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That is strange. Here is a page from KPN in the Netherlands with the tariffs: https://www.kpn.com/mobiel-abo.... I looked up Russia. Roaming there costs about 80 euros/GB if you buy a separate bundle. If you don't have a bundle you can still roam but indeed for 250 euros/GB, as you say.

If this is not what you mean then I don't understand what you mean :).

According to some the Lumia 800 was the top selling phone on http://www.kpn.com/mobiel/alle-telefoons.cat
(KPN being the largest mobile provider (ex monopolist)) for a couple of weeks. Last week it was second to an iphone4s, now it is third:
1: BlackBerry Torch 9860
2: Samsung Galaxy S II
3: Nokia Lumia 800
4: iPhone 4S 16GB, zwart
5: Samsung Galaxy S Plus

This is a bit of a strange statistic considering the sales of iphone4s were most like at their highest for a couple of months to come.

The hacked machine seems unrelated to the actual CA business, though - it's just a website, not a CA management tool or whatever. Source: http://forum.kpn.com/t5/News-stream/UPDATE-11-30-KPN-sluit-tijdelijk-website-Gemnet/ba-p/8477

Broadband is somewhat cheaper in Holland than it is here, but rest assured that it won't be cheaper than the same in the US.

Well, KPN says that they offer (at least from what this non-Dutch-speaker can pick out with the aid of Babelfish) 1.5Mb down/256Kb up for EUR 15.00/month for the first year and EUR 25.00/month after that, 3Mb down/512Kb up for EUR 20.00/EUR 30.00, 6Mb down/768 Kb up for EUR 40.00/EUR 50.00. The "packages" (Internet + TV + telephone) at those speeds go for EUR 44.90/month and EUR 52.90/month - unless I'm missing something, they don't have a 6Mb up/768 Kb down package.

Here in Amurrica, at least in California, AT&T says that they offer 768Kb down/128Kb up for USD 14.99/month, "up to" 3MB down/"up to" 512Kb down for USD 24.99/month, and "up to" 6MB down/"up to" 768Kb down for USD 34.99/month. They have an Internet + TV + long-distance (you have to get your local phone service from them to get DSL) bundle for USD 99.98/month - as the Internet part is "Internet Pro", and "Pro" for their "just DSL" offers is the 3MB down/512Kb up service, I assume that's what you get for the DSL with the bundle.

I don't know whether "up to" means that they're just being more cautious in what they state than KPN, or if KPN really does offer guarantees that AT&T doesn't. I don't see anything in the AT&T material I saw about the rate going up after the first year.

On the other hand, perhaps the Dutch and Belgians should move to France. Orange appears to offer 1Mb down/??? up for EUR 24.90/month, up to 8 Mb down/800 Kb up for EUR 29.90/month, and up to 18 Mb down/800Kb up for EUR 34.90/month - and, unless I'm misreading (which this non-French-speaker might be doing), that includes TV. It also appears that they offer an Internet+TV+telephone bundle, with an Mb down/800 Kb up, for EUR 34.90/month, with a 1-year commitment (it sounds as if the "a la carte" requires no commitment).

I didn't see anything on KPN, AT&T, or Orange about a traffic limit.

Broadband is somewhat cheaper in Holland than it is here, but rest assured that it won't be cheaper than the same in the US.

Well, KPN says that they offer (at least from what this non-Dutch-speaker can pick out with the aid of Babelfish) 1.5Mb down/256Kb up for EUR 15.00/month for the first year and EUR 25.00/month after that, 3Mb down/512Kb up for EUR 20.00/EUR 30.00, 6Mb down/768 Kb up for EUR 40.00/EUR 50.00. The "packages" (Internet + TV + telephone) at those speeds go for EUR 44.90/month and EUR 52.90/month - unless I'm missing something, they don't have a 6Mb up/768 Kb down package.

