I plotted the development of fiber home internet prices in Switzerland:

You can find an interactive version here.

The source code is available on Github.

For each speed, only the lowest known base price (at that point in time) is included. Reductions from the base price are not considered (temporary promotions, combining home internet with a mobile subscription, …). There are too many possible combinations, they change too often, and they are too intransparent to track without a lot of effort.

Note that price is only one factor when choosing your internet. E.g., you may want to consider: the physical architecture (P2P/AON vs. P2MP/PON), the backhaul capacity of the POP you are connected to, the connectivity of the ISP towards other ASes (good peering and internet exchange capacity), or the quality of customer support.

Please let me know if there is any base price data that I missed!

Paying for the physical fiber

ISPs don’t build their own fiber to each house. That would be insanely expensive and simply redundant. It would also require a huge amount of capital for a new ISP to enter the market. Fiber should be a public utility, just like water and electricity. Politicians and the resulting regulations don’t always see it that way, though…

ISPs rent fiber access from Swisscom. Swisscom (through their subsidiary Cablex) builds and operates the fiber, often in cooperation with the local municipial utility company (Stadtwerke), e.g. see Zürich. They do this until the building entrypoint. The cabling inside the building is also done by local electricians.

Swisscom’s product for renting fiber access is called Access Line Optical (ALO). The prices for ALO are the following:

  • 24 Fr. per month recurring fee
  • 107 Fr. one-time fee for setting up a new connection

For a new connection, a Swisscom (!) employee has to physically go to the switchboard building in your town or neighbourhood and plug the fiber coming from your home into the equipment of your ISP.

So even if your ISP is not Swisscom, 24 Fr. of what you pay every month still goes to Swisscom for operating Layer 1.

Cost of running a PoP as an ISP

init7 has a blog post where they break down what it costs them as an ISP to build and operate the equipment for a point-of-presence (PoP).