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France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

zdnet.com

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Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#41

Post by wtvanhest »

rayiner wrote: post #19
wtvanhest wrote: post #13

Is there anyone else out there that thinks the investment may not be smart long term? I enjoy the luxury of highspeed wired internet in Boston and LTE internet on my phone. In the short term, I am considering switching to an LTE hub for my home to get rid of Comcast completely. I could be wrong, but I feel like we will see rapid development of wireless technology which could make the entire 20bn investment somewhat f…

Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than wireless. For the foreseeable future, you're going to want to be able to maximize your total capacity by taking advantage of terrestrial links when you have them. As for switching to LTE--don't. I tried that here in New York, and it's not what it's cracked up to be.…

Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than wireless.

I'm not an expert in physics but if cell phones use radio waves and radio waves travel at the speed of light it seems like at some point technology will allow for very fast over the air data transfers without breaking any laws of physics.

I have LTE on my AT&T phone and it seems pretty good, but I am definitely apprehensive about switching all my data to it in my house. I'll probably wait a few years, but if Comcast does anything to really infuriate me, I am likely to switch.

[Added] I got a few downvotes on this one, while I don't care about the karma, I do want to say that I didn't mean to say "I'm not an expert" in a sarcastic way. My intention was to point out that I don't know what I am talking about.

Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#42

Post by rmc »

cletus wrote: post #14

Ultimately I think Internet access will reach utility status (like water, electricity, telephony), meaning it will be a given (in the developed world at least and hopefully more and more of the developing world as time goes on). It's still priced as a premium product and there's no reason for this other than regional monopolies over the last mile. The one thing that confuses me about the France proposal is how they p…

In my experience the cost of things is higher in Australia than France. That could explain why the Aussie system is more expensive.

Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#43

Post by hughes »

cletus wrote: post #14

Ultimately I think Internet access will reach utility status (like water, electricity, telephony), meaning it will be a given (in the developed world at least and hopefully more and more of the developing world as time goes on). It's still priced as a premium product and there's no reason for this other than regional monopolies over the last mile. The one thing that confuses me about the France proposal is how they p…

France has a population density 42x higher than Australia, making it significantly easier to lower the per-person cost.

Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#44

Post by EwanToo »

wtvanhest wrote: post #41
rayiner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than wireless. For the foreseeable future, you're going to want to be able to maximize your total capacity by taking advantage of terrestrial links when you have them. As for switching to LTE--don't. I tried that here in New York, and it's not what it's cracked up to be.…

Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than wireless. I'm not an expert in physics but if cell phones use radio waves and radio waves travel at the speed of light it seems like at some point technology will allow for very fast over the air data transfers without breaking any laws of physics. I have LTE on my…

All those radio waves need to be shared between every phone connected to that cell, and between all the other radio based services out there (e.g. Television).

For a direct fibre link, all the available bandwidth is dedicated to you.

Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#45

Post by jvrossb »

vacri wrote: post #2

Hopefully the French public respond more maturely than the Australian public did to their similar plan - after years of bitching about how shit internet speeds were here, the gummint finally said "okay, we're going to build a great network with capacity for future use; it will be a great nation-building project", to which the public promptly turned on its heel and started whining about what a white elephant it was an…

Are you sure it's the same public? You're making it sound like the same people who were once for it swung against it.

Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#46

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #35
Retric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cut even 1 trip in 50 and you can avoid building a lot of infrastructure. Netflix vs video rentals is one clear example of less trips, but there are plenty of others.

1) Cutting 1 trip in 50 is actually a lot; 2) A 2% reduction in travel doesn't do much when e.g. U.S. air traffic alone is growing 2-3% every year and car traffic is increasing at 2-4% each year.

[deleted]

Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#47

Post by quink »

cturner wrote: post #32
cletus wrote: post #14

Ultimately I think Internet access will reach utility status (like water, electricity, telephony), meaning it will be a given (in the developed world at least and hopefully more and more of the developing world as time goes on). It's still priced as a premium product and there's no reason for this other than regional monopolies over the last mile. The one thing that confuses me about the France proposal is how they p…

Telecommunications has been headed in the other direction. State monopolies get privatised and lose their monopoly status. I don't think your other examples are standardised in the way you suggest either. Control of electricity becomes less and less centralised. I wouldn't want internet to be treated as one-size-fits-all. With competition, if one company tries to block certain features, you can change to another. Als…

The extenuating circumstance here is that the opposition, which is now trying to get elected, privatised the national telco starting in 1997.