Here in Amurrica, at least in California, AT&T says that they offer 768Kb down/128Kb up for USD 14.99/month, "up to" 3MB down/"up to" 512Kb down for USD 24.99/month, and "up to" 6MB down/"up to" 768Kb down for USD 34.99/month. They have an Internet + TV + long-distance (you have to get your local phone service from them to get DSL) bundle for USD 99.98/month - as the Internet part is "Internet Pro", and "Pro" for their "just DSL" offers is the 3MB down/512Kb up service, I assume that's what you get for the DSL with the bundle.

I don't know whether "up to" means that they're just being more cautious in what they state than KPN, or if KPN really does offer guarantees that AT&T doesn't. I don't see anything in the AT&T material I saw about the rate going up after the first year.

On the other hand, perhaps the Dutch and Belgians should move to France. Orange appears to offer 1Mb down/??? up for EUR 24.90/month, up to 8 Mb down/800 Kb up for EUR 29.90/month, and up to 18 Mb down/800Kb up for EUR 34.90/month - and, unless I'm misreading (which this non-French-speaker might be doing), that includes TV. It also appears that they offer an Internet+TV+telephone bundle, with an Mb down/800 Kb up, for EUR 34.90/month, with a 1-year commitment (it sounds as if the "a la carte" requires no commitment).

I didn't see anything on KPN, AT&T, or Orange about a traffic limit.

I couldn't disagree more with the choice of BT as the leading company because of its 21CN network. As such it is in interesting choice of BT to go to Ethernet IP for its entire network. There are at least two other incumbents who are doing the same thing. KPN has a project called ALL-IP and and Telstra has a project called the Common Network.

However KPN is doing something more than just changing the backbone. KPN will roll-out VDSL2+ to the end-users as well. This will all be Ethernet/IP based for the backhaul and VDSL2+ for the last 450 meters, allowing 50/20mbit down/up. KPN will close 1350 swithch locations and roll out 28000 street cabinets to deliver the speeds to the end-user.
http://www.kpn.com/upload/1215076_9475_11328305981 77-1212162_9475_1132326712652-Op_weg_naar_All-IP_1 81105.pdf
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=69 419&print=true
(the lightreading article forgets the vdsl2+ bit, see presentation for that)

In contrast BT will only do ADSL in its network, they will not reach speeds above 24 mbit and in response to a question on access networks he says, that it is very hard to understand what a user will want to do with more than 24mbit. (hereby forgetting that most of the UK will not be living close enough to a dslam to actually get this 24mbit). He doesn't see a reason for fiber to the home or any other kind of access networks. This was said by its Chairman Ben Verwaayen at a recent Ofcom Event on convergence. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/event/presentations/sessio n6 (minute 25 and onwards)

Fuck up royally? That's funny, our commercialised monopolist in the Netherlands is called KPN, which stands/stood for Koninklijke PTT Nederland. Translation: ROYAL PTT Netherlands. They still control the telephone (landline) infrastructure for which you will have to pay 10 euro's a month regardless of your ISP or telephone provider.

Cable companies are used to consumers of one or more of their products who can't do anything more with that product then choosing to consume it or not, after having paid for it. You pay for a cable subscription, one or more extra packages and you hope to receive them when you want to watch. As long as the signal is available everywhere, no problem. Your customers cannot influence the cable reception of their neighbours.

Some 'bad' customers get a cable splitter and connect a second TV to the same cable connection (oh the horror! the cheapskates!). By the way, in my country (the Netherlands) I can't get a second cable subscription in the same house. I'll have to get my own splitter and/or amplifier.

Then cable modems came. And all of a sudden there is a lot more diversity to what people can and can't do with their cable (modem) connection. Even send data back to the Internet! (gasp!). Or even worse, somehow have that Internet available on more then one computer!

So cable companies have to play ISP. Do really new stuff like provide reliable mail and reliable connections to the Internet.

And make users somehow pay for their usage. They try to make this fit into simple models.. Joe Sixpack home user who would have otherwise dialed into AOL for many hours and Brent Bussinessman who wants to be online for the office. Because their billing model can only deal with so many different pricing structures.

