Swiss ISP init7 launches unlimited symmetrical gbit FTTH for $73/month

https://www.fiber7.ch/

by alternize • 12 years ago

93 58 12 years ago

fiber7.ch

lugg• 12 years ago

Fuck it I'm moving to Switzerland.

Honestly if I could find symmetrical adsl2 I'd be happy. Download speed is nice but I'm a gamer upstream is everything.

cliveowen• 12 years ago

Symmetrical ADSL is an oxymoron, the word you search for is SDSL.

zokier2• 12 years ago

I don't think anyone uses SDSL anymore, VDSL2 is where the action is at (in DSL tech).

ojii3• 12 years ago

Move to Tokyo and get symmetrical FTTH for ~30USD/month.

illumen2• 12 years ago

Just move inside a rack. There's a lot of buzzing noise, but it's cold, dark, and there's good internet access.

icebraining• 12 years ago

Upstream? As a gamer myself, I'd rather have low latency. Games don't need that much bandwidth anyway, downstream or upstream.

zokier2• 12 years ago

Maybe he likes to stream his gaming to twitch or something, I've heard that is a thing nowdays.

Spittie• 12 years ago

Games don't use much bandwidth, what you need is a low ping (you get in with ADSL by being near the central, and having your ISP set you a fastpath profile). Unless you need that bandwidth to stream what you're playing.

"symmetrical asymmetrical DSL" is an oxymoron, but where you get ADSL you can usually get SDSL/SHDSL. It's just going to be a lot more expansive :)

ADSL is pretty much a death technology, and the sooner we leave it behind the better. There is Annex M which could give a decent boost in upload (~3mbit) but it has seen a very low adoption rate.

mtarnovan• 12 years ago

Move to Romania instead. Symetrical gigabit ftth for ~18$/month. I have had it for almost a year now.

Nanzikambe2• 12 years ago

Love it, hopefully they'll add coverage for the French part of Switzerland too, or else I'll have to consider moving cantons :)

pling2• 12 years ago

Well that shits on my 12Mbit/1Mbit here in London that costs nearly that much...

arethuza• 12 years ago

That's pretty bad - we get 40/10 (actual speeds) here in Edinburgh for £25 a month.

van2077• 12 years ago

Ouch. It's 200/10 mbit/s here in Dublin, for the same amount of money (well, for the first 12 months at least)...

snowwolf• 12 years ago

Where in London are you and which provider are you with? Pretty much all cabinets in London now support FTTC so it should be pretty easy to get 80/20 and plenty of ISPs are offering unlimited FTTC for around £20/month. You might want to consider switching.

pling2• 12 years ago

South West near Kingston. Andrews and Arnold. Unfortunately for some reason we can't get FTTC. I think its an issue with the cabinet near me which looks like it has been run over by a bus. The local exchange is also an ancient branch exchange so it may not have the capacity.

nonuby• 12 years ago

Have much capacity do they have to offload that traffic, I imagine they have largest ports on peering exchanges locally, with some other local private peering, and perhaps they got some backhaul to AMS-IX, LINX and others, but you can read the issues peering exchanges are facing with capacity and the cost of highest 100G ports (where available). How much transit do they have to carry the rest? I jut cant see this being feasible unless its p2p on their own network. Last mile is only a small part of the problem.

alternize• 12 years ago

init7, the company behind fiber7, has already a pretty good peering and international pops: http://www.init7.net/en/backbone/

rsync2• 12 years ago

Yes, init7 is a serious provider with real peering and a global presence. My impression (as their datacenter/IP customer) is that they've been putting this together for a few years...

yjh0502• 12 years ago

Seoul, South Korea. Gigabit internet is available for ~$18/month.

shock• 12 years ago

Same price (~$18) for gigabit internet in Romania, but it's not symmetrical.

oblio• 12 years ago

I saw a Steam (Valve) graph for Dota 2 download speeds. Roughly 8 million players, spread across the world, quite evenly.

The "fastest" countries were South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands and Romania.

We might be lacking quite a few things, but Internet speed is not one of them :)

sschueller• 12 years ago

The city of Zürich voted on having fiber to every home/building. The fiber is independently operated from the service providers (EWZ (City of Zürich electricity) and Swisscom manage the fiber). You can pick from as many as 15 different providers in the area of internet/television and phone [1]

[1] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/ewz/de/index/telecom/ewz_zuerin...

pilif2• 12 years ago

In this case though, this offering isn't using the fiber we voted for:

Im Gegensatz zu anderen FTTH Angeboten, die auf Layer-2 Plattformen von städtischen Werken basieren, benutzt Fiber7 eine komplett eigene Internet-Infrastruktur. (https://www.fiber7.ch/fiber7-verfugbarkeit/)

Loosely translated this means that they are using their own infrastructure not based on what the EWZ has already built.

