[guiambros]

I live in NYC, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and yet Verizon Fios 1 Gbps is my only option. I tried to upgrade to Fios 2 Gbps, but it's not available. Spectrum only goes to 200Mbps; no other providers in my area.

I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling. If we're this bad in NYC, imagine what someone in rural America goes through.

[Aurornis]

> I have no idea if Switzerland is any better, but the US situation in 2026 is appalling.

Kind of amazing that we're calling 1Gbps fiber "appalling".

Every thread about internet access attracts people with unique situations. NYC is a dense city that's hard to build in and has to deal with a lot of regulation.

I don't live in NYC and I'm not even in a dense area, but I have my choice of fiber providers up to at least 8G, maybe more. I haven't looked that hard. I'm not going to pretend my situation is normal across the US just like you shouldn't assume your situation is normal either. It's a big country and things are different everywhere.

Switzerland is the same: Internet access options depend on where you live. The article sneakily tries to imply that 25G is everywhere, but it's not.

[serial_dev]

Rural area? Hard to build.

Dense city? Hard to build.

Got it.

Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor.

Sort of?

If you're going to provide wired service in rural areas at all, doing it with fast fiber isn't a significantly different maintenance cost than using the old stuff, but it has a high one time cost to transition from copper to fiber. The cost of doing that is more like per-mile than per-customer, which makes the per-customer cost a lot higher where there are fewer customers per mile. There are areas rural enough that nobody would spend the money to run fiber even if there were no regulations at all.

Whereas for NYC it's just unambiguously corruption and regulation destroying competition.

[danaris]

But in rural areas, Verizon, at the very least, is deliberately neglecting their copper, and not replacing it with fibre.

For people whose service degrades or stops working entirely, what do they offer instead?

Wireless. Which has much higher margins and much looser regulations around it.

At least for a while, Verizon was sending very strong signals that they wanted to get out of the wired connection business entirely, so they could do exclusively wireless contracts, including for your home broadband. (I don't know if that's still the case.)

This isn't a matter of "oh, it's really hard and really expensive for these multi-billion-dollar megacorporations to install wires going out to those rural areas!"

It's a matter of corporate greed, pure and simple.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're anthropomorphizing the lawnmower. Corporations can't feel greed, greed is an emotion. Publicly traded corporations are automatons. It's the same reason they don't experience shame.

If you think a company could easily do something better than they're doing it right now then start a company and show them how it's done. If that's prohibitively difficult, e.g. because the incumbents have captured the regulators, then you've identified the root cause of the problem and what you need to change to make things better.

[danaris]

No, I'm using a convenient shorthand.

The greed comes from the people running the corporation, at many levels.

They're not interested in "doing something better"; they're interested in making the stock price go up faster. Nothing I show them is going to change that.

[miki123211]

Building in rural areas is hard for physical / engineering reasons. There's more cable to lay, more distance to cover, and fewer people to use that cable and offset the costs.

Building in dense cities is hard because we choose to make it hard. We could (and should) choose differently.

Ironically enough, rural areas now have a ceiling on how bad service can get (because Starlink is a viable alternative). That doesn't work for dense EU/Asian style cities where most people live in 5+ story buildings.

[matt-p]

Rural is complicated. You have more distance between subscribers, but it's much more likely to just be grass which you can mole plough into for about a tenth of the cost per metre of digging up sidewalk.

I don't know about New York specifically but I do know laying new duct in central London is more expensive than it should be because the sidewalks are mostly now full. You need to close roads and track down them which is more expensive because you have to go deeper and you pay the city per day for the closure.

The one thing that has enabled fibre deployment here is that the incumbent is forced to allow other ISPs to rent space for a regulated price in thier existing ducts. In Switzerland I believe init7 benefit from the same principle but the incumbent rents the fibres themselves not duct space.

The only thing America needs to do is compromise the property rights of AT&T or build out city owned ducting. It's a bit socialist I guess, but look, it works.

[ErroneousBosh]

> Rural is complicated. You have more distance between subscribers, but it's much more likely to just be grass which you can mole plough into for about a tenth of the cost per metre of digging up sidewalk.

You've also most likely got existing telephone poles that you can dangle your fibre off, and (in farming country at least) you've probably got some handy grain silos to nail a microwave link to.

