Monthly Archives: July 2008

KPN launches its new fibre to the home (FTTH) service. The Netherlands is Europe’s most sophisticated broadband market with extremely high broadband adoption and PC ownership. On some measures, it is the global broadband leader. What happens here, has tremendous implications for everyone.
KPN’s download speeds are good (30-60Mbps). Prices are not that high given that this is an initial launch aimed at testing the market, early adopters, and teasing a response from the savvy Dutch cable companies. The top package tier looks be have little differentiation to justify the higher price. Pricing is significantly above the benchmark set by France’s Free (Euro30) which is a very good thing for the business models of all Dutch operators.
Upload speeds are low (3-6Mbps) and look to have been chosen to be just one tenth of the marketed download speed. They are especially poor if compared with other fibre broadband services around Europe.
As KPN’s main competitors are cable co’s, KPN are under less pressure on upload due to the weakness of cable’s HFC (hybrid fibre coax) technology to deliver high upload speeds. Ideally, KPN should use the much higher upload speeds of which FTTH is capable to create clear differentiation from cable broadband packages, even those based on DOCSIS3.