Considering how hard it is to get permission to dig holes around here, I wonder how the hell they have done this.

Hurdy2• 12 years ago

I think you've misread that. They don't use the layer 2 of EWZ, but they do use the fibers (layer 1).

CaptainZapp• 12 years ago

Wouldn't it be for the EWZ we would still be waiting for fiber.

I remember clearly how the telecoms, most notably Swisscom, argued that it was overkill and not necessary.

The telecoms also invested into massive lobbying efforts and an intense advertising blitz in order to kill the necessary referendums. (At least the first, I think when it came to the second referendum covering the rest of the city they where pretty mute. But then Swisscom was already in the boat).

The referendums where necessary, since the voting public needed to decide if the city owned utility is allowed to invest the money. Both referendums sailed pretty much through in a landslide.

Basically all public utilities in Zurich are city owned and operated. And while it may appear weird in other parts of the world, people here actually love their public utilities.

This probably has to do with really high service quality being quite reasonably priced. But I digress.

rayiner• 12 years ago

Basically all public utilities in Zurich are city owned and operated. And while it may appear weird in other parts of the world, people here actually love their public utilities. This probably has to do with really high service quality being quite reasonably priced. But I digress.

Here in the states, our public utilities are more often than not of poor quality for the price. For example, I lived in Atlanta, GA for many years. Much of its sewer system dates to the rebuilding of the city after the Civil War. It's in violation of federal environmental laws, and when it rains too much it overflows and dumps untreated sewage into the local river.

I'm not sure why municipal services are so bad in the states versus in parts of Europe. After all, there's no private water/sewer company lobbying to blame for the water/sewer system in Atlanta (or Chicago or D.C. or the numerous U.S. cities with similar problems). I suspect it has to do with the locus of power vis-a-vis urban and suburban voters in the U.S. versus Europe. That is to say, most U.S. metro areas take the form of poorer central cities supported by wealthier suburbs, at least to a greater degree than I think is true in Europe.[1] Thus, there is less concentrated political will, as well as less money, to spent on infrastructure within cities.

Regardless of the reasons, I think many people in the U.S. are justifiably skeptical of public utilities. I personally would very much trust the city of Zurich to build my internet infrastructure. I wouldn't so much trust Atlanta, or Wilmington, or Philadelphia, or Baltimore . . . maybe Chicago or New York City. I say this as someone who has lived or worked in these cities, and relied on the municipal infrastructure more than the vast majority of Americans (because I take public transit and don't like to drive).

[1] For example: Atlanta has a core city only a little bit larger than Zurich proper (though only 1/3 as dense), but has a metro area 3x as large as the Zurich metro area. The vast majority of the wealthy voters in Atlanta live in the surrounding suburbs. Thus, funding for road construction to get these folks to and from work in the city takes priority over funding for services used by people who reside in the city.

hocuspocus• 12 years ago

I'm very glad to see it happening. Finally we might catch up with Baltic countries...

Switzerland has the money and a population that isn't particularly hard to cover thoroughly compared to some nearby countries. Yet we wasted nearly 15 years in some cantons arguing about roles and responsibilities, while it was pretty clear that local utility companies need to be in charge of horizontal fiber deployment, and the ISPs of the rest, preferably without bitching about the costs of vertical deployment. Sadly our politicians are apparently more interested in letting UPC have nearly full control over the cable network, as long as the duopoly situation allows for ridiculous profits and dividends from Swisscom.

Haiperlink• 12 years ago

Living in the canton of Zurich and having my office in Dübendorf this makes me happy! :) We are currently paying about 250$ for 10Mbit/s symmectrical fiber.

vstm• 12 years ago

I'm living in Rüti (which is about 30 km from Dübendorf but still in the canton of Zürich). If I do the availability-check on the fiber7-page it returns something like "that's a black-hole for us" - I'm not surprised.

wrboyce• 12 years ago

https://www.fiber7.ch/fiber7-bestellen/ https://www.fiber7.ch/fiber7-verfugbarkeit/

Django with DEBUG = True in production.

carsonreinke• 12 years ago

Wow, thats a lot of debug info.

anoother• 12 years ago

Seems to be fixed now.

hsx• 12 years ago

It's giving me an "UncompressableFileError at /"

tedchs2• 12 years ago

There is a nice "gigabit community" being built in Sout Carolina near Charleston: http://www.nextonsc.com/gigafi/

jtsnow• 12 years ago

Interesting. This looks like the same concept as the community in which I reside: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daybreak_(community)

