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

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

#51

Post by Variance »

chaostheory wrote: post #37

Not many people remember, but the Clinton admin offered $200 billion in credits and tax cuts for US telcos to roll out fiber nationwide in 1996: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026... http://www.cringely.com/2009/10/29/what-goes-around-teledesi... TDLR: through mergers and good lawyers, the telcos were able to get the $200 billion of Clinton tax credits in return for nothing. Obama is trying…

The Clinton administration bears a lot of blame for that--the government had a unique way of not, you know, actually making the credits conditional on rolling out nationwide fiber. Business is as business does, government is as government does, and apparently no one had the idea of modulating ISP rewards _after_ broadband service levels changed. I'm not sure you can blame the telcos for maximizing shareholder value as much as you can blame regulators for not understanding that the sky is blue.

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

#52

Post by bjourne »

Variance wrote: post #51
chaostheory wrote: post #37

Not many people remember, but the Clinton admin offered $200 billion in credits and tax cuts for US telcos to roll out fiber nationwide in 1996: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026... http://www.cringely.com/2009/10/29/what-goes-around-teledesi... TDLR: through mergers and good lawyers, the telcos were able to get the $200 billion of Clinton tax credits in return for nothing. Obama is trying…

The Clinton administration bears a lot of blame for that--the government had a unique way of not, you know, actually making the credits conditional on rolling out nationwide fiber. Business is as business does, government is as government does, and apparently no one had the idea of modulating ISP rewards _after_ broadband service levels changed. I'm not sure you can blame the telcos for maximizing shareholder value a…

You're assuming that the government has the public's interest as it's main priority -- not that its purpose is to funnel value from the public to private owners pockets. That they are able to exploit the goodwill of the state isn't a flaw, it's a feature.

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

#53

Post by kl0nk »

Like every ideas there is some good and some bad. It's stupid to think about FTTH and FTTLA in the french countryside because nobody cares about it. We just have to wait and see how much will be actually spent in a useful way. I'm confident because in the past, France showed that it can make a success in telco.

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

#54

Post by kl0nk »

Jacqued wrote: post #12
mtgx wrote: post #9

Only 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload? I guess it would be okay for rural areas, but it's awfully obsolete for cities, even today, let alone for 2023 - at least for an European country, especially one like France. And why such low upload speeds?

Today in France, most people in cities can have access to 100Mbps/5Mbps. Low upload speeds have been a constant around here since the first broadband offering, with upload speeds capping at roughly one tenth or on twentielth of download speeds. I guess this is because the concept of Internet as an entirely decentralized network didn't make sense to France Telecom, the national operator which made the first investment…

To give the entire picture, you should say that ADSL is asynchronous, and the 100/5 Mbps (and also 200Mbps/10 which I currently have, but only available in Paris) are offers offers are from "Numericable, which is a cable operator (and the only one) were/are really famous for their... err. problems (euphemism). In my last flat I was eligible to offers from "Free" ISP , and I got around 500Mbps to 800Mbps symectrical bandwith since it was only limited by the gigabit switch of the box. Sadly I had to move. And to be totally honest their peering problem (again euphemism since Youtube was slower than my smartphone with Orange in 3G) was killing the thrill. I got a faster "everyday" internet right now with 200/10/Mbps than during my "Free" days. (For the story Numericable has abandoned the peering part of the job and just buy bandwith to Level3, Neotelecoms, Telia and HE mainly. Their only job is to deploy and maintain a country wide backbone). During the 2000s France internet was really in advance, with the cheapest megabytes, but right now it tends to be like others countries :( The only good thing that remains is that traffic is always unlimited, in homes offers. The business market is still competitive. My point is I don't think €20B is really an answer, but that's not answering to how they are going to use it.

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

#55

Post by kl0nk »

seszett wrote: post #31
lucb1e wrote: post #26

Last time I heard, they were so poor they got more money from the EU than they paid. Category Greece and Spain. Meanwhile we're only paying...

That's always been wrong http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/europe/09/eu_budget_...

I don't know where this gif comes from but I have this source: http://ec.europa.eu/budget/figures/2011/2011_en.cfm So in terms of "Total 'national contributions'": DE: 21 189.9 FR: 19 075.6 IT: 14 517.6 UK: 12 918.3

It was published the 20/09/2012.

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

#56

Post by chaostheory »

Variance wrote: post #51
chaostheory wrote: post #37

Not many people remember, but the Clinton admin offered $200 billion in credits and tax cuts for US telcos to roll out fiber nationwide in 1996: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026... http://www.cringely.com/2009/10/29/what-goes-around-teledesi... TDLR: through mergers and good lawyers, the telcos were able to get the $200 billion of Clinton tax credits in return for nothing. Obama is trying…

The Clinton administration bears a lot of blame for that--the government had a unique way of not, you know, actually making the credits conditional on rolling out nationwide fiber. Business is as business does, government is as government does, and apparently no one had the idea of modulating ISP rewards _after_ broadband service levels changed. I'm not sure you can blame the telcos for maximizing shareholder value a…

> I'm not sure you can blame the telcos for maximizing shareholder value as much as you can blame regulators for not understanding that the sky is blue.

Actually you can. Regardless of legality, it is still stealing.

I'm just really sick of people condoning this crap just because the motivation is to maximize shareholder value. There's a thing called ethics.

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

#57

Post by riffraff »

kl0nk wrote: post #55
seszett wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's always been wrong http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/europe/09/eu_budget_...

I don't know where this gif comes from but I have this source: http://ec.europa.eu/budget/figures/2011/2011_en.cfm So in terms of "Total 'national contributions'": DE: 21 189.9 FR: 19 075.6 IT: 14 517.6 UK: 12 918.3 It was published the 20/09/2012.

the two things are not necessarily at odds: states put some money in (total national contributions), then take some more money out (resulting in net contributions).

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

#58

Post by scarmig »

hughes wrote: post #43
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.

Not strictly true. The relevant number is population density as lived. Australia is really big with large empty areas, but it has huge concentrations of people on the coasts in urbanized, developed environments.

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

#59

Post by bcbrown »

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…

Both wireless and fiber optics act by transmitting information through electromagnetic waves. The speed of light isn't the interesting constraint here, because they're both bound by it. Fiber-optics will have slightly higher latency for the transmission component, because the speed of light is slower in a fiber than through the atmosphere.

The real constraint comes in bits per second. With wireless, the ability to improve that comes about by increasing the frequency spectrum in use. You can overlay a signal at, say 1GHz with one at, say, 1.5GHz, and the two signals won't interfere with each other. So the eventual capacity ceiling with wireless transmission is the size of suitable frequency spectrum that is budgeted to it. There is a physical ceiling (can't use 1Khz, for example, or 1PHz) to the amount of spectrum, and therefore, the total wireless bandwidth has a ceiling.

With fiber optics, to double bandwidth, you can simply drop a second cable next to the first. So the bandwidth is capped by the number of cables you can lay. This has a much higher ceiling than for wireless.

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

#60

Post by walshemj »

sambeau wrote: post #5

Britain would be better-off doing this rather than building ahigh-speed line. High speed internet for the whole country would be a massive stimulus to all sorts of new business ideas and working practices.

BT offered this (nationwide fire lookout) to the thatcher government 20+ years ago in return for 20 years to payback. Refused of ideological grounds unfortunately.

But that would not had let the fast boys in the city make a killing.

I suspect that France Telecom will contrary to EU regulations will not allow this local loop to be unbundled - France Telecom still acts as a defacto PTT and national champion

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