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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

#61

Post by vacri »

jacques_chester wrote: post #6
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…

You and I both know that the politics, economics and public finance implications of the NBN are far more complex than you're making them out to be. (We've crossed swords on the subject before)

My comment is meant to be more lighthearted than serious political analysis, not to mention that we both also know that the general public have short memories and the tone is set by whomever is bitching at the moment. I certainly don't agree that the general public is aware of the complexities - vocal opponents of party X usually take any excuse that's currently going and run with it.

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

#62

Post by rayiner »

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…

Does anyone of a credible study about this?

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

#63

Post by vacri »

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.

I'm talking more about the general public tone, but yes, I do know some people that made that exact switch. There's really not much cognitive dissonance involved.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who grew up around poor people and was aware of how they struggle with money. Her family wasn't in poverty, but they weren't flush with money either. At around age 30, she made her way into the finance industry and started pulling down six figures. She mentioned that she got a raise recently, but had been infected by the finance mindset that any raise is tainted by the marginal tax rate, and was bitching that 'half of it went to the government' (for values where .37 = half, it seems).

Anyway, her version of the story went 'the government taxes so much money out that I can't give as much to my single-mother sister who is scraping by on welfare - they should lower taxes [for this reason]'. I asked what about all the other single mothers our there that don't have sisters in high finance - reducing the tax yield would mean they get less. My friend changed her tune pretty fast and realised that hey, she was actually in a good position and should be positive about it instead of negative.

The thing is, my friend wasn't someone who grew up amongst wealth, she knew what it was like to be poor, and she herself had worked the same shitty jobs as poor people everywhere. She was smart, and knew deeply about social opportunity (she dated a fiery, forthright anarchist for many years). People just tend to have short memories and short forethought and tend to think that what concerns them in the present is the most important thing always.

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

#64

Post by vacri »

scarmig wrote: post #58
hughes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The NBN still needs to go to where people live, which means stretching the grid out over far more land than in France. The width of the lain cable doesn't change the point that you still need to get someone out to dig a trench in the first place, as it were... France is only about 700km wide - that distance barely gets you out of our most populated state if you start from from its capital and drive for the nearest border.

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

#65

Post by vacri »

meaty wrote: post #20
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?

Huh? Only! I live in London and have 5 people on the end of a 12Mbit down and 1Mbit up and it's fine. The company I work for has 100 people on a 40Mbit fiber. This is all fine. People are just greedy bandwidth whores these days.

I think it's particularly funny when you see people complaining about pipe sizes that have wider throughput than can be generated by the servers from which they get their content. I have three people on the end of a 12Mb down and sure (torrentors and streaming video-watchers), sometimes we saturate it, but not often.

Far more often I'm sitting there going "No-one else is home, and my pipe is barely being used - why is this download so slow?". A server giving you content at 300KB/sec isn't going to go faster because you upgrade from 12Mb to 100Mb.

More speed is always nice, but seriously, the change from 2Mb to 12Mb was far less noticable than the change from dial-up to 2Mb. I guess an increased bandwidth would give more opportunity to stream hi-def video, but that's icing-on-the-cake territory, not basic-civil-right stuff.

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

#67

Post by seanp2k2 »

rayiner wrote: post #62
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…

Does anyone of a credible study about this?

"The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a non-profit American public broadcasting television network with 354 member television stations in the United States which hold collective ownership.[2] Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia."

"Since the mid-2000s, Roper polls commissioned by PBS have consistently placed the service as America's most-trusted national institution."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS

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

#68

Post by seanp2k2 »

Gmo wrote: post #11
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.

well, France has plenty (and still builds) plenty of high speed rail lines. So one does not necessarily prevent the other.

I wish the US didn't have such an extreme hatred of rail. Ooh well, enjoy sitting in traffic for hours every day, my fellow citizens. You can't buy that time back later in life.

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

#69

Post by josephlord »

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…

Look up Shannon limit. Fundamental limit on bandwidth is directly related to signal to noise ratio and available bandwidth.

Then you need to think who you are sharing the bandwidth with. Basically all transmitters and those overlapping (either they are noise or impose bandwidth limits).

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

#70

Post by rayiner »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #67
rayiner wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone of a credible study about this?

"The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a non-profit American public broadcasting television network with 354 member television stations in the United States which hold collective ownership.[2] Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia." "Since the mid-2000s, Roper polls commissioned by PBS have consistently placed the service as America's most-trusted national institution." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS

But it's not a PBS article. Cringley is a pundit and PBS is hosting his articles in an op-ed space called the "Pulpit."
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