So weird hearing about how amazing this speed is for a convention center when I have 25Gbps at home and mainly just use it to download movies and anime from Usenet.
Good for you? The majority of the world is on a fraction of that, much less the US. It just became easy to get 2 Gbps in some parts of the USA while others you max out at 25 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up. This is very much good news to everyone else.
The price is the same as for 1Gbps and 10Gbps (~60USD/month) - though the initial setup price differs: ~300USD for 25Gb/s vs <100USD for 1Gbps
The actual speed within network is indeed 25Gb/s to some fellow users running speedtest.net servers. Inside Switzerland it's maybe ~15Gb/s to some well connected servers in the area of Zurich, and ~10Gb/s across EU. Tested with speedtest.net and iperf.
I think in the EU the limit is sometimes not Init7 but the Speedtest.net servers. I ran a test to many of them and did get above 10Gbps but only to eu-25g.ookla.tierservers.com, which clearly has a 25Gbps NIC.
A bunch of other Speedtest.net servers were located in Amsterdam and took a very similar route via Cogent but none of the others broke the 10Gbps barrier.
It is for sure often Init7 though. Those peering relationships it built up have become a bit of a weakness because they're usually limited to a 10Gbps port.