There is a different system that might work. The cable company provides 'IP transport' between your cablemodem and the ISP, and the ISP connects you to the Internet and your e-mail, your news and other services.

This model now works for (A)DSL in the Netherlands. The phone company doesn't play ISP, they just connect my line to the DSLAM in the exchange. By my login I select the ISP I want and the rate I want to use (my adsl login is koos@xs4all-basic-adsl) and the router in the telco network sets up a virtual circuit with my ISP, xs4all.
This can work with any transport protocol that supports logins and sessions, like PPPoE and PPTP. Which also lowers the chance of unauthorized hookups and cable packet sniffing.

I get two bills, one from KPN, the phone company for the adsl link and one from XS4ALL, the ISP for the Internet connection and services. If I use too much bandwidth I may get charged extra for that (XS4ALL isn't clear on this matter, I just wish they would say N bytes per month and extra bytes cost you this fee).

Why don't the cable companies go to this model ? The only reason I can think of is that they always had virtual monopolies and don't want to have competitors on their turf. The ISP's are no competitor for KPN since KPN is not an ISP itself. (KPN indirectly owns a number of the ISP's that offer ADSL connections but in the day-to-day reality KPN and the ISP are two different parties to deal with).

This model has its disadvantages. The problem with your connection is in the equipment of the (Telco, ISP) depending on who you ask (ISP, Telco). At this moment, moving from one address to the other and trying to keep a working ADSL connection is a nightmare.

About running servers at home and sharing the connection for multiple computers.. XS4ALL encourages the users to do just that. XS4ALL had deals on cheap routers and tells people that they can run their own webserver, gameserver at home. As long as you don't use up too much bandwidth, which is the only thing that XS4ALL will count for your connection.

Any other classification of your traffic ('business use') is also a violation of your privacy.

Going back to the cable company, the only difference between a 'consumer' and a 'business' subscription would be (for me) that the business connection would be available for at least a certain percentage of the day and that outages longer then a certain time would automatically mean that I get part of the subscription money refunded (a service level agreement).

I>Been there, saw a commercial version...
All KPN Telecom (animated) ads, all the time(!)

I've had a shell account with xs4all from the very beginning when the name was hacktic. In 1998 they sold out to the evil local telecom giant KPN. Almost three years later it's still a quality ISP and if I need to get hold of a techie or even the CTO I can usually find them on IRC. If not, I can email them and they'll respond fairly quickly.

They offer ISP-choice and you have to sign up via your ISP. Since then they have been plagued by disconnections up to an entire weekend, routers needing resetting and sucky software.

Technically you need to setup a PPTP connection with the ADSL network and then go to the mxstream web portal and select Internet access from the great portal with services. Ofcourse people started writing scripts to automate this. According to rumors (!) the url's to log in get changed from time to time so people have to see the great (..) stuff available other then IP access and cannot use autologin scripts.

A large Dutch provider, Cistron is building their own Telco/adsl network where getting an ADSL connection means they take over the local loop and you don't have to deal with KPN anymore. Speed isn't rate-limited, meaning a theoretical 8 mbit downstream could happen (2 mbit guaranteed) and 1 mbit upstream.

Since KPN decided to skip my phone exchange, I am waiting for Cistron. Cistron is looking very good sofar, but I actually have to see them connect large amounts of customers.

I live in the Netherlands. Here we've had the whole telephone-system (which is controlled by a single company) renumbered. Most numbers used to be 9 digits (except for Amsterdam and Rotterdam which already had 10 digits). Now we all have a 10 digit-phone number. It all went rather flawlessly; they gave nearly everybody a new areacode. They chose those new areacodes in such a way that the new ones did not exist in the old system (luckily there were enough area-codes). They also added a digit to the phonenumbers, and voila...there are about 10 times as much numbers. They kept the old and the new system working together for a few months and then dumped the old system. A funny thing was that suddenly I got a free new-number-calculator with everything I bought:)