Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Is Still Debating Broadband Basics

Switzerland's national telecom provider is now rolling out 25 gigabit-per-second internet to residential customers. Meanwhile, the United States—the country that invented the internet—still has tens of millions of households with no broadband access at all, and those who do have it often pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for mediocre speeds. This isn't bad luck. It's the predictable result of specific policy decisions made over decades.

The Myth of the Free Market Fix

American broadband policy has long leaned on a core assumption: if you deregulate telecoms and let private companies compete, prices fall and quality rises. The problem is that genuine competition almost never materialized.

• In most U.S. markets, households have one or two options for high-speed internet—usually a cable provider and a phone company. That's a duopoly, not a market.
• Without competition, there's no pricing pressure and no urgency to upgrade infrastructure.
• The FCC's 2017 repeal of net neutrality rules further reduced regulatory leverage over ISPs, and a 2024 attempt to restore those rules was struck down in federal court.
• Telecom companies have successfully lobbied against municipal broadband projects in more than 20 states, blocking local governments from building their own competitive networks.

The result: Americans pay an average of $70–$90/month for speeds that would be considered mid-tier in Europe or Asia.

What Switzerland Actually Did Differently

Switzerland didn't stumble into 25 Gbit internet. It built toward it through a combination of structural choices that the U.S. largely rejected:

• Swisscom, the dominant provider, is majority state-owned. The Swiss government retains a controlling stake, which aligns the company's long-term infrastructure investment with public interest rather than quarterly earnings.
• Switzerland mandates open access: Swisscom must lease its fiber infrastructure to competitors at regulated rates, creating real market competition on top of a shared physical network.
• Dense urban geography helps, but Switzerland has also built fiber into rural and mountainous communities that would be considered unprofitable by a pure profit motive.
• Regulatory bodies set minimum speed standards and enforce them, rather than letting ISPs self-report or define "broadband" at 25 Mbps download (the U.S. standard until the FCC raised it to 100 Mbps in 2024).

This isn't socialism versus capitalism—it's infrastructure policy versus infrastructure neglect. Roads, water, and electricity are treated as public goods in the U.S. Broadband, despite being equally essential in the modern economy, largely isn't.

Why This Matters Right Now

The U.S. is currently spending $42 billion through the BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment) Program to expand broadband access—the largest such investment in American history. But critics argue the program's structure still funnels money to the same incumbent ISPs that created the access gap, without requiring open-access rules or meaningful competition.

Key stakes:

• Remote work, telehealth, and AI-dependent services increasingly require symmetric, high-speed connections that most Americans don't have.
• Rural and low-income communities bear the worst of the access gap, compounding existing economic inequality.
• Without structural reform—open access mandates, municipal broadband protection, or public ownership models—new federal spending risks repeating old patterns.

Switzerland's 25 Gbit network isn't a flex. It's a demonstration that the infrastructure gap is a choice, not an inevitability. The question Americans are increasingly asking is whether the political will exists to make a different one.