Here in rural NE Scotland there are several altnets, and it's not uncommon to see a massive cluster of microwave dishes and yagis hanging off the corner of a barn somewhere.

[psychoslave]

Edge cases are hard is not a bad rule of thumb.

High concentration, and you have saturation issues. Extremely low concentration, and there is not much active elements to leverage on.

Yes, as all rules of thumb, it falls apart in many situations too. But in that case at least the rule of thumb kind of recognize it will poorly scale at full generalization level.

[porknubbins]

Its not how bad must other areas be when NYC is this bad- its bad because its NYC. Corruption, aging infrastructure, enormous construction costs, diverse building types and complex ownership interests etc etc. The fastest and most competitive internet is in places like wealthy suburbs where you just roll it out without any issues.

[ElProlactin]

> Corruption, aging infrastructure...

There are developing ("third-world") countries that have better overall internet than the US.

[gleenn]

I heard someone argue that because original phones rolled out in the US much earlier and more broadly, we spend all this money on copper wiring. Because Europe didn't have as much, they transitioned to fast cellular quickly. Being first does not mean you will be best certainly.

[jimnotgym]

Europe? I heard that about Asia and Africa, maybe post soviet Eastern Europe, but not Europe in general. We had telephones...

[Foobar8568]

France had Minitel and now, for less than 50, you have up/down 8Gbps with TV etc. 5G is half that price.

Switzerland might be even cheaper with Salt for the fiber, 5G, can be pretty cheap here too, or bloody expensive ( Swisscom )

US just has many excuses that's it.

[spwa4]

Minitel was a total own goal. Earlier than the internet, further reach. And totally destroyed by the financial model.

[sph]

Haven’t you heard? We barely have electricity here in Europe, let alone phones. Or so I keep reading online.

[Beretta_Vexee]

Major campaigns to install telephone lines took place in the run-up to and during the First World War. This enabled civilians and conscripts who were not trained in the use of radio to communicate with headquarters.

There were literally regiments drawing up lines as the troops advanced.

[ElProlactin]

> Because Europe didn't have as much...

Europe isn't the developing world. There are countries in SE Asia that put the US to shame in terms of the speed, quality and cost of their internet. I'm literally in one now at a random cafe where I'm getting 400 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up while sipping a $1.75 cup of coffee.

[ahartmetz]

South Korea isn't the developing world neither (at least since the mid 90s), but 10 years ago I could barely read HN on the subway in Berlin while I saw people watching YouTube on the subway in Seoul.

[edukite]

Cheap excuses. It's like saying Europe started without asphalt streets so we don't have it. Building/upgrading asphalt street is order of magnitude more costly than cable yet majority of streets aren't dirt and stones

The issue lies in willingness to upgrade and cutting costs on end users

[stefanfisk]

Dude, this is what Stockholm looked like 1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower.

2009 we made it a national strategy that 90% of the population should get internet access via fiber and by 2020 we’d reached 63%.

Here’s a map of our broadband coverage https://bredbandskartan.pts.se/.

The US had a similar strategy and basically paid $400 billion for the same buildout but got nothing in return and no one was held accountable https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5....

[ahartmetz]

There is a real disadvantage of countries with large population: More layers of management in politics, more corruption.

[kalleboo]

Maybe the US should split themselves up into 50 smaller divisions of populations that have more local autonomy to optimize things like this.

[stefanfisk]

Oh certainly. I'm not saying that "we did it so it should be just as easy for you". But neither having an existing copper network nor being sparsely populated is the reason for why the US does not have extensive fiber coverage.

AFAICT the required political will just isn't there due to how campaign financing works. Just look at the plain insanity of laws like this https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-....

[piltdownman]

In Europe local calls were generally never free, and in many countries getting a line/handset installed in your home was an onerous and expensive task. In more socialist/ex-bloc regions it was generally down to how much social and political capital you could muster.

European telecom providers typically charged for local calls on a per-minute basis, often with connection/establishment fees. US telecom providers did it on flat-rate bundles at worst.

For the same reason, Europe completely skipped pagers as an interim step between landlines and mobile connectivity outside of specific on-call jobs like Medical practitioners.

Much more of an incentive to divest yourself from a copper network designed for voice traffic that was not cheap, fast, or available in many cases.

