Let me give you some more information about the decision of SWITCH to close down the well known SWITCHmirror service.

In about 1990, the newly born Internet was such a success, that soon after,
lines were completely overloaded, and it became literally impossible to download
anything from sites across the Atlantic, at least during local office hours or in the evening.
This also became a major problem for administrators at local Universities
who had to install or patch their servers, as their installation routines took
ages to complete, or even ran into timeouts.
This being a common problem of the Universities, it soon became clear that
instead of solving it at each University individually, it made much more sense
to let SWITCH do that once and for all of them.
So SWITCHmirror was born.

And it was used. Heavily. Such that the SWITCHmirror infrastructure became
among the most performant - and the most expensive - for about two decades.
It was so performant that it could even be used to test network speed.
Network engineers out there on the edge of the SWITCH network knew the
sustained throughput of the SWITCHmirror by heart, and so they could just
measure the download rate of some large file in order to tell whether their
local line actually had the speed it was planned for.

The congestion across the Atlantic didn’t actually last for too long.
Soon after, new lines with double throughput and more were put in place.
However, this didn’t come at no cost, and so, SWITCH also had to charge
separately for overseas volumes, which again made the SWITCHmirror
attractive as it generated only local traffic. Later on, this separate charge
could again be dropped, and so the SWITCHmirror lost, in principle, its
raison d’être. However, in the meantime, the SWITCHmirror was well known,

and only 2-5% to the Swiss Universities.

SWITCH is committed to operate solutions that empower users primarily in the
academic world. Given the above statistics, and seeing that the hardware was reaching
its eol, SWITCH has done a survey among the responsible people at the Universities,
which clearly showed that as of today, having such a mirror clearly isn’t a requirement
for them any more. SWITCH has therefore decided to decommission this service,
in favour of many others that are about to be put in place.
The schedule for this decommissioning is documented on http://mirror.switch.ch/ .