More Q2 signs of strain

Today Swisscom reported, and as with KPN yesterday, there's some intriguing stuff going on under the hood. As with KPN, PSTN line loss accelerated in the quarter, to 3.4% YoY, up from 2.9% in Q1. Moreover, the annualized run rate loss (i.e., the sequential quarter-on-quarter loss, multiplied times four) was 4.2%, more than double the rate of a year ago. So, what has changed in the intervening year? Cablecom has launched VoIP, that's what, and by May of this year had seen uptake of 130k users. That doesn't sound like a huge number, but in the context of the Swiss market, we're talking about 5% of the voice access market. I can easily see this number doubling over the next year. Swisscom's not suffering as much as it could be, however, because of the absence of ULL (there's a will, but no way at this point), which enabled it to generate enough DSL wholesale revenue this quarter to offset half of the traditional revenue loss in calls and access, while racking up 76% of the net additions in the retail DSL space.