Mastodawn

I never bothered to wonder why my sister in Germany has lousy Internet where as I declined to upgrade my 1 Gbit/s to 10 Gbit/s because we don't need it.

"You may have heard about 25 Gbit symmetrical internet in Switzerland. This is often cited as the fastest dedicated (non-shared) residential connection in the world. However, did you ever wonder why Switzerland has such fast internet at a reasonable price … ?" -- The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't

The answer is that in Switzerland, fibre is treated as infrastructure -- like water, like electricity. That is to say, the providers don't put down their own cables. One company puts down the cables and then all the providers get access to it. End users get to pick the provider they want.

Interestingly, the article then goes on to say that the regulation leading to this was spearheaded by Swisscom in 2008 who tried to change course in 2020. Init7, one of the providers, took Swisscom to court. In 2024, the case had gone through all the layers and Init7 won. The old regulation stayed in place.

Incidentally, one of the reasons I'm a happy #Init7 customer.

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

Stefan Schüller

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Ed Davies 1d ago

@alex It's supposed to work more-or-less the same in most of the UK: Openreach (who were part of British Telecom - not sure how separate they are now) were supposed to do all the last-mile stuff.

They've been so slow, though, that other companies are doing it now. E.g., the site of the house I was building has Openreach fibre in the road outside but the village I'm renting in doesn't have any fibre yet. An independent company (Highland Broadband) say they'll be putting it in by the end of the summer.

So, currently I only have VDSL (22Mb/s down, 1.5Mb/s up) for £45/month (about the same in CHF). I'm hoping for 500Mb/s symmetric for a few £ less/month by the end of the year.

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Alex Schroeder 10h ago

@edavies Hm, interesting. I don’t know why Swisscom didn’t drag their heels putting down their fibre. Perhaps the reason was that in the beginning, a few cities decided to pay for it and so there was suddenly a market with millions of CHF for the building.

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Ed Davies

@alex Dunno, but I did talk to one of the supervisors of the company doing the trenching, etc, for the fibre up by my house site he said that Openreach put it in where the Council (i.e., the local authority) said. My guess would be that Openreach wait to see what handouts they can get from local or national government before they do anything.

So perhaps Swisscom had some clear understanding they wouldn't get that or they already had it and knew they wouldn't get any more or something.