The Free-Market Myth: Why Swiss Fiber Beats American and German Broadband

Switzerland offers dedicated, symmetric residential fiber up to 25 Gbit/s with multiple competing providers at low prices, while the supposedly free-market United States and heavily regulated Germany both leave consumers with a single provider and connections shared across the neighborhood. The author argues this paradox exposes a misunderstanding about markets and regulation: broadband is a natural monopoly, where building the physical infrastructure is enormously expensive but serving each additional customer is cheap, so facilities-based competition destroys value rather than creating it.

The US and Germany both got this wrong in opposite ways. America produced territorial monopolies — Comcast, Spectrum, and AT&T each carve out protected regions, market it as competition, and run cheap point-to-multipoint architectures so a marketed ‘gigabit’ collapses to a fraction of that at peak hours. Because the point of presence where home fiber terminates is privately owned by the incumbent, rivals can’t plug in and would have to trench entirely new networks. Germany instead pushed infrastructure competition, resulting in wasteful ‘overbuild’ — redundant trenches meters apart — while permit delays, duct-access disputes, and Deutsche Telekom’s incumbency block smaller ISPs.

Switzerland treats the fiber in the ground as a neutral, shared public asset built once. Every home gets a dedicated four-strand point-to-point line terminating in an open hub any ISP can access equally, so switching providers is a phone call quoting your outlet number — no truck roll, no digging. Competition happens on price, speed, and service rather than on who owns the cable. The takeaway: the decisive variable isn’t more or less regulation in the abstract, but whether policy separates the monopoly infrastructure layer from the competitive service layer.