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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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Technology
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Honestly, fuck American ISPs, but what on earth would you need 25 gig fiber in your home for? We have a gig line that actually runs at a gig 99% of the time, and I can be downloading a steam game while 3 separate videos are being streamed and I won't have stuttering. 25 gig sounds cool, but also utterly pointless
Home e-business and you run your own servers. Or cohousing, one building where multiple families live under one address.
It saves time. You cannot buy more time, only preserve what you have left.
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Also, depending on where AI goes, those gigs might become filled with activity. For example, every house having at least one AI server that works for the residents. That would decentralize the AI infrastructure and authority, which serves both the personal and national interests. Harder for a data center to be destroyed, when it doesn't exist in the first place. The people also get to decide to whom the spare time of the AI can be lent to, which helps diffuse the power of corporations and government.
Look, I hate these data centers, but the vast, vast majority of them won't be using residential lines. They'll be running their own lines in order to not have their traffic be tied up by slow downs during peak hours. And with how expensive and difficult it is to run a model that's worth the half a fuck the bullshit machines we have now are, an AI server running in every home is not only unlikely, but with how central these big companies want to keep everything, simply not happening. Hell, the vast majority of people who have been forced to use these chat bots in everyday work hate them. Plus, most people barely know how to install apps to their iPad let alone how to run a local server
Edit: also, you need specific computer equipment to run that fast. You can't just plug in your computer to an Ethernet line and get the full 25 gigs
I can run a 35b-3a AI model, on a single videocard, and have it translate a Japanese game within a day. A year ago, that would have required much more hardware, and would have taken longer. Your position is bad, because it doesn't acknowledge a developing reality, and more importantly, surrenders the future to jerks by default.
It's only around $100 for a pcie 25gb Ethernet card. Not particularly a huge hurdle.
Networking researcher here. Your bottleneck wouldn't be the NIC, but memory bandwidth, CPU compute (for TCP), PCIe bandwidth, and Storage bandwidth, also the bandwidth of the server you're connecting to. You'll also need some sort of fiber SFP connection for your entire house, and those have firmware that usually makes them vendor locked. Most networking issues are also latency related, so increasing your throughput to 25Gbps wouldn't help.
So yeah, not a good time for home use.
I'm pretty sure that nic cards for those speeds would really need more hardware offloading and dma to stand a chance of those speeds. With those it should be possible. With the right hardware handling there shouldn't be a problem, ssds connected to pci manage a lot more.
In real terms, right now who needs it aside from to post speed test results?
I have gigabit symmetric and can upgrade to 2.5. But, I cannot imagine we'd need 2.5 let alone 10 or 25. And I'm a fairly heavy user.
All NICs already work off of DMA to access/copy packets into/from memory. Yes, even your $10 ones. So "would need DMA to stand a chance" doesn't have any technical meaning other than putting a bunch of words together.
The bottleneck for TCP is sequence number processing, which must be done on a single core (for each flow) and cannot be parallelized. You also cannot offload sequence number processing without making major sacrifices that result in corrupted data in several edge cases (see TCP chimney offload, which cannot handle the required TCP extensions needed to run TCP at 1Gbps). So no, "more offloading" is easy to say but not feasible.
Who needs it: data centers trying to scale legacy software, or dealing with multi region data replication (rocev2 is terrible for long distance links). But no, no home user would need it
Well I was thinking more home users since this was what the post was about. Pretty sure data centres have solutions for this already with price tags that would make us cry.
At home I can see only edge cases where even going to 2.5 would be useful for us here anyway. Let alone more.
Now I'm sure as time passes demands will continue to increase and we'll need more speed. But for now running 2.5/10 internally and 1gbit to the Internet is more than enough.
A bluray remux of a whole series can run in the hundreds or thousands of gigabytes. I want to be able to download and watch it the same day I decide to do so.
Blueray bitrate is lower than even 1gbps so even full remux is downloadable at a speed you could begin to watch it the same day while later episodes continue to download. You wouldn't need the full series downloaded up front.