An unlimited calls, data and SMS 5G SIM in Ireland runs you about €15/monthly on a Pay-as-you-go basis. You tend to get about 20-50GB of Roaming Data in the EU bundled.

https://www.eir.ie/shop/mobile?simonly=true https://48.ie/ https://shop.gomo.ie/mobile-sim-only https://www.clearmobile.ie/

[argentier]

In Ireland at least local calls were a fixed price, no matter how long the call was. Long-distance calls were billed by the minute.

[piltdownman]

No they weren't - they were billed by the minute. About 5c/min in new money. That's why you had things like night and off-peak tariffs for 56k dial-up services in Ireland in the early 00s.

[jabl]

Um, Europe had pretty ubiquitous copper phone wiring long before cellular became a thing.

Many developing countries, however, were able to leapfrog the wired phones stage.

[glimshe]

I have 5 Gbps available in a near-rural area in the southern US.

It's just incredible how so many people in NYC and Los Angeles believe they have the highest standard of living in the US when they in fact are closer to the lowest.

Visitors from abroad also look at these decaying cities and think the rest of the country have their problems.

[apexalpha]

> but the US situation in 2026 is appalling.

1Gpbs symmetric is not 'appaling' come on now.

[laughing_man]

I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit. I don't think I've ever been able to use more than about 50 mbit due to constraints on the other end.

[jjav]

> I guess I'm getting old, but I have to wonder what people are doing that they need more than a gigabit.

I have a hard time believing there is anything they can do to saturate 1 Gbps connection at home. It's probably just bragging rights on speed test reports, without any relevance to real usage.

[petee]

I appreciated it for my Google Takeout download - they seemed to cap per file speed, so I could get multiple going. Getting it done quickly was important since google would force 2fa re-auth if you waited literally 30 seconds between files, ~80 4G files

Besides that, my two housemates streaming 4k while I'm downloading an iso can definitely hit the cap. The extra headroom is nice, versus just falling over

[lwkl]

You don’t really need it but it is nice when downloads are really fast. Though most services cap downloads at 2 - 3 Gbit/s.

[fragmede]

If you're downloading AI model files, which are tens or hundreds of gigabytes, or downloading large datasets to fine tune them, and then uploading them to various cloud providers, you start waiting around a lot. Uploading videos to be processed on a cloud GPU to produce gaussian splats and then you have to wait and download the results.

[jjav]

> but the US situation in 2026 is appalling

appalling?

What exactly, in detail, can't you do with a 1 Gpbps connection?!

My home ISP delivers ~22 Mbps and it is totally fine for all use cases.

[guiambros]

You missed the point (and I should have clarified better). It's not that 1 Gbps is bad; it's pretty good, actually. And I do think Verizon is one of the least bad options.

The problem is that there's zero competition. And while many other countries have 2, 5, 8Gbps available, there's zero reason for Verizon to offer it, despite being a densely populated area.

And 1 Gbps has been the max available for 10 years. It's very likely in 2036 we'll be in the exact same situation.

I wish we had a model like Switzerland, where the fiber is centrally managed, and providers compete just to connect you to the network.

[Nnnes]

> imagine what someone in rural America goes through.

Here's the FCC's map of residential access to ≥1 Gbps fiber internet.

https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/area-summary/fixed?version=dec2...

Of course most areas don't have it, but take a look at the Dakotas. I won't say it's better than NYC, but it may be as good in quite a large number of counties where the population density is ~1/km²=~2/mi². Most of the ISPs in those areas are coops like BEK, Consolidated Telcom, Golden West, etc. that have been making good use of state and federal grants. Gigabit internet is generally $100/month from them (in NYC it's $90/month if I understand correctly).

Would be interesting to compare this to areas of Europe with a similar population density, e.g. Lapland or... well, maybe Lapland is the only one

[fransje26]

Just for the sake of information, related to the article being discussed. In Switzerland:

- Init7: 1 Gbit: CHF 44/month, 10 Gbit: CHF 77, 25 Gbit: CHF 222

- Salt: 10 Gbit: CHF 49.95. (CHF 39.5 when combined with a mobile plan)

[qingcharles]

When I was living in the city of Chicago only a couple of years ago the best wired connection I could get was 1.5Mbps AT&T (the tech said it might push 3Mbps if I was lucky, but would only guarantee the slower speed).

Comcast said they'd run a cable for $71,000 as long as I agreed to a multi-year $800/month contract on top.

