Also any workload I have that is bandwidth heavy would be on clouds machines between data centres and generally very fast. Are there reasons why someone at home would benefit from 25GB internet beyond whatever is available?

Is this a case of over engineered central planning instead of a blow against the free market?

Our little committee investigated all manner of options, including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the power company’s own signaling).

Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.

A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.

The other point that I'd like to bring up is how useful is a 25G connection to your local demarcation point if your speeds to most sites will be far lower in practice because the Internet isn't circuit-switched.

In Charlotte NC, I have 3 choices of internet providers, two of them fiber.

As you are doing with this post, "broaden the base." The vast majority of voters do not understand the issues here. That is your biggest obstacle.

My POV would call this regulatory failure vs free market lie. That way, the enemy is a smaller target.

Path to progress is to get a friendly state (WY, RI, TX) to pass the legislation. Then shop that around among activists in other states.

If people knew they were only getting 1/25 of a shared product, that would get political hackles up.

Thanks for taking the time to think this through and make your argument.

But yes, Swisscom (owners if the old crap copper) do have to let the competitors use it.

makes me very much consider moving to Switzerland. I'd be happy with symmetric 5Gbit internet. Anything more would be overkill imo.

I hated working with ISPs in the states. Ever try cancelling Comcast? You literally get routed to a department whose sole reason for being is to talk you out of it.

I really like the idea, share the lines compete on execution.

One thing the article doesn't mention is in Germany the electricity and gas lines are more or less this approach. I can switch electricity providers like the article author can switch ISPs. It's a common practice to do so about 1x a year to take advantage of customer acquisition incentives.

The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.

And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies but then have the state give control of a given market to a single or a couple of monopolists.

The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-dependent small and large business people whose livelihood depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.

The article initially does a good job of describing the situation, but gets a bit confused when it gets to the history of the US, especially this line "This is what happens when you let natural monopolies operate without oversight." What it's discussing is not natural monopolies; it's discussing public utilities which are granted monopolies expressly through regulation, not despite it. Also, the US has a lot of oversite on wired ISPs. The prices are almost always approved by regulators.

A good example of a natural monopoly is Google search. It's pretty common for people to get frustrated by it, and look for other search engines. There's also multiple companies trying to compete with it. Normally this would mean that users would migrate to the competitors, but Google's search algorithms have been so good that practically every user has stayed with Google.

Natural monopolies are still easily disrupted, if the naturally-occurring barrier changes. For example, Internet Explorer had a natural monopoly, due to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy giving it many capabilities that other web browser didn't have. When the internet market quickly migrated from a feature-first market to a security-first market, Internet explorer was quickly overtaken by Chrome and Firefox. There's a reasonable chance the same thing will happen with Google Search, as the market for it's search algorithm is overtaken for the marked for LLM based web searches, which Google is pretty bad at.

Anyway, the reason Comcast or Charter is the only one that provides cable internet in your area isn't because it's too expensive for anyone else to deploy cables. At the margins they operate, it would be well worthwhile to invest in a parallel infrastructure, but it's downright prohibited almost everywhere in the US. In fact, they may own the rights to lay cable, despite having never laid any. This is the case where I live, for the phone company, which plays by similar rules.

Fixed-wireless internet providers are starting to provide some competition, as backhauls have improve enough that cellular providers can compete with wired internet providers. T-Mobile is currently offering $20/mo fixed wireless add-on plans, with a five-year price guarantee. To complete with the fixed-wireless market, Comcast has launched a service called NOW Internet, which starts at $30/mo with a similar price guarantee and no no add-on requirement.

Speaking of "starting at", a large source of high prices is the common use of FUD to pressure users into paying for more than they need, or can even use. Very few households peak at more than even 40 Mbps (https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/) and the starting price of almost every provider is above that, but must customers have been talked into higher-tier plans.

The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than that are video game distributors, so if you are in the type of household that would like to download game updates in minutes, instead of tens of minutes, while also watching multiple 4K video streams, then comparing other plans may be worthwhile, otherwise stick with the absolute cheapest plan available from all providers that serve your area. (And, if you are big on multi-player gaming, selecting the ISP with the lowest latency will be beneficial, but all plans from a given service will be the same latency.)