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Comment by digitallyfree | Hacker News Reader

I would expect such a service to ban hosting services on the "private" plan, or have strict conditions on what is considered acceptable use. However I see nothing of that sort in their contracts with the exception of this line in their Contractual Conditions.

"3. Fair Use Policy The Internet subscriptions for private customers are intended for normal personal use. Init7 reserves the right to temporarily or permanently restrict or discontinue the provision of services for connections whose data volume exceeds 0.5 petabyte (500 terabytes) in a period of 4 weeks, or to take another suitable measure."

(https://www.init7.net/de/kleingedrucktes/072021_contractual-...)

You can build some serious infrastructure on 500T/4weeks on a 25Gbps line, service uptime withstanding. They also provide optional /29 subnets with the private plan so it looks like it's intended for more than just personal browsing.

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It’s just a great internet provider, which very much caters to techies. They supply the plug in the wall, you provide your own router etc.

I guess the key is that they _are_ actually more expensive than the competition here, and they provide less ”value”.

But less is very much more in this case, since you don’t have to use a locked-down provider-specific router. I guess they save money that way too.

I pay more for my current provider (not Swiss), but they support customer-provided modems and allows hosting within reason. Really depends on the type of user you are and what you value - I run my own servers etc. and prefer this service but someone else may prefer a plug-and-play approach with everything managed by the ISP.

There's big competition esp. in the Zurich area. I don't understand all historical peculiarities behind this, but it has something to do with monopolistic position of Swisscom - their old national telecom company.

As a part of de-monopolization they made it lease links to any willing ISP (bit-stream access?), so many ISPs arose, and they have relatively "cheap" and advanced offerings: 1Gb/s, 10Gb/s, 25Gb/s, fixed IPs, IPv6 etc.

This bitstream access is now extended to pretty much anyone who installs FTTH. E.g. one can have it installed by a city or cantonal electrical company or TV provider, but still be able to buy IP access from pretty much anyone through some form of open market - https://litexchange.ch/

Unbundling (the copper lines) and open fiber deployments are different things.

Many municipalities still haven't gotten fiber deployments from the local utilities, and in practice you can be stuck on Swisscom's fiber. It's not too bad since several ISPs are also able to use it: for instance Sunrise before (I'm not sure they still allow it), but also Init7 (their Hybrid7 offering). However an ISP like Salt uses only open fiber, at least for now.

Salt and Sunrise had signed an agreement to push for extensive open fiber deployments by 2027. But then the deal blew up when Sunrise got acquired by UPC, since they'd rather use the existing DOCSIS infrastructure in the less dense areas.

Swisscom was going to push its own deployment as well (even though G.fast is not bad) and Salt was now interested in chipping in, but soon after the Comco has stopped Swisscom from using P2MP which is a big setback in its strategy to cover sub-urban areas. I understand the decision to enforce P2P deployments and give smaller ISPs a fair chance but it's definitely going to hinder the speed of new deployments. I believe we're rich enough, and we should mandate (and fund) open deployments in all these sub-urban municipalities that won't do it on their own.

> but soon after the Comco has stopped Swisscom from using P2MP which is a big setback

Yup, I'm using some 3rd party ISP. I have from them 1Gb/s (ODC - optical direct link), and the first hop is their IP.

And also 10Gb/s via Swisscom's XGS-PON. Here the first 2-3 hops are located within Swisscom's net (except the immediate gateway). I guess init7 complained about it - i.e. paying more for using Swisscom's L3 net, instead of leasing fiber?

> I understand the decision to enforce P2P deployments and give smaller ISPs a fair chance but it's definitely going to hinder the speed of new deployments.

Why would P2P slow down deployment?

You have the same exact amount of cables in a P2P and a P2MP topology, the only difference is the amount of fiber in the cables. There is a (small) cost savings, but that's about it.

You're absolutely right but in practice, P2MP allowed Swisscom to connect new apartment buildings in suburban municipalities that otherwise don't have FTTH generally available.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe P2P topologies would be inefficient (i.e. too expensive) for sparsely connected areas. Conversely, the kind of hardware needed to operate XGS-PON is prohibitively expensive to small ISPs, and they're all deploying P2P topologies, and only that.

The cost of fiber is so low it doesn't make much difference between P2P or P2MP, be it urban or rural. All the real cost is in having somewhere to put the fiber.

XGS-PON isn't that expensive. You can buy disaggregated XGS-PON modules in a SPF+ form factor for $1500. CPEs are $120 each.

I don't really get why Swisscom wouldn't be able to deploy P2P in low or medium density areas if they wanted to.

Um, why ? Are centralized cloud providers the only ones allowed to run Internet services now or what ?

While you could use it for hosting a business, I wouldn't recommend doing so without some business plan that offers SLA.

I might be incredibly unlucky but I had two major multi day downtimes with Init7 (neither their fault).

If you depend on your internet as part of your business, make sure you have a plan for when it might fall out.

On that note, I'm hosting my own personal fileserver over that connection and the public IPv4 address has not changed once in the two years I've been using them so far ^^

You can download a lot of "Linux ISOs" on 500 TB.

And by Linux ISOs I mean porn.

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