What that meant is we had a for profit company, Telstra, owning both the entire phone network and the biggest cable network, with big stakes in PayTV and joined at the hip through that to the biggest media organisation in the country, Murdoch's. The only competition worth speaking of is another HFC rollout by a competitor that Telstra overbuilt at every turn and made much less viable and DSLAMs by other providers in a minority of local exchanges that still require payments to Telstra including ULL fees. Telstra was also privatised without any vertical separation worth speaking of.

The NBN, evil as government run business may be, represents the most viable and sensible solution to the problem of Telstra. The people putting it together and the ACCC have made sure that it wouldn't be like Telstra at all. What it represents is, like water or electricity infrastructure, a single path to the premise at the lowest possible cost, a mandate of falling prices in real and nominal terms and restrictions by the ACCC being planned out until 2040 already.

How do we know it will be good for competition? Because every telco in the country, Telstra included, is unhappy wih particular details, but they are on board, and Telstra included, happy enough to be there.

Also, the NBN is fairly dumb as a network. A lot of things are handled by the provider, the FTTH deployment of the NBN goes up to layer 2 only. We've tried your proposal of letting private enterprise do the lot, and all it has led to is an increasingly decaying copper network and no HFC rollout of any major note since about 1997.

If broadband becomes a right, not a privilege, especially in a country of suburban sprawl, then you need to treat it like water or electricity. Dumb wholesale network at the bottom, vibrant conpetitive market at the top.

Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#48

Post by Retric »

rayiner wrote: post #35
Retric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cut even 1 trip in 50 and you can avoid building a lot of infrastructure. Netflix vs video rentals is one clear example of less trips, but there are plenty of others.

1) Cutting 1 trip in 50 is actually a lot; 2) A 2% reduction in travel doesn't do much when e.g. U.S. air traffic alone is growing 2-3% every year and car traffic is increasing at 2-4% each year.

Air travel is substituting for other forms of travel because it has become far cheaper with a 50% average cost savings between 1997 and 2006.

Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#49

Post by quink »

wtvanhest wrote: post #41
rayiner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than wireless. For the foreseeable future, you're going to want to be able to maximize your total capacity by taking advantage of terrestrial links when you have them. As for switching to LTE--don't. I tried that here in New York, and it's not what it's cracked up to be.…

Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than wireless. I'm not an expert in physics but if cell phones use radio waves and radio waves travel at the speed of light it seems like at some point technology will allow for very fast over the air data transfers without breaking any laws of physics. I have LTE on my…

Case in point, I'm Australian and just looking at Verizon's website and 50 GB is $375 on a small business plan. That's the wireless telco way of managing contention. Price any significant usage out of possibility.

Re: France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

#50

Post by cpleppert »

jvrossb wrote: post #45
vacri wrote: post #2

Hopefully the French public respond more maturely than the Australian public did to their similar plan - after years of bitching about how shit internet speeds were here, the gummint finally said "okay, we're going to build a great network with capacity for future use; it will be a great nation-building project", to which the public promptly turned on its heel and started whining about what a white elephant it was an…

Are you sure it's the same public? You're making it sound like the same people who were once for it swung against it.

If he is referring to poll numbers likely he is taking them out of context and extrapolating tepid support for one element to majority support for the entire project. This happens a lot in the media analysis of polls. You can't take what the results of a poll question were and assume that 100% of the respondents in favor even:

1)know what the project is

2)favor it over alternatives

3)have judged the the disadvantages and are prepared for them

4)support it because they believe their party supports it

5)have faith in the political system

This isn't about the wording per se. Context matters.

To take a recent example: polls shows that Americans favor Obama over congressional republicans on economic issues. However, they still are (generally and marginally)opposed to his handling of economic issues and a strong minority of those who oppose the republicans do so out of a belief that they aren't cutting government enough. In other words, disillusioned republicans don't favor either party but aren't likely to support obama under any circumstances. You can look at the same polls with regard to china and democracy. Chinese both are satisfied with the direction of their country and want more democracy. If you aren't willing to consider context you can choose either poll to support your position.

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