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France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

cartefibre.arcep.fr

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Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

#64
One thing worth mentioning is that a law was passed around 2017 in France that as a tenant, if you want to install fiber, the landlord can't prevent you from doing so (because e.g. they don't want to drill holes in the walls or other excuses).

Also the vendors do not commercialize ADSL anymore since a decade ago or so if fiber is installed in the district.

Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

#65
post #27

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

I think FTTC is just called (V)DSL in most places. IME it's uncommon to call anything less than FTTB (basement / building) fiber.

Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

#66
post #31

I was curious and just looked it up: Germany reached 36.8% in 2024 ( https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung... ).

Not sure if I'm surprised negatively or positively by the fact. My apartment (Germany) was built in 2017 and coax in every room was the choice planners made :_)

Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

#67

Meanwhile, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gi...

Previous admin allocated a good chunk to upgrade to fiber network. Provider can claim 25% of installation cost. Frontier has been using it. I heard it's about to run out.

Their workers were staying at my hotel, and putting fiber in my community. It was fascinating how frontier practically hires contractor to lay down pipes, and another contractor to pull the fiber, and another contractor to splice it and another contractor to run fiber to the house, and another contractor to come and install in the house.

Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

#68
post #3

And here in SF we have like 55%? Been waiting for it for 10 years in my hood.

It's ironic that SF has such a bad network. When I moved there like 10yrs ago I thought I would finally have 1gig fiber, but bandwidth was on par with what I had with my parent's VDSL connection from the country side, and latencies were worse, I went from sub-5ms to 30ms because many servers were actually in LA and the routes were bad (I expected ~1ms per 100km, not ~5ms/100km). ISP gerrymandering to avoid competitio…

That’s because infra telecom is done incorrectly. Look at Sweden’s municipal fiber model how you make infrastructure cheaper and make competition actually work for customers. Having each carrier have to run lines to each customer is the wrong model. Sweden somehow got it done in a moment of sanity when the leading telecom pushed for this model.

Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wonder why companies do run new fiber in the US in cities, given all this? 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?

If stuff is already being dug up for another reason, then the numbers can pencil out. But it’s pretty rare for somewhere that does not have fiber to gain access to fiber, at least on any reasonable timescale.

Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

#70

Currently typing this from my vacation house in France, in a rural area, with vineyards nearby. Closest highway is a 45 minutes drive (!). Now, sure, it is a fancy place in that it's Provence's seaside and, well, I can see big yachts from my couch but it's still in the middle of nowhere . At night it's wild boars (which my cat hates), snakes (which my wife hates) and toads everywhere. It's a very sparsely populated a…

Using DNS over HTTP instead of the ISP's DNS solves most of these blocks, for now.
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