Back in 2008, when the industry sat down at the Round Table organized by the Federal Communications Commission, it was Swisscom, the incumbent itself, that pushed for the four-fiber Point-to-Point model. The company argued that a single fiber would create a monopoly and that regulation would be necessary.
So the standard was set. Four fibers per home. Point-to-Point. Open access for competitors on Layer 1 - the physical fiber itself.
Then, in 2020, Swisscom changed course. The company announced a new network expansion strategy, this time using P2MP, the shared model with splitters. On paper, they argued it was cheaper and faster to deploy.
…
Swisscom fought this all the way to the Federal Court. They lost. In 2021, the Federal Administrative Court confirmed COMCO’s measures, stating that Swisscom had failed to demonstrate “sufficient technological or economic grounds” to deviate from the established fiber standard.5 In April 2024, COMCO finalized its ruling, fining Swisscom 18 million francs for violating antitrust law.God damn
It’s like a whole other world
https://irregulators.org/200-billion-broadband-scandal/
TLDR; $200-$300 billion fraud committed by American telecoms in the 90s because of corruption, deregulation, and shady business practices - set the US back decades technologically and economically.
A lot of people in here saying they have no use case for it, but if everyone had this kind of connection then the use cases could start to emerge.
When I briefly had really fast fiber, the noticeable latency difference was insane. It’s not enough to go by a simple ping. Nobody uses the internet by sending pings. Real world use is about moving a lot of data. A more accurate measure of latency is bandwidth. Everything loads instantly. It’s like going from HDD to SSD or single core to multicore CPU. I probably rarely max out the bandwidth of my modern SSDs or CPUs but they’re just faster.
Also it seems like a lot people, especially Americans, cope about everything they aren’t the best at. Tell themselves they don’t need it. What’s it for? It’s useless. It sucks anyways. They don’t want it… Like immature little kids. When they have the thing then suddenly everyone else sucks for not having it.
I live near San Francisco and I pay like $55/month for Sonic fiber. It’s 10G down, 10G up, which is absurdly fast for me. Almost all my devices can only use 1G so I definitely don’t need 10G. I was just so fucking sick of Comcast, I was paying quite a bit more for 1G from them.
My ISP bumped me up from 1GB to 3GB for free and I was like like great, can you upgrade all of my NICs and router ports to be higher than 1GB? Because you effectively gave me nothing.
Laying fiber that supports 200G literally costs exactly the same as fiber that supports 100M. It’s just single mode fiber and when you have it you can run anything over it you want. You can also add expensive DWDM equipment at both sides and run a multi Tbit line over it. Also you can still use it in 25 years.
Building anything else than P2P fiber is just dumb.
Switzerland can be driven from top to bottom in about 4 hours. The entire country. It’s tiny. That’s how.
Most European countries have 10G, it’s nit about the country size. And it’s mostly in the cities anyway, which just completely remove the “the US is too big” defence.
It’s absolutely about scale. It’s super easy to build high speed fibre to every house when your entire country can be seen in a single day trip. Not so much when it takes a week to drive from one side to the other without stopping.
Most European countries are tiny.
You realize that each state in the US can be seen as a country too, right? If you didn’t only have a tiny handful of private, greedy ISPs, you’d literally have the same situation as europe, except that country = state and continent = federated states… just because the country USA as a whole is big does not change anything and is just american exceptionalism
The article is about America, as a country, being compared to Switzerland, the country.
Europe is about 10% larger than the US, if you exclude Alaska.
Yeah, and Europe as a whole doesn’t have this internet. Switzerland does.
That wasn’t the point, you said most countries are tiny.
But as stated before, many countries has 10G or more.
Most European countries are tiny.
Europe isn’t a country……you know this, right?
What they’re doing can be done at scale. Instead we scream about socialism like monkeys throwing poop at each other.
It can be done at scale, it’ll just cost trillions of dollars.
cries in Australian
Remember how we were going to have a full FTTP NBN, but then the Liberals fucked it?
Cause I will never forget.
In Romania we have 10gbps in some regions. 2.5gbps is becoming common in cities and 1gbps is the norm everywhere. You don’t have to use Switzerland as a benchmark here!
It’s funny because we actually have three fiber providers where I am now. They all have their own last mile runs, with fiber to the home. And none of them even offer 10Gb. It makes no sense. At this point fiber itself is way cheaper than copper. 10Gb/s switching equipment is cheaper than 1Gb/s was 15 years ago. The infrastructure is literally there, and it’s like nobody cares.
I’m sad this article uses AI images, instead of the obvious choice to show a Comcast employee rubbing their nipples
Beaten by a Third World nation, easily (Switzerland is neutral and was neither in NATO - the First World, not the Warsaw Pact - the Second).
I don’t even have 25Gbit connection to other rooms in my own house. I’m still at 1Gbps all over.
Where are you all getting reasonably priced networking kit from? As far as I can tell it just doesn’t exist…
China. India also rolled out cheap fiber.
Right, but say it’s 25Gbps, how are you going to wire your house to take advantage of that?
Currently I’ve got a couple of 1Gbps 8 port switches dotted about the place. Where is the 25Gbps version of that? There’s absolutely no consumer hardware at all to take advantage of this kind of speed.
Consumer hardware? No. But there’s plenty of used enterprise grade 25gbit networking. Industry has moved beyond 25g to 200+g so the 25gbit equipment is cheap
Check alibaba
Reasonably priced 1Gb kit?? Should be easy to find. Heck, I picked up a 16 port no name switch missing the power adapter for 4 bucks at the thrift store.
Netgesr stuff is still pretty good for home use, at least last i checked. Ubiquit APs aren’t bad (again, last I checked).
No, 1Gb kit is easy. I’ve got a couple of switches all over for that.
Going past that? Only common one is like 2.5Gbps, maybe. Anything else is priced like you’re running an Azure datacentre.
How does 4 strands mean 4 providers?
Can you communicate bidirectionally on just one fiber strand?
Yes. Using different colors of light and polarisation, you could even have multiple connections going over the same wire/fibre.
What does P2MP mean?
Point to multipoint.
How do I even ask an ISP if a fiber network is shared or dedicated?
I don’t know the words, and the sales reps probably don’t know either. I don’t live in either Europe nor North America.
I’m willing to pay $10,000 for a dedicated fiber line that’s shared by no one else, but I literally don’t know how to explain what I need when I call the ISP.
