Being outside the EU, and thus not pressed by any European Commission for effective market regulation, Switzerland has lagged behind other less advanced countries in broadband access to the Internet.
It took Swiss ISPs several years to unleash proper ADSL2+ services using local loop unbundling, while in neighboring France speeds >15 Mbps were available to a big majority of the population since 2005 (depending on the distance from their phone exchange of course).
But at the end of 2008 a big change occured, when
Swisscom decided to reposition itself as a wholesale provider of Fiber to the Home access. In a nutshell Swisscom decided to go ahead and deploy fiber optics in the biggest Swiss agglomerations, but not with the scope of using this network exclusively for retail services to the consumers but also making it available for telecom operators wishing to provide services renting the fiber optic from them.
This is one of the really few cases globally in which the incumbent operator offers to regulate itself (which is not as dumb as it may sound because it allows them to do it under their own terms).
In the meanwhile, other Fiber to the Home projects are in deployment phase in Switzerland, e.g. Orange's offer in Zurich:
http://www1.orange.ch/orangehome?lang=en.
In this thread I'd like people who already receive (or have the possibility and are considering to order) a Fiber to the home service to describe their experiences.
Latest news:
Swisscom has signed some cooperation agreements with other entities in order to share the construction costs.
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