While FTTH is not yet on the short-term roll-out plans of Swisscom, the Swiss incumbent announced a decision yesterday to invest 600-700 million CHF by end of 2008 in the expansion of its VDSL network. Fiber is moving closer to the customers, though - to an outdoor DSLAM and from there via copper to the end users. To stay ahead of Cablecom they have now also announced further upgrades to their ADSL services (for free) from 2000/300 to 3500/500 kbps and from 3500/300 to 5000/500 kbps. Swiss law requires that by 1. January 2008 all households have to be reached with broadband links. In Switzerland there are 1.4 million ADSL users currently and nearly 4 million households.

While FTTH is on Swisscom's radar screen, it is to be expected that the first deployments will be local FTTx projects like the one in Zurich, which will be done by a city-owned power utility.