It's a shame they were stuck with DSL for almost all of the Netherlands. Fiber deployment is very limited and DSL has been inferior to cable for 10+ years.

I and most other tech-minded people I know switched to Ziggo (the largest/only cable provider) because they could provide 5-10x faster internet at around the same price. XS4All became even harder to justify than when it was just a slightly more expensive DSL ISP.

Ziggo does not provide 5-10x faster internet at around the same price. That's a huge exaggeration.

https://www.xs4all.nl/pakketten/internet/

58,50 EUR a month for 200/20 mbit (if you can get that speed over VDSL2, that is)

https://www.ziggo.nl/pakketten#internet-online-tv#zonder-bel...

54 EUR EUR a month for 200/20 mbit (provided they deliver at your premises)

Where Xs4all is more expensive, is TV, which is actually KPN's.

Previously I had the choice between good quality VDSL2 from Xs4all (or KPN etc) and slightly cheaper Ziggo. That's before they merged with UPC. I consciously picked Xs4all because they deliver a far better service.

When I switched in 2012 I went from 40 Mbps VDSL down, from which I got maybe 14 Mbps tops in practice to a 100 Mbps down cable connection, which I frequently hit. The shop I worked at similarly got a boost from a 40 Mbps VDSL (really 25) to a real 150 Mbps down around the same time. In 2016 I moved to my current apartment and 40/4 was still the max, while I could get 300/30 from Ziggo. Hence my 5-10x claim.

YMMV depending on the copper quality of your neighborhood and distance to the neighbourhood connection point (I don't know how to translate "wijkkast").

I have little experience with VDSL2, but in my experience xDSL delivers a lot less than the theoretical max and has a lot more variance than DOCSIS.

Same here. Looked at xs4all when I moved to Amsterdam in 2010. Went for UPC which had a much faster connection, in 2015 they merged with Ziggo.

Incidentally, KPN announced yesterday that they are starting a rollout to 1 million households for FTTH.

That sounds really nice, albeit 10 years too late. It's a shame XS4All won't be around when/if I finally get access to fiber.

1 million MORE households on top of roughly 1/3 of all households that have fiber. :)

Probably a lot of people ended up not choosing them simply because they are more expensive. You do have to distinguish yourself in the marketplace and XS4ALL has failed in that regard for a long time. All they have left really is the name and history.

People aren’t going to pay extra for a reskinned KPN service.

KPN meanwhile majorly improved their service with extensive free installation service while XS4ALL remained with the useless Gideon offering.

It is not just a reskinned KPN service. Xs4all offers a lot of technical advantages (e.g. being able to configure the ISP-side firewall to allow port 25 access).

The problem is that the market of tech enthusiasts is very small. At the KPN-scale, it is financially probably more attractive to streamline operations and to lose a few tech enthusiast subscribers than to keep several separate operations.

That said, Xs4all gave KPN the moral higher ground, plus testing grounds for new technology.

>Xs4all offers a lot of technical advantages (e.g. being able to configure the ISP-side firewall to allow port 25 access).

Where I live there's no ISP-side firewall on any ISP, so that would not be an advantage at all.

tinus_hn meant that that might be what Xs4all would become. Currently they're not, of course.

Did you read the article? It shows many ways in which XS4ALL differs from other ISPs/KPN. Furthermore they run part of their network infrastructure themselves and put a lot of care into it, resulting in less downtime than other ISP's. Sure if you don't care much about your internet connection or the original values of the internet then you won't notice these differences, but I gladly pay a bit more for their outstanding service and support.

Name, history, and a better service. You're not paying for a brand name with XS4ALL but for the service.

Why would we care if it's only historic events? We'd have moved to another isp and not bothered with a petition.

That would imply that you actually deliver better service which really they don’t.

If you don't care about anything, you might as well have CGNAT. If you care, it's easy to see what XS4ALL does better: you don't get a locked down xperiabox, you get ipv6, you get good customer support, you get to set your reverse dns, you can set a carrier grade firewall if you want... I don't know how you can say that it's no different. It's different in the same way that a $4000 or a $400k car will both get you to your destination, but one has a lot more features than the other.

You can get IPv6 with Ziggo; it will utilize CGNAT. Its terrible. Things such as connecting over LTE to IPv6 OpenSSH won't work if the LTE is IPv4 only. Things like P2P (BitTorrent) or PlayStation won't work. For a proper networking connection you need either dual stack or IPv4. If you get such a router from Ziggo call them up and tell them you want/need IPv4.

I did that and they told me I had to give up v6 for that, so I noped out of that one. I'd rather have the new protocol than be stuck with the old one. If I need a v4 address (which I did to host a game, I was amazed ziggo pulls this on people and they're not required to have huge warning signs like "you're not really getting a normal Internet connection, you're gonna share an IP address with a million people and not be able to use it in the expected way") I'll do ssh forwarding (-R) to my box at XS4ALL.

Yes, Ziggo don't provide dual stack. It is either IPv4-only or IPv6 with CGNAT for IPv4. I'll take IPv4 in that case, wait till the rest of the world has either dual stack or IPv4, and then once the whole world has IPv6 I'll be OK with IPv6-only.