1003
The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't
(sschueller.github.io)
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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Switzerland is fucking tiny.
That's why.
No that isn’t why.
There is no correlation between population density and broadband speed in the west.
Not relevant to the point but that is a terribly color coded graph, there are multiple indistinguishable pairs
Edit: worse than that, how do you tell New Zealand, Germany, and the Netherlands apart? Norway, Spain, Iceland?
Netherlands has highest population density and New Zealand the lowest of those three.
I’ll talk to my researcher.
Tbh looking at it now it's not quite as bad as it initially looked, iirc I had like just woken up or smthn lol
But still
Also throw Switzerland onto this plot and suddenly there’s a massive correlation
No, read the article
I'm not engaging with someone who wishes other people cancer for correcting them
Me neither... Maybe, the person is drunk... I dunno. Blocked and reported that... Not what we need on Lemmy or anywhere else...
I love how that's always the cop out for any advancement.
How exactly are facts and maths cop outs?
There are states with better fiber deployment than Switzerland.
But generally, think of it as highway design. That's the American way, after all, and it also stinks.
Switzerland: mostly point-to-point where each home gets its own dedicated fiber strand. Upgrading to 25 Gbps can be as simple as swapping optics(multi spectrum) on each end. Some places in USA do this. Some offer 100 gbps, symmetrical.
United States: mostly point-to-multipoint (PON: GPON/XGS-PON) One fiber is split among 32–64 homes. Everyone shares the bandwidth.
And they say Americans don't have socialism. But that's the problem. When there's socialism it's the public subsidizing corporations.
Well, Austria is right next to it. It's tiny, too. So why is it not as good?
Oh, I dunno. 🫨 Why don't you tell me why what applies to a subset doesn't necessarily apply to the superset.
By that logic Tuvalu's internet must be amazing.
If I did that I still wouldnt be as butthurt as you.
That's absolutely logic, certainly.
By which logic do you mean? My guess. You don't know.
Oh, that's where you go dark.
Whatever you say bud.
Enjoy the dial up.
With many mountains and streets, scattered settlements.
That affects latency and throughput how?
Not much.
China has a bigger landmass than the US and China's internet is insanely fast. Just like the 5GA. The US is like dialup compared to China. Especially now only Netgear is allowed in the US compared to the innovate technology from the likes of Huawei.
This is apparently a different China than the one I've worked in for the last decade.
You may have a theoretically fast connection - but even then it's not particularly cheap (I pay less in Romania and Thailand for FTTH,) and the actual qualify of Internet bandwidth is beyond atrocious for any non domestic traffic (i.e. anything crossing the great firewall.)
Which is not to be negative about China, it's got a hell of a lot going for it - I'd live in China before I'd live anywhere in the US - but great Internet is not one of those things.
Maybe you live in a 4rd level city, but here in Shanghai, the speed is fenomal. I download a 4k atmos movie in mere seconds. And outside because most of the city is covered by 5GA, it's crazy fast. Whenever I go back to Europe, I struggle with both the fixed line speed and whatever they claim is 5G.
New Tier 1 actually; Shanghai is very much China for amateurs, of course - but that's irrelevant; you might not realise this but the vast majority of Chinese also don't live in Shanghai.
Lol... Ok...
China has been able to leverage new roll outs while US deals with cost sunk fantasies.