A similar ISP, very much alive and kicking, is https://www.init7.net/en/ in Switzerland. In particular, with their fiber7 brand (see https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/), they tick all the boxes mentioned in the article: no caps, fully symmetrical gigabit fiber, ISP actively promoting and pushing net neutrality, ISP actively engaged politically, very knowledgable support staff, etc.
I've been a customer of Init7 for several years. They're amazing. Some more boxes to tick:
- Use your own hardware, no crappy ISP router required
- They host a Netflix cache server, in contrast to ISPs actively limiting bandwidth
- They launched https://mirror.init7.net/ after Switch announced they would stop running https://mirror.switch.ch/
* their fiber offering is just plain ethernet, so if you have a switch with an SFP slot, that's all you need (well aside of whatever you use as a router - but in my case, that's a VM running PFSense - you're totally free to chose whatever you want). Fewer moving parts means fewer issues.
* they hand out native IPv6 addresses and if you ask them, even a static prefix (for free)
* if you get a static prefix, they even delegate the ip6.arpa zone for reverse lookups
* total soft-factor: their support people use Dovecot Mail under Linux and their press releases are written in Libre Office
Disclaimer I have no relationship with them aside of being a very, very happy customer and I once brought them two bottles of whisky as a thanks for being really quick to set it up for me after I waited a long time for the electrician to put the fiber in my apartment.
I don't know what mirror switch is, but XS4ALL also has Netflix boxes. I didn't actually realize that it might be a special thing: why not reduce your transit traffic? But now that you mention it, yeah, murica.
And XS4ALL is also fine with you using your own hardware, but so are all German ISPs by law so that's not super special.
It's also not rocket science to clone their MAC and do the authentication afaik. But I've never had to do it so I'm not sure if it seems easier than it is.
In Germany before that law, they made sure you wouldn't get the credentials to roll your own. There were some tutorials around how to extract your PPPoE credentials from certain cheap DSL routers, but many were fixed over time, so if you really wanted to do it, you had to open the box and read the EEPROM by external means. Cable modems always have a certificate baked in and were tied to your account, so just cloning the MAC didn't help.
Some American ISPs have realised they can shake down Netflix for cash by refusing to install caches, connect at peering points and suchlike until Netflix pays them.
Some Americans can only get broadband internet access from a single company, so they don't have the option to move ISPs when their Netflix access is degraded.
Upon re-reading I see how that sentence was badly written. I meant that there is at least one fairly large country (a neighboring country even) that mandates this, so I don't consider being allowed to use my own router very special.
To give an idea about how great support is, I as a customer emailed them asking for them to peer with a particular network I was heavily using and within about a day they actually did it.
On another occasion I was having problems with my own equipment and they were able to help diagnose it and loan out SFPs to see if they helped. The equipment's manufacturer was not so generous (buy more stuff or fuck off).
Same experience here. Tweeted at them saying my latency to Hetzner had regressed by 10ms (w/ smokeping graph as proof). They replied the next day saying "we fixed it", and actually improved latency by an extra 5ms from my previous baseline :-)
It's still a magical feeling for me to have a stable 0.8ms latency to 8.8.8.8 (0.7ms if I plug in directly to my media converter without any switching equipment in the way).
I concur with the other reply regarding privacy but I'll add that according to SmokePing, until 5 days ago, CloudFlare took 6ms total to resolve a query, compared to Google at 900 us and Init7 itself at 106 us.
Init7 is covered by Switzerland's braindead data-retention bill due to being an ISP so it's out, leaving Google the best acceptable performer for me.
I'm perfectly comfortable sending my DNS traffic to 8.8.8.8. I have a pretty good understanding of how Google handles my DNS data, and I don't have any specific reason to trust Cloudflare better.
