Swisscom surpasses 1 million homes connected to ultrafast broadband

Swisscom says it has connected more than a million homes and businesses in Switzerland to ultra-fast broadband – delivering download speeds of 100 Mbps or better – using a mixture of fiber-optic broadband technologies.

The operator has switched on vectoring in over 200,000 homes and business and continued its roll out of fiber-to-the-building (FTTB) and fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). Outside the major conurbations, Swisscom has connected the first ten municipalities using what it calls fiber-to-the-street (FTTS), which brings the optical fiber to within a few hundred meters of the customer’s home (see "Swisscom plans fiber to the street expansion").

Swisscom is one of Europe's frontrunners when it comes to introducing vectoring, the company asserts. At the beginning of 2014, Swisscom started to roll out vectoring technology in those areas where FTTC and VDSL had been installed. Vectoring improves the transmission quality and by doing so, allows up to twice the previous bandwidth. Across Switzerland, Swisscom has switched 200,000 homes and businesses over to vectoring, which makes it one of Europe's top providers.

The FTTS roll-out has been completed in ten municipalities, including Croy (VD), Wila (ZH), Iragna (TI), Prêles (BE) and Rothenthurm (SZ), and is currently being deployed in over 100 further municipalities. FTTS enables broadband speeds of up to 100 Mbps to be achieved. Swisscom is also collaborating with Huawei Technologies Co Ltd. to develop G.fast, a successor technology to VDSL, which could be used to boost speeds even further (see "Swisscom chooses Huawei as supplier for its FTTS expansion").

The roll-out of FTTH to homes and businesses is continuing alongside these activities. Over 800,000 homes and businesses in over 80 towns and cities have now been connected, up from approximately 700,000 a year ago (see "Swisscom FTTx plans include 1-Gbps services" and "Alcatel-Lucent supplies FTTH gear for Swisscom’s 1-Gbps broadband services").

Swisscom says it aims to roll out ultra-fast broadband technologies to over 2.3 million homes and businesses by the end of 2015 and over 4.6 million by 2020, throughout Switzerland. This has required laying over 55,000 km of fiber-optic cables across the country.

The operator says its investments have made a substantial contribution to Switzerland’s position in global rankings. According to Akamai, Switzerland is ranked first in Europe and third globally for bandwidth coverage greater than 10 Mbps.

For more information on FTTx/access systems and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyer’s Guide.