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Quebec has high-speed internet available to all residents. Either fibre to the home, or subsidized StarLink. Canada as a whole is expected to have 90% high speed internet by the end of 2026, and 100% by 2030.
"Cable is equivalent" only if you don't need/want a symmetric connection - until they lay fiber I'm stuck with an awful upload speed.
Is that fiber to the property or fiber to the cabinet? In the UK I get FTTC which means the last bit from the cabinet down the road to my house is copper wires. My speed is bottlenecked by that. New builds and flats get services for the building giving them full fiber. My fiber is only as fast as my copper wire to the cabinet allows
Orange has started decommissioning its legacy copper network.
Quebec has high-speed internet available to all residents. Either fibre to the home, or subsidized StarLink. Canada as a whole is expected to have 90% high speed internet by the end of 2026, and 100% by 2030.
Spain is at 96.79% (June 2025), up from 94.79% a year before. See [0] I think France and Spain are the best of the big European countries regarding coverage, but also adoption: If we look at the adoption ranking globally, Spain sits fourth at 90%, behind the UAE, China and South Korea and ahead of France at 83.6%. Very few European countries convert coverage into subscriptions that efficiently, and I think it's drive…
Second a lot of people has still FTTC even if it has FTTH, mostly because FTTC offers a speed that is enough for most people (100Mbit/s) and upgrading may have costs (the installation of the fiber is at the expense of the ISP, but if you need to make modifications, such as put a pipe from your house to the street in which they will put the fiber, it's at your expense). In some cases even if fiber is present it's difficult/not possible to get it into your house (for example you live in a condo and the other tenants doesn't want to spend money to make the modifications that are needed to pass the wires).
In any case they have started to switch off copper (since it costs money to maintain an infrastructure that has decades), so either way customers will be forced to move to fiber or 5G network in the upcoming years. In any case a fault on a copper line is likely not to be repaired...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's pretty wild that parts of the Houston metro have a better ISP story than SF. The last home I was in had multiple competing fiber providers available. My current home is in the middle of the woods and I have a 5gbps symmetric link.
For a new build or overhead wiring, it's a trivial cost that is easily recouped. For buried infrastructure where the coaxial cable company already sells internet, you will almost never recoup your investment to bury new fiber and run it to all the homes. You can have the superior product, but insufficient people will pay enough more than the existing coaxial cable prices.
I got underground fiber direct to the basement of a student apartment years ago and it was basically a hundred dollars for install fees. They must have already been laying it on the street, but still. Competition?
It's a very sparsely populated area, we're kilometers away from the nearest village and indeed we've got fiber to the home (since years and years already now).
Now it's not all rosy: they filter traffic/block IPs/force website to imposes checks (like age checks) that aren't done elsewhere, block torrents, etc.
I'd say it's the least open Internet I've seen in any EU country (now of course there's VPN and I can use a SOCKS5 proxy through ssh to one of my server etc. but still: France are complete control freaks and it shows).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's pretty wild that parts of the Houston metro have a better ISP story than SF. The last home I was in had multiple competing fiber providers available. My current home is in the middle of the woods and I have a 5gbps symmetric link.
For a new build or overhead wiring, it's a trivial cost that is easily recouped. For buried infrastructure where the coaxial cable company already sells internet, you will almost never recoup your investment to bury new fiber and run it to all the homes. You can have the superior product, but insufficient people will pay enough more than the existing coaxial cable prices.
Probably a main difference is that the Swedish infrastructure was deployed by municipalities with an open access model, so no need for 10 different ISPs to dig their own cabling.
Meanwhile, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gi...
FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to Musk's Starlink
> The Carr FCC said last year that the gigabit goal “may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds.”
I don't know if this is so much a handout to Starlink, seems like a way to win the race by moving the finish line.
I was curious and just looked it up: Germany reached 36.8% in 2024 ( https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung... ).
Meanwhile, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gi...
FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to Musk's Starlink