Every home has fiber, but the bandwidth is throttled to about 12/4mbit by Century Link, which is the contracted provider. This contract expires soon, so hopefully we'll be able to negotiate better speeds.

tedchs2• 12 years ago

Yes, FTTH itself is common for greenfield developments built in the last several years. Unfortunately, as you have found, they are often operated in a way that does not capture their bandwidth potential. I suspect that in the case of Centurylink, they feel constrained by feeling like they can't sell 100 Mbps service to a FTTH customer for the same price as 10 Mbps service to xDSL customer.

coldcode• 12 years ago

So what I pay for 15/1 at $60 a month from TWC. Oh wait... I live in a third world internet country.

damian2000• 12 years ago

Damn, I'm paying $80/month here in Australia for 3 mbit/s. The local exchange has been maxxed out for the last 10 years. Its possible we have the worst Internet of all developed countries.

pugz• 12 years ago

I'm paying a bit more ($89/month) for unlimited 100/40mbit on the NBN. Consider moving! (That's Turnbull's advice>

pilif2• 12 years ago

Tangentially related: Init7 is one of the few providers here in Switzerland that offer native IPv6 connectivity to end-users (they might be the only one offering it to end-users).

This makes this already amazing offering doubly interesting because it would finally allow me to play with native IPv6

rsync2• 12 years ago

Init7 is the ISP that we (rsync.net) have been using in Zurich since 2007, and we highly recommend them.

brunnsbe2• 12 years ago

xDSL-prices are still quite high here, at least in Gèneve.

I'm not 100% sure if Swisscom has a monopoly as I have only lived here since January but here are Swisscom's price list for xDSL (rough calculation from CHF to EUR):

5/0,5 Mbit: 30 euro

10/1 Mbit: 40 euro

20/2 Mbit: 55 euro

For these connections you also have to pay for a fixed telephone line (hello Swisscom, this is the 21-century, not the 19:th!) which costs 20 euro per month.

(Source: http://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/internet/internet-at-h...)

Back in Finland I got a 50/10Mbit connection for 40 euros which included IPTV.

rguldener• 12 years ago

Fiber in Zurich is a lot cheaper, eg. 20Mbit symmetric is about 25 euro with a small but very competent ISP

pasiaj• 12 years ago

I'm paying 30€ for a 100M symmetrical VDSL in Oulu, Finland.

I'm actually getting 35Mbps in both directions, which is awesome.

Nanzikambe2• 12 years ago

DSL is expensive everywhere in .ch , switch to cable if its available in your area:

http://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/internet/internet-at-h...

Not sure about Geneve, but in Vaud and Neuchatel it's available.

brunnsbe2• 12 years ago

It still seems to cost a lot, e.g. Vivo Casa package which has 8Mbit download speed is 74CHF, I have the same connection but with a VDSL-model. The interesting part is that my connection really is 27Mbit so that the IPTV gets enough bandwith, then Swisscom adds this "artifical" speed reducer so that the Internet traffic only reaches a maximum of 8Mbit. :-(

kosinus• 12 years ago

The provider Tweak here in the Netherlands is also launching symmetrical 1Gb/s FTTH in select cities:

http://www.tweak.nl/consument/fiber/productoverzicht_odf.htm...

Zelphyr• 12 years ago

Meanwhile, Comcast is patting themselves on the back because they just upgraded me to 50MB! I feel like I'm being served $25 boxed wine by an idiot waiter while across the street a guy is getting a $16,000 Richebourg for the same price.

GBiT• 12 years ago

In Lithuanian FTTH 500 mbit connection is only 23 euro or $31

rasur• 12 years ago

Hmm, Swisscom have been waving FTTH here (Winti..) for the past few months, and I've seen lots of workers actually laying cable, but nothing to the actual apartment yet..

Fortunately I work for a Swisscom owned co. so there are some benefits that hopefully will eventually trickle down, otherwise I think I'd be very tempted by init7's offer (we also use them at work, and they're a good bunch).

chli• 12 years ago

Swisscom FTTH is available in my building (Biel/Bienne), but at the moment the price is too steep plus you need to have the Vivo XL package to be eligible [1]. That brings the whole TV + Phone + 1Gbps/100Mbps internet at 169 + 80 = 249 CHF / month. I like fast Internet but not THAT much !

[1] http://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/packages/options/1giga...

billiam• 12 years ago

I hope one of Tom Wheeler's minions prints out this thread for him on the dot matrix printer they use over at the FCC.

Swiss ISP init7 launches unlimited symmetrical gbit FTTH for $73/month

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