What would be interesting to know is how St. Gallen funded the effort and whether they hope to break-even or make money. Seven different service providers will certainly keep Swisscom on their toes. It would also be interesting to know how much they are charging for dark-fiber or bandwidth.
ALTDORF, Switzerland — Early this year the town of St Gallen launched its new fibre-optic network. In March the public utility company switched on the first connections in the quarter Im Vogelherd. Thanks to Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH), residents in around 1000 homes and many businesses now have faster, more extensive access to the internet, TV and telephony (Triple Play), and to many additional services offered by seven providers.
Over the next few years, around 6300 homes and 700 businesses will be connected to the new fibre-optic network each year. The St Gallen public utility company and the installation companies involved have been deploying large amounts of special cables and FTTH connection boxes from Daetwyler Cables – and will continue to do so.
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About Mark Milliman
Mark Milliman is a Principal Consultant at Inphotonics Research driving the adoption and assisting local governments to plan, build, operate, and lease access open-access municipal broadband networks. Additionally, he works with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to increase the value of their intellectual capital through the creation of strategic product plans and execution of innovative marketing strategies. With more than 22 years of experience in the telecommunications industry that began at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Mark has built fiber, cable, and wireless networks around the world to deliver voice, video, and data services. His thorough knowledge of all aspects of service delivery from content creation to the design, operation, and management of the network is utilized by carriers and equipment manufacturers. Mark conceived and developed one of the industry's first multi-service provisioning platform and is multiple patent holder. He is active in the IEEE as a senior member. Mark received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
