Norway's Bayonette debuts 1Gbps FTTH and free fibre, promises network extension
With the price of fibre broadband continuing to drop in Norway, a local fibre operator in the greater Oslo area, Bayonette, launched its new offering on Tuesday.
The company debuted a 1Gbps full duplex fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) service for consumers at NOK 499 per month (€62).
The price is much lower than most other fibre products on offer in the Norwegian capital — a quick look at rivals' offerings shows that the same price per month will get you a broadband connection with a theoretical top speed of just 50Mbps to 60Mbps.
"Networks make a lot of money by selling stepped internet connections. We think differently, and don't want to milk customers by offering different service levels that are only marginally cheaper to produce," Arve Paalsrud, head of technology at Bayonette, said in a statement.
'Free' broadband
Bayonette is aiming the fibre service at housing associations and jointly-owned apartment blocks with multiple tenants.
The ISP plans to gradually roll out its service to a few select housing cooperatives this year, the company said, and go into full production next year.
Bayonette is also offering a "free" service to consumers willing to pay for the installation themselves. This service is an asymmetric 3Mbps down/1Mbps up internet connection, without any data cap. The intention is to encourage all apartment owners in the block to sign up for fibre when the installation happens. Bayonette argues that the upside is that the value of the apartment will increase if it's got fibre installed.
DWDM
Bayonette came to the market last year, providing fibre broadband to enterprises in the greater Oslo region. The company employs existing dark fibre, and runs its own-brand DWDM (dense wave division multiplexing) equipment on top of the fibre.
In this way Bayonette gets the ability to split a single fibre pair into 160 discrete channels, greatly increasing the capacity of the fibre.
Bayonette's basic enterprise service is also a symmetric 1Gbps connection, but priced at 2,490 NOK per month (about €309).
Paalsrud told ZDNet that this offering includes a service level agreements and gives the customers access to Bayonette's datacentre services, which are sold separately. The company also recently launched a 10Gbps connection option for business.
Bayonette is currently planning to extend its network to the cities around the Oslo fjord, passing through the cities of Drammen, Horten and Moss. This project is planned to be finished in three months' time, Paalsrud said.
"Note that everything we do in Norway is in preparation for a larger market. Our ambitions are definitely international," he said.