Swisscom begins offering 1Gbps fibre broadband
Swisscom has launched its 1Gpbs fibre broadband service across Switzerland.
The Swiss incumbent began trialling the service earlier this year with a handful of customers, and has now expanded availability to 650,000 users.
The 1Gpbs service, which offers download speeds of 100Mbps, is priced as an CHF 100 per month add-on, which can be bought with Swisscom's Vivo Casa 5* tariff costing CHF 149 a month. The telco has also brought in another lower speed tariff — with 300Mbps upload and 30Mbps download speeds — for an additional CHF 20 per month.
For customers on standard Vivo Casa 5* plans not buying either of the two new add-ons, Swisscom has increased the maximum download speed for the tariff from 100Mbps, up from its previous 50Mbps.
Currently, Swisscom's fibre network is available in 50 towns and cities in Switzerland. The company said it plans to make its highest speed broadband available to 2.3 million premises by 2015 — around half the country — using a mix of technologies including fibre to the premises and vectoring. The company won't say what speeds customers can expect, however.
According to the company's most recent set of quarterly financial results, the cost of rolling out fibre has caused its capital expenditure spending to rise by 20 percent year on year, reaching €393m for the third quarter.