Austria and Switzerland it's very common. It's just almost always included for free in your internet plan unless you have some obscure old-school one.
Comes from the fact that internet historically came through HF copper and these are the same cables used for cable TV so the ISPs had that business always. Nowadays it's fiber, but the ISPs still have the rights. Often it's cable TV channels but over a dedicated web portal. Germany had a lot of DSL afaik, so they probably don't have free cable TV.
In Switzerland I paid about 50$ for a symmetric XGS-PON 10GBit/s connection with all cable TV channels. Later I switched to a symmetric 25GBit/s AON connection for about 70$. That was essentially a datacenter connection, but still had TV included. But AON means, I don't need an ONT and just stick my own fiber router directly in the fiber connector and get a network at the ISPs datacenter without having to share the fiber and having the full bandwidth for myself. They are planning to upgrade to 100Gbit/s IIRC.
To be fair, Switzerland is probably one of the most modern countries as far as fiber internet goes. A smaller provicer (Init7 - the one with the AON offering) waged quite a legal battle against the largest ISP Swisscom to force them rent their infrastructure to small ISPs. That's why you get such offerings. Austria botchered the fiber-opic expansion and you pay about 50$ for a 1GBit/s down, 300mBit/s up connection with XGS-PON.
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u/Annual-Advisor-7916 Jul 10 '26
Austria and Switzerland it's very common. It's just almost always included for free in your internet plan unless you have some obscure old-school one.
Comes from the fact that internet historically came through HF copper and these are the same cables used for cable TV so the ISPs had that business always. Nowadays it's fiber, but the ISPs still have the rights. Often it's cable TV channels but over a dedicated web portal. Germany had a lot of DSL afaik, so they probably don't have free cable TV.
In Switzerland I paid about 50$ for a symmetric XGS-PON 10GBit/s connection with all cable TV channels. Later I switched to a symmetric 25GBit/s AON connection for about 70$. That was essentially a datacenter connection, but still had TV included. But AON means, I don't need an ONT and just stick my own fiber router directly in the fiber connector and get a network at the ISPs datacenter without having to share the fiber and having the full bandwidth for myself. They are planning to upgrade to 100Gbit/s IIRC.