Swisscom Invests in Switzerland's Superfast Broadband Expansion

BERN, SWITZERLAND - Swisscom, a provider of telecommunication services to about 1.8 million Swiss customers, announced a host of new initiatives to expand its superfast broadband offerings. "We are stepping up our network expansion activities, with the aim of providing superfast broadband to over 2.3 million households and businesses – including in locations outside the main conurbations – by 2015," says Urs Schaeppi, acting CEO at Swisscom. Swisscom is investing a total of $1.88 billion this year in infrastructure and by year end will also see the first 700,000 customers surfing the Internet at speeds of up to 1 Gbps. By 2020, broadband speeds of 100 Mbps will be possible in over 80 percent of households and businesses.

Swisscom is using a mix of fiber-optic technologies in order to speed up expansion. Swisscom's new Internet box, which supports the fastest WLAN standard, will provide customers with massively quicker wireless connectivity while on the move. Other features such as guest WLAN access at the touch of a button will also make surfing simpler and more secure.

At the beginning of 2014, Swisscom will start rolling out the new vectoring technology for VDSL, which will improve the quality of transmission via copper cables. Vectoring will allow a doubling of the current bandwidths. In addition to vectoring, Swisscom will continue its rollout of FTTS (Fiber to the Street) so that locations outside the major urban centers can also be quickly upgraded to fiber-optic technology. Swisscom is also currently testing fiber to the building (FTTB), which involves running fibers to building basements and using the existing copper cables within the building itself. FTTS and FTTB will initially allow surfing speeds up to 100 Mbps. Laboratory tests have already achieved speeds of between 400 and 1,000 Mbps.

The FTTH rollout will continue alongside these activities. By 2015, around 2.3 million households and businesses will benefit from ultra-wide broadband, using vectoring (800,000 households and businesses), FTTS and FTTB (500,000) and FTTH (1 million households and businesses).