KPN can end support of outdated internet technology

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has decided that KPN will be allowed to stop providing the ATM service. ATM is an out-of-date technology for, for example, high-speed internet. Except for a few thousand users, everybody by now has moved on to, for example, Ethernet. ATM customers have already been notified years ago of KPN’s intention to end the service. Henk Don, Member of the Board of ACM, explains: “It is important to ACM that sufficient alternatives to ATM are available. This is now the case. A few thousand business users of ATM remain, who really need to say goodbye to this outdated service this year. It can no longer be justified that the Dutch consumers pay the price for these unnecessary extra costs.”

From the 1990s

Since the late-1990s, the Netherlands completely switched to broadband internet. At the time, KPN introduced ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), a technology enabling high-speed internet. Many homes saw the installation of DSL modems. High-speed internet was and still is important for our economy and for our social relationships. Besides high-speed internet, several other services requiring a reliable, fast connection also ran over ATM.

No more updates

Internet technology has now been evolving for 15 years. Almost everyone in the Netherlands has now switched to Ethernet for high-speed internet. This new technology offers even faster and better connections than ATM. No new services are developed for ATM: old software is no longer updated, hardware is no longer produced. Maintenance has become relatively expensive. Currently, the only wholesale customer of regulated ATM is telecommunications services provider Tele2. They lease out their lines to other customers. These lines are used, for example, for direct connections between business locations or for conference calls.