Switzerland Gets 25Gbps Home Internet for $64. America Gets Excuses.

A Swiss ISP called Init7 just started offering 25Gbps symmetric fiber to households. The price: roughly $64 a month. Meanwhile, a significant chunk of American consumers pay north of $80/month for speeds that don’t even crack 100Mbps. That’s 250 times slower for more money. Something has gone very wrong.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Init7’s Fiber7 service delivers 25Gbps both up and down. Symmetric is the key word here. Uploading a video, pushing a cloud backup, running a home server — it all moves at the same speed as a download.

In the US, the FCC’s definition of “broadband” sat at 25Mbps down / 3Mbps up for years. It wasn’t bumped to 100Mbps/20Mbps until 2024. Switzerland was leapfrogging from gigabit to multi-gigabit while America spent years debating whether to raise a megabit-level floor.

Pricing tells the same story. Gigabit plans from Comcast, AT&T, and Spectrum generally run $70–100/month — and that’s before the hidden fees. Equipment rentals, data caps, early termination penalties, and speeds that routinely fall short of what’s advertised. The sticker price is just the opening bid.

“Free Market” Is a Funny Way to Spell Monopoly

Ask why American broadband is slow and expensive and you’ll hear a familiar refrain: the country is big, population density is low. There’s some truth to that. But it’s not the real answer.

The real answer is that competition barely exists. Roughly half of US households have access to only one broadband provider. One. That’s not a market — that’s a landlord. If Comcast is the only game in your neighborhood, Comcast has zero incentive to improve speeds or lower prices. Why would it?

This didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of decades of franchise agreements and lobbying. Large ISPs struck exclusive or near-exclusive deals with local governments, then bankrolled legislation to block competitors from entering. More than 20 US states have laws restricting municipalities from building their own broadband networks. The “free market” isn’t protecting consumer choice. It’s protecting incumbent revenue.

What Switzerland Did Differently

Switzerland didn’t discover some secret technology. It made a policy choice: open infrastructure.

Swisscom, the national carrier, built a fiber network across the country — then opened it to competitors. Smaller ISPs like Init7 can offer services over that same physical infrastructure. You build the pipes once. Multiple companies compete on top of them.

This model is common across Europe. The physical network — fiber, ducts, poles — is treated like a public utility, the same way roads, power lines, and water mains are. Private companies compete on services, not on who owns the wire in the ground. It’s the difference between one company owning the highway and running the only trucking service on it, versus a public road where any carrier can operate.

The US took the opposite approach. The same company that owns the infrastructure also sells the service running on it. Imagine if the company that built your street also had exclusive rights to every delivery that crosses it. That’s American broadband.

Even Google Couldn’t Break In

How locked-down is this system? Google Fiber is your answer. One of the most cash-rich companies on the planet tried to wire American cities with fiber — and largely gave up.

The barriers weren’t technical. Incumbent ISPs weaponized pole access disputes, permit delays, and lawsuits to slow Google’s rollout to a crawl. In many areas, stringing fiber on a single utility pole requires the existing provider’s cooperation. New entrants can burn months just trying to wire a single block.

In a genuinely free market, a deep-pocketed competitor like Google entering the arena should terrify incumbents into improving. Instead, the incumbents used regulatory capture to keep the gate shut. The market isn’t free. It’s locked, and the incumbents hold the key.

Slow Internet Is an Economic Problem

This isn’t about Netflix buffering. Broadband is 21st-century infrastructure — as fundamental as roads and electricity.

Remote work, telehealth, online education, cloud computing — all of it depends on reliable, fast connectivity. Large swaths of rural America still struggle with basic internet access. The federal government has poured tens of billions in subsidies into broadband expansion, but critics point out that much of that money flowed to the same large ISPs with little measurable improvement. The pipes stayed slow. The bills stayed high. The subsidies disappeared into balance sheets.

Switzerland’s 25Gbps isn’t a flex. It’s the predictable outcome of treating internet infrastructure as a shared foundation rather than a private toll road.

The gap between Swiss and American internet isn’t about engineering capability. America has the technology. What it lacks is the political will to treat broadband as a public good instead of a private fiefdom. The US champions free markets while presiding over a system where consumers can’t even choose their provider. A truly free market would let you buy 25Gbps for $64. What America has instead is something else entirely.