Subj : Weekly nodelist report on noteworthy changes (148)
To   : Michiel van der Vlist
From : Matthias Hertzog
Date : Wed Jun 02 2021 08:16:59

Hello Michiel!

 MV> However.. The market for fixed internet connections is pretty
 MV> saturated. Mobile is another kettle of fish but almost every household
 MV> in the western world has a fixed broadband IP connection by now. There
 MV> is not much net growth and in consequence little demand for more IP
 MV> addresses in that sector. The incumbents are not short of addresses
 MV> yet. The ones most affected are the newcomers.

That's true. But one may not forget, that customers are shifting to other suppliers. While one is getting free IPs, the other gets short of them. Every company has to be prepared for such a shift, which is especially citical for newcomers or others with a great load of inbound shifts. Really hard to predict. Since the bottom of the price is probably reached, huge shifts will no longer happen that easy these times. As you've said, the market is saturated.

 MV> So... next question.. this ISP of your connection at home, is it a new
 MV> kid on the block?

No, it's not. In fact, one of the oldest. www.green.ch
But as i've said before: "Conservative". I know some of the people there and see exactly why things are like they are. They have a new CTO, so i expect some changes in the future. Just had a nice chat with him yesterday about IP-addresses :-)

 MH>> The ISP i use at home  is a bit conservative, but the only one
 MH>> providing FTTH in my building.
 MV> What are the alternatives? Cable? DSL? Sattelite?

Cable: Too slow here, to expensive
VDSL: Possible, but there is no more copper in the building. So there would be installation cost. And: Too slow.
Sat: Never looked at this since here in switzerland sat uplinks are not allowed, only downlinks.

Having FTTH is fine and the right thing to do. It sucks a bit, that it's not a real "open access network" where several providers can participate. When i ran my ISP, we always went to the open access networks and had a great success with it. A lot of cities here went the right way and installed FTTH networks which they rent to providers on L2/L3. That works, allows competition and is hassle-free for endusers.

Green is using BBCSF (broadband connectivity service fiber), which is using the swisscom physical network, but with green backbone. Not bad, works very well and performance is fine. Green is not getting rich of it, as swisscom takes a large portion of the fee for their network, but green had not to do invest in the physical network. So it's probably fine for both of them.

The market here in switzerland is very fragmented. You can get swisscom everywhere and UPC-Cablecom-Sunrise almost everywhere. To find another ISP is possible, but offerings vary from city to city, sometimes even on street level ... and that's exactly why people stick with swisscom if they once have it. Moving is easy (even the tech spec can be different at a new location) and they bundle mobile. Expensive as hell, but a real "don't worry"-packag for the tech-unare enduser. I was fighting on that front for years.

Matthias
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