Ended up with a $40/month T-Mobile 5G hub which got me ~800Mbps.

[dlcarrier]

Everyone's mocking you for using more than 1 Gbps of internet bandwidth, but I honestly want to know how you are able to saturate it. I've found on even the fastest internet connections, it's difficult to get more than a few hundred Mbps, from any given sever. Do you have a bunch of people on the network downloading large files simultaneously, or are you connected to servers able to saturate your connection? I have trouble getting my computers to copy data between each other anywhere near the theoretical limit for a 1 Gbps NIC, despite being connected through only a single switch.

[m4rtink]

Steam CDN can saturate 1 GBit/S line just fine - and its actually super convenient when a bunch of friends wants to play some 50 GB game you don't have installed at the moment - it will download and install in a few minutes.

[zepearl]

> I have trouble getting my computers to copy data between each other anywhere near the theoretical limit for a 1 Gbps NIC, despite being connected through only a single switch.

Maybe your LAN cables have deteriorated?

Reaching 100 MiB/s should be easy peasy for a PC; in my case (2 10Gbps switches) by using nvme SSDs I reach almost 950 MiB/s and with 4x raidz1 HDDs I reach 450-650 MiB/s.

Until a few years ago I was smoking in my flat and often I had to change lan cables (whatever's in the smoke was sticking to the connectors)

[ra]

Sydney, Australia - the most I can get is 500mbps from our government owned nbn. I have a 1Gb plan, but in reality it's half that.

[Nursie]

Just outside Perth, WA. I pay for 400Mbps 'fixed wireless', which became available last year (prior to that it was capped at 250). On a good day I get 200/14.

Starlink was approximately the same at a similar pricepoint but I switched to NBN because hey, Elon doesn't need my money and at least I have an alternative now.

[Gasp0de]

It is harder to install fiber in densely populated areas than in some backcountry farm. Imagine tearing open a busy street in NYC for a few weeks to install fiber vs. digging a trench in the dirt next to the farm road. Which one do you think costs more? For which do you think you need to jump through 1001 bureaucratic hoops?

[Terr_]

So wait, a good deal from an ISP requires just the right Goldilocks zone of not-too-rural and not-too-urban, and for some reason almost nowhere in the US qualifies even though it's more-common in other countries?

That doesn't really pass the smell-test, especially not compared to other explanations like national differences in regulation and competition.

[UberFly]

Just dealt with this. I'm square in suburb America. AT&T in my community can't run lines into established neighborhoods because they can't use existing conduits. They have to dig their own, but local regulations make it difficult and a lengthy process. Easier for companies to just give up and move on. Who's fault does your smell test point to?

[Hikikomori]

It's illegal in many states for the local municipality to do it. Here it's the norm, so our local power companies put down fiber when do power or other utilities.

[dmbrThnU]

I just commented this elsewhere. It does exist and is where the good internet is. Good internet being a few g, but still better than i've had downtown or rurally

[vineyardmike]

Nah it's BS. It's American-flavored capitalism that's the issue, and it's crushing the free-market.

I live in SF - the densest US city on the west coast, and the densest US city after NYC. We have city-owned "dark fiber" run through (most?) every street. Any ISP can offer service by renting the connection to my house, as long as they service "the last hundred feet" from pole to door and the billing.

I have about half-dozen ISPs that will give me from 1G-5G of service, all under $100/mo - (a great price in America). I pay for redundant >1g fiber connections to my house for less than the price of my parent's 50 mbps bill.

The issue is capitalism. In much of the US, the ISPs have lobbied and enforced "monopolies" by exclusive fiat of the jurisdiction, in some shape or form. 16 US states have laws that prevent the local government from maintaining or providing internet infrastructure like fiber lines, requiring private companies to maintain it all. Any free-market enthusiast will readily tell you that competition brings prices down, but capitalism is crushing the free-market, reducing competition for the benefit of the wealthy.

[hnlmorg]

I cannot comment on the cost in the US, but in the UK it would be the farm that’s more expensive because the cost is relative the distance. You still have to file the same government applications to close a dirt road as you would a busy city street. But you would have much more miles of road to file the application for, plus the actual expense of the engineering work, for rural destinations.

And that’s without factoring in that fewer subscribers are going to sign up in rural destinations vs busy urban hubs.

This is why the UK had to make subsidies available for rural fibre.

