and mom working from home, on conference calls from time to time, when kids got a snow day and (I am not joking) they had homework on laptops, a TV playing an anime stream, a laptop looking up playthru/cheat videos, and two online games going. That, for reference, was 2 adults & 2 teenage children.

Someday, let’s talk of my epiphany a decade ago, when 4 souls in an SUV north of Gilroy CA had 4 phones, a laptop and two tablets working accommodations, college reviews, gps/mapping, and misc. “if you build it, they will come” applies to all modes of data capacity.

@dukeboitans @Sylocule @pluralistic

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ferricoxide 1d ago

@cascheranno @paoloredaelli @dukeboitans @Sylocule @pluralistic

Live video-streaming (as opposed to "I need to upload/download an entire movie's worth of 4K content as quickly as possible"), especially video-conferencing isn't all that taxing. Streaming services that even offer 4K streams usually only offer a subset of their catalog in true 4K. Most video-conferencing tools top out in HD. Even one's running a maxed-out 4K stream, that'd still peak at 25Mbps/stream. Even with "just" 1Gbps, that's a pretty healthy number of simultaneous streams. And, while you can get consumer-grade devices capable of competently displaying 8K, the amount of 8K content is significantly less than what's even available at 4K.

Right now, unless you're part of the Duggar clan and everyone wants to individually and simultaneously stream at maxed-out 4K, you're unlikely to need even 1Gbps (especially if everyone's running wifi on a consumer-grade AP). The only real (current) driver for higher residential bandwidth needs is if you're frequently needing to transfer large files over across a network that will support it (and, given how frequently even corporate WAN gear implements session-limits, you'd need to be doing multi-part transfers to work around that).

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@ferricoxide The wobbly moment for me your reply is when you note how many of these get downgraded by platforms, or raise difficulty in the apps and protocols not fully supporting us.

My adult kids edit video on their phones. I’m old enough to remember needing specialty equipment to WYSIWYG a printed page. That. Is. Glorious. Cropping footage, image overlay, color filters, audio tracks, split-screen… blows my mind how all that advanced video capability and more is wrapped in a UI kids use.

We can’t simultaneously declare ‘it isn’t useful’, ‘silly use cases’, and ‘software limitations prevent doing so transparently, so let’s not.’

@pluralistic
@paoloredaelli @dukeboitans @Sylocule