Fiber is also very very common in Brazil, I type from a small city near to the coast (beach yay!) and I've 1Gbps for about 20 dollars, it never get down or slow.
France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
161–170 of 245 posts
Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Gigabit Project (edit: should be BEAD) has allocated 40 billion since 2021 and still has not finished any last mile projects.
Yeah I'm sorry massive infrastructure projects with mandates to properly map access and measures to prevent fraud don't fit neatly into a four year presidential term before being effectively yanked away.
The cause of the delay or the blame doesn't really matter. The fact is Starlink could serve all of these users' internet now with no extra build-out cost at a 50th of the price. It's almost certainly time to rethink the plan and have the government take some of the money back.
Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :_)
Because back then cable TV was a common inclusion in apartments that could be unilaterally be added to "Nebenkosten" and was therefor sold to landlords as such a nice benefit by cable providers.
My cable cost $25 and offered 200mbps — 8 years ago. So it wasn't that bad of a deal. 400mbps was possible.
Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Gigabit Project (edit: should be BEAD) has allocated 40 billion since 2021 and still has not finished any last mile projects.
Why lie? The Gigabit Project is a £5 billion project, not $40 billion. It has delivered last mile interconnects to 296,770 residences. It's also a UK program and not a US program. The US has a similar program called BEAD, it has allocated $42B in funding, however, that is allocated, not spent budget. Build outs have only started this year.
Ezra Klein would point how how dangerous it is. In New York we had really big talk about a fiber buildout where it was clear they kept spending money and spending money in multiple rounds but nobody I knew was getting fiber well past the 2017 deadline the program claimed. They did lay a wholesale fiber to a place where I could get FTTN at 20Mbps and 10 years late they fixed up the poles by my house and say they’re going to give me real FTTH.
Trouble is these programs that just say they’re going to spend money as opposed to solve a problem make people cynical and just want to vote no on everything to protect their pocketbooks. Ultimately they turn the people who are the greatest supporters of these programs into enemies.
Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
#165It's pretty insane. Our family has a holiday home in a fairly mountainous region in central-southern France. Dwindling population, no major tourist activity, wine production. We'd long suffered the worst imaginable 56k but in 2018, the local ISP just ran fibre out to everyone . I think the current service is cheaper than the 56k was too, and far cheaper than any of the 4/5G options back then. What I mean (vis á vis i…
>Our area is never going to generate the return on internet alone for the isp? maybe. for the gdp? well, i imagine that a lot of highly paid remote labor would love to be located in rural France.
There's so very much rural France. They'd need a colossal influx of well paid remote labour moving to the country to make the sums work.
I think the goal is social, to ensure that rural France isn't abandoned further than it was since the 1990s.
Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
#166It's pretty insane. Our family has a holiday home in a fairly mountainous region in central-southern France. Dwindling population, no major tourist activity, wine production. We'd long suffered the worst imaginable 56k but in 2018, the local ISP just ran fibre out to everyone . I think the current service is cheaper than the 56k was too, and far cheaper than any of the 4/5G options back then. What I mean (vis á vis i…
Wonder how many thousands of taxpayer dollars was spent for this. Does not seem efficient.
Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
#167It's pretty insane. Our family has a holiday home in a fairly mountainous region in central-southern France. Dwindling population, no major tourist activity, wine production. We'd long suffered the worst imaginable 56k but in 2018, the local ISP just ran fibre out to everyone . I think the current service is cheaper than the 56k was too, and far cheaper than any of the 4/5G options back then. What I mean (vis á vis i…
Is it really that expensive? Many poor places are now having optic fiber for even remote areas. Algeria is having its speed boom (https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/algeria#fixed). I have been through some remote poor areas in Asia who had optic fiber with "crazy" speeds (ie: 500mbs).
I wonder if the price of fiber now is just too low that it's very viable to install at scale even for low-density areas.
Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
#168Meanwhile, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gi...
Since the FCC no longer consistently enforces 'public good' requirements on commercial exploitation of limited shared common assets, they're increasingly becoming a drag on innovation and seem to primarily protect incumbants from new emerging competition.
In the early days of broadcast radio and TV it made sense to have an agency regulating use of the airwaves, but in recent decades the downsides of such close govt agency regulation on most (but not all) digital telecom are beginning to excede the upsides. And regulatory capture has turned some FCC rule-making committees into cage fight octagons where telecom lobbyists battle each other. Net neutrality is a punch line, spectrum auctions often fail and arcane media ownership rules made in the B&W TV era don't make sense. Maybe it's time to begin gradually sunsetting some of the FCC's historical remit.
Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
#169It's pretty insane. Our family has a holiday home in a fairly mountainous region in central-southern France. Dwindling population, no major tourist activity, wine production. We'd long suffered the worst imaginable 56k but in 2018, the local ISP just ran fibre out to everyone . I think the current service is cheaper than the 56k was too, and far cheaper than any of the 4/5G options back then. What I mean (vis á vis i…
Wonder how many thousands of taxpayer dollars was spent for this. Does not seem efficient.
How is it inefficient? This is the whole point of government: how much economic activity is happening over 56k? Virtually none. You could make the same argument for paving the street and repairing the sidewalk in front of your house. Chances are the property taxes from the average single family home don't cover just the basic street repairs, let alone all the other services your local government provides. Yet we do it, because it turns out that having a happy, well-served population by way of redistributing wealth through services is a generally good thing.
Re: France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Our area is never going to generate the return on internet alone for the isp? maybe. for the gdp? well, i imagine that a lot of highly paid remote labor would love to be located in rural France.
There's so very much rural France. They'd need a colossal influx of well paid remote labour moving to the country to make the sums work. I think the goal is social, to ensure that rural France isn't abandoned further than it was since the 1990s.
But also, having dial-up in 2017 is wild for me to think about.
I do wonder if ultimately via having everyone on fiber it pays for itself ultimately, since you don't have to "convert" anyone's internet between different mediums, you can also sunset all sorts of legacy equipment that's no longer in use since fiber is it.