[dmbrThnU]

I've lived dense city to rural in the US, and it's suburbia that has the best internet. Can rip up the street for days no problem, but still a relatively dense population.

[laughing_man]

That's my sense, too. Companies seem to get permits really quickly where I live, and there are enough people around to make it worth their while.

AT&T, which already had cable here, ripped up the street a few months back and put in fiber. There are two other high speed providers as well.

[rbanffy]

> Imagine tearing open a busy street in NYC for a few weeks to install fiber

Or you can just run new fiber in the pipes that contained copper wiring that has most likely already been swapped out for fiber in the 1990s. Or just add better line equipment and use those same fibers already there.

[db48x]

In theory you would be right. In practice you have to ask all of your competitors for permission to change anything, and all the old copper is still there. They never actually swapped it out for fiber! You cannot take out any of their old copper, even though you’re sure it’s not in use by anyone, to make space for your new fiber.

[gjulianm]

I don't think you need to tear open busy streets to install fiber. In my area we got fiber (up to 10G now) and they didn't open any trench.

[throwaway27448]

Mamdani just mentioned yesterday that he was investigating streamlining permitting processes. I imagine this would be a perfect time to push to improve this.

[dalben]

And yet the root comment claims the opposite (the US is very stretched out, so it’s harder to connect all of it).

In my country, fiber is run to my apartment building and through the technical shafts. Very easy for the telco: to connect a unit, they only need to branch off from the technical shaft. I imagine the total cost to connect 200 apartment units is much lower than connecting 200 farms or 200 houses in the suburbs, even with the red tape.

[eloisant]

Don't you already have conduits, or undergrounds where old telephone lines are running already? That's what we used to install optical fiber everywhere in cities France. Really easy, nothing to tear open. And because it's dense, it's cheap per home.

On the other hand, rural areas require to digging a lot of kilometers of trenches just to connect a few houses. Much more expensive per home.

[Beretta_Vexee]

Public or shared technical ducts and technical galleries, available to all operators, are a distinctive feature of France. The law strongly encourages the leasing of, or joint investment in, telecommunications infrastructure. All operators have sharing agreements; as soon as a block of flats or a house is connected to the fibre network by one operator, it is possible to subscribe to any operator.

In many countries, the ducts belong to the operator, who is under no obligation to lease or share access with other operators.

It’s not perfect, as technicians from one provider tend to neglect customers of another, and it’s not uncommon to be disconnected by mistake. But it does mean there’s a wide range of options and genuine competition in the services and price. It’s not as if we’re left with ‘Verizon’s the only option here’.

[Foobar8568]

Imagine providing fibers in city such as London, Paris or Geneva. Oh wait.

[mlrtime]

Funny, I used to live in NYC and I was a few blocks from the Verizon datacenter downtown and one of the first to get direct fiber, FIOS. It was amazing.

Fast forward 10 years , FIOS still only has 1gbps in this area but my rural town will give me 10gbps fiber no problem. I just can't afford the router right now :)

[dzhiurgis]

I live in NZ, but work with mostly US SaaS'es. Got 1 gpbs fiber but I'm torn between downgrading to something like 500mbps which also downgrades your upload and upgrading to 6gbps so I get better international speeds (right now it's something like 100mbps tops).

[lancewiggs]

Yup. For those interested we have a similar approach where the fibre to the home is owned by a regulated provider that is required to offer its service to all retail service providers (RSPs) at the same price. Competition is strong.

[esseph]

> If we're this bad in NYC, imagine what someone in rural America goes through.

It's actually easier in some ways. I can build tons of infrastructure to cover tens of thousands of people in fiber for what it would cost to dig up one NYC street for a few days.

[trashface]

1 Gbps is still pretty good if you can get it for a reasonable price. Just did a speed test at my parents place in Philly suburbs, they only get 50Mbps down. They pay A LOT of money to comcast, every month.

[ricardobayes]

Exactly why starlink's business was viable.

[PowerElectronix]

There are issues everywhere. Companies that had their cables deployed made sure that any regulation that would eliminate that moat heavily favor them, either by forbidding other companies to deploy and forcing them to lease the already deployed infra or by forbidding them digging ir whatever bullshit.

Very few companies wanna get into deploying their own network (both in the states and europe), but the few that do make money out of it. I would be really surprised if Switzerland is any different.