Networks overview
The Dutch broadband landscape centers on two competing networks: plain old copper and coax cable. Penetration of copper is some 98%, cable some 90%. The coppernetwork is owned by incumbent KPN (for just 7.8% owned by the national government), the cable (MSO) sector is for about 60% privatized (UPC = Liberty Global, Casema = Carlyle + Providence and Multikabel = Warburg Pincus) and 38% government owned (Essent, Zeelandnet). The 2% is a multitude of small, not for profit MSO's.
Tariffs of MSO's
The large MSO's all charge some euro 16 or more for 30 analogue channels. The small not for profit ones offer up to 40 channels for euro 6.60 to euro 8 per month.
No wonder UPC's owner Malone last year told the Financial Times the "in the Netherlands we realize a gross margin of 70 to 80%."

Regulation
The Dutch telecom market is considered to be liberated and regulated by the telecom authority OPTA as well as by competition authority NMA. Nevertheless the open network obligation as of yet only is targeted towards KPN's coppernetwork. The cable networks are still a closed shop, be it for video, telephony or internet. This results in lopsided situation in which Malone-owned UPC uses KPN's network to deliver ADSL-services, at the same time refusing KPN to use its own cablenetwork to deliver video services.
Recently OPTA under EU law decided to define a 19th telecom market, that of television distribution through cable networks. MSO's UPC, Casema, Multikabel, Essent and Delta are now officialy declared to be monopolists within there respective geographical foortprints. Next they are under suspicion to abuse that monopoly in the wholesale as well as retailmarkets. More specific OPTA has stated that not allowed cross subsidy from basic video income towards broadband investments may take place.

European Kommissar Kroes did not react joyfull towards the OPTA ideas. Later on a compromise was reached: the tariffs of Dutch MSO's will be frozen throughout 2006; OPTA will investigate MSO's books and in 2007 again will bediscussed whether a price decrease of for basic video services will be enforced.

Whether the MSO's will be forced to open their networks remains to be seen, if so than still not for broadband services.

Broad- and midband subscription figures
At the end of Q2 some 50% of households had a mid- or broadband connection, market studies indicate that percentage to grow to 62% at the end of 2005.
The figures per network including a breakdown.

ADSL2+, VDSL(2)
Introduction of ADSL2+ started august '05 by Versatel, with now some 20,000 subs. Later this year KPN and other DSL-co's will start to roll it out as well.
Figures of actual connection speeds are difficult to get. The impression is that DSL subs go for faster connections, Cable subs more for email and light surfing. However the cable MSO's now offer speeds up to 20 Mb/s, at some euro 80 a month. All speeds of course are asymmetric. VDSL is discussed but as of yet has not been introduced in the Netherlands.

Actual speeds and pricing
An idea of the market, actual speeds reached and pricing can be had through www.speedtest.nl
(speeds are in Kilobytes/s).

Some prices & 'Bang for your Buck'
Below pricing schemes of the dominant Cable MSO, one of the best reviewed DSL-co's - and that of competing telco Versatel's ADSL2+ offering. Only the two cheapest UPC-connections have a data limit.
Prices of other ADSL-arrangements can be a lot cheaper than XS4All, up to 50%, depending on extra services like homepage space, capped data traffic etc.
The first really interesting and heavily varying figure is the price per Megabit download capacity per month (not to speak of the price per Mb upload ;-). Even Versatel with it's $ 1,67 per Mbs per month pales at prices realized in Japan or South-Korea. Or, to stay closer to home, in France at Free's 24 Mb/s at $ 25,00 a month ($ 1 per megabit/month).

Then there is the quality of the connection (latency) and of course the rate of overbooking.

Note: prices of the speediest connections are now (feb 2006) lower. When there's time the new euro-dollar conversions will be given.

Note on Nuenen: in 2004/early 2005 about 99% of all Nuenen households was connected with FttH, under an experimental scheme of the national government. On december 31, 2005, people had to decide whether they wanted to start paying for all or some of the FttH-provided services. In the end over 80% of all households signed up for a paid subscription.

FttH
The need (as well as the, according to incumbents, lack of it) for Fiber to the Home is discussed heavily in the Netherlands. Some small scale projects like that in Nuenen (7,900 homes, 98% subscription), Rotterdam, Enschede, Amersfoort, Deventer, Almere are realized. Amsterdam is working towards a first roll out to 40,000 homes. Recently a group of cooperating municipalities presented a Broadband Manifesto, demanding freedom for municipal fiber networks.
The incumbents all agree on the eventual transition to FttH - the hot discussion centers on the how and especially when. In 2003 KPN published a "Deltaplan Fiber" Deltaplan_Glas_v5_3_Engels.doc, in which it envisioned a cooperation between itself and the Cable co's to roll out fiber to some 80% of all homes. In it KPN lauds FttH: _"Therefore, KPN endorses the conclusion in the recent report of the Broadband Expert Group that said Fibre to the Home is the preferred solution for creating a future-proof broadband telecommunications in-frastructure. KPN also recognises that it is desirable to create the fibre-optic network as quickly as possible." The Cable co's however refused to go along with it. This was a strong signal to Municipalities that their impulse was and is needed to realise future-proof broadband.

Amsterdam FttH projecte
On december 23d, 2005, Amsterdam's City Council (45 seats, divided over 9 parties, of which 3 are in the ruling coalition) has unanimously backed the first phase of the planned citywide fiber-to-the-home project that will initially connect 40,000 adresses (homes, businesses, institutions). All 45 members of the Council backed the scheme in which the investment of the passive layer (some €30 million) will be backed by a corporation, jointly owned by the City of Amsterdam, five housing corporations, and ING Real Estate. The next step is for the shareholders to formulate a binding agreement, which will then be presented to the European Commission.

Use of broadband
On several indexes the Netherlands score very high on broadband penetration. An idea of the impressive growth give the figures of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange. Early 2004 traffic peaked at 20 Gigabit/s, in january it was 50 Gb/s and at the end 2005 the 100 Gigabit/s barrier was broken. At the end of january 2006 this has gone up to 135 Gb/s.

However, when the wellknown OECD graph is re-ordered on the number of 'other' (i.e. FttH) connections, the Netherlands sharply fall back to rank 21.

One of the more interesting Dutch broadband offerings is that of the Amsterdam based concert broadcaster FabChannel, possibly one of the 2006 nominees for the Webby Awards.

Tribute
In putting together the above, especially the the diligent reporting of Peter Olsthoorn, editor of Planet Multimedia was a great source of factual information.