It is not just a reskinned KPN service. Xs4all offers a lot of technical advantages (e.g. being able to configure the ISP-side firewall to allow port 25 access).

The problem is that the market of tech enthusiasts is very small. At the KPN-scale, it is financially probably more attractive to streamline operations and to lose a few tech enthusiast subscribers than to keep several separate operations.

That said, Xs4all gave KPN the moral higher ground, plus testing grounds for new technology.

tinus_hn meant that that might be what Xs4all would become. Currently they're not, of course.

Did you read the article? It shows many ways in which XS4ALL differs from other ISPs/KPN. Furthermore they run part of their network infrastructure themselves and put a lot of care into it, resulting in less downtime than other ISP's. Sure if you don't care much about your internet connection or the original values of the internet then you won't notice these differences, but I gladly pay a bit more for their outstanding service and support.

Name, history, and a better service. You're not paying for a brand name with XS4ALL but for the service.

Why would we care if it's only historic events? We'd have moved to another isp and not bothered with a petition.

That would imply that you actually deliver better service which really they don’t.

If you don't care about anything, you might as well have CGNAT. If you care, it's easy to see what XS4ALL does better: you don't get a locked down xperiabox, you get ipv6, you get good customer support, you get to set your reverse dns, you can set a carrier grade firewall if you want... I don't know how you can say that it's no different. It's different in the same way that a $4000 or a $400k car will both get you to your destination, but one has a lot more features than the other.

You can get IPv6 with Ziggo; it will utilize CGNAT. Its terrible. Things such as connecting over LTE to IPv6 OpenSSH won't work if the LTE is IPv4 only. Things like P2P (BitTorrent) or PlayStation won't work. For a proper networking connection you need either dual stack or IPv4. If you get such a router from Ziggo call them up and tell them you want/need IPv4.

I did that and they told me I had to give up v6 for that, so I noped out of that one. I'd rather have the new protocol than be stuck with the old one. If I need a v4 address (which I did to host a game, I was amazed ziggo pulls this on people and they're not required to have huge warning signs like "you're not really getting a normal Internet connection, you're gonna share an IP address with a million people and not be able to use it in the expected way") I'll do ssh forwarding (-R) to my box at XS4ALL.

Yes, Ziggo don't provide dual stack. It is either IPv4-only or IPv6 with CGNAT for IPv4. I'll take IPv4 in that case, wait till the rest of the world has either dual stack or IPv4, and then once the whole world has IPv6 I'll be OK with IPv6-only.