Switzerland’s Goldilocks fiber

mostlysignssomeportents:

ALT

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post 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

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. And you can switch providers with the click of a mouse. It’s the ne plus ultra , magnifico , wunderschön :

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

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.

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). 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

In Germany, most people also have a single fiber 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?

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