In the world of Fiber builds, the Swiss definitely have their hands full. Switzerland is a relatively small country with fantastic broadband penetration and a plethora of carriers all vying for the same customers. The landscape is very complicated and the solution appears to be very politically driven.
There are basically two national carriers, Sunrise and Swisscom as well as a national Cable Television carrier Cablecom. Orange has also quite a bit of service but relatively little infrastructure from what I understand. There is also hundreds of Cable Companies with Telecommunications infrastructure that have a monopoly in their little geographic corner of Switzerland.
Now come the Energy companies. There are also hundreds of these all over Switzerland, “One per dorf” said one of my contacts said recently. They have also elbowed their way into the telecommunications game.
This has been an interesting to follow for a number of years now as everyone wants the same customers in their geographic locations, the local companies are a bit more agile and the national companies have brand awareness.
One idea born out of this chaos has been the idea of an “Open Access Model”. One of the basic ideas of this model is to decouple the content services from the plumbing. This would allow the local players to offer their fiber access to the customer to anyone who wanted to reach them. This, in effect, is a customer sharing scenario where the fiber provider gets paid as well as the service provider.
Obviously the next evolution here is for there to be multiple service providers that differentiate themselves through any number of methods. This would mean, hypothetically, a small business customer, say a stockbroker, in Sierre gets their access from Sierre Energie, their VoIP from Swisscom, their VPN from Sunrise and their stock quoting (Reuters tools) from Orange.
Now comes the big question…….who writes the bill 
