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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

#71

Post by contingencies »

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…

I am Australian and totally agree the NBN is a great idea. After all, it will allow higher tech companies to operate in regional Australia, which can only do good things for people's health (move out of the city!) and presently suffering economies.

New Zealand also has an NBN-like initiative based upon dual fiber/wireless; they have just upgraded their rollout map here: http://koordinates.com/maps/BroadbandMap/sets/

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

#72

Post by martinced »

Desperate move...

It's a desperate move and it may not be that smart in face of ever faster wireless.

The problem with France is that for years they were bragging that they were the "4e plus grand puissance du monde" (world's 4th most powerful nation). Now they're fifth. By the end of Hollande's first mandate they'll be sixth (Brazil passing in front of them).

If Hollande is re-elected, France could very well be out of the G8 by 2022 (ouch: three more places lost).

Germany today said that french people only working 35 hours a week and only until 60 years simply isn't going to cut it.

Oh, sure, it may somehow work. But not if you plan to stay relevant compared to the other countries.

These are more words by Hollande: some more little faerie dust to dodge and delay discussing the real issue. Most notably: public spending representing 56% of the GDP and the private sector being taxed like crazy and which, hence, keeps shrinking and shrinking.

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

#73

Post by T-Winsnes »

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…

I don't think it's the population size that is the problem. It's the difference in land size[0].

AU: 7,682,300 km^2

France: 640,427 km^2

Australia is over 7 million square kilometers larger than France. Even though 95% of the population is centralized around the coast, the network will have to reach close to 100%. That last 5% is what pushes the price up.

If you look at the distance from Adelade to Alice Springs, from the south to about the middle of Autralia, which is around 1500km[1]. And compare it to the distance from Marsielle to Lille, sounth to north of France, which is around 1000km[2] you start realizing how large Australia is and why putting fiber down to get close to 100% coverage gets a lot more expensive here.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependenc...

[1]: https://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=di...

[2]: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=distance+from+Marsielle+t...

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

#74

Post by Vlaix »

kl0nk wrote: post #53

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.

France is larger than Paris. The countryside isn't populated by cows only and I'm very much concerned about it.

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

#75

Post by tjoff »

EwanToo wrote: post #16
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?

Mmmm, describing 50 Mbps down as "okay for rural areas" doesn't really mesh with reality. Most rural areas throughout Europe and elsewhere are struggling with If you know any region in the world which isn't densely populated, but where every home (not just 1 or 2) has 50 Mbps download, I'd love to read about it. I know of a handful of self-starter village communities which are doing this (e.g. B4RN in the UK), and th…

We are talking about rural areas in 2023...

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

#76

Post by nitrogen »

vacri wrote: post #65
meaty wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I would argue that the ability to upload HD video is in the same basic civil right territory as telephony, what with the ubiquity of video calling to maintain family connections across long distances. Modern cultural participation, when not located in a major urban center, requires high upload bandwidth.

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

#77

Post by demallien »

vacri wrote: post #64
scarmig wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bo…

You don't actually have to provide fibre to someone living in Cobar for the NBN to be useful though. If you cover the ten biggest cities in Australia, you have covered about 90% of the population. If you cover the ten biggest cities in france, you haven't even got to 50%

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

#78

Post by meaty »

nitrogen wrote: post #76
vacri wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I would argue that the ability to upload HD video is in the same basic civil right territory as telephony, what with the ubiquity of video calling to maintain family connections across long distances. Modern cultural participation, when not located in a major urban center, requires high upload bandwidth.

Most non major urban areas give less of a crap about such things. It's only the cities that care.

The internet doesn't have as much penetration as you think.

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

#79

Post by ZoFreX »

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.

> People are just greedy bandwidth whores these days.

Not really. Having really fast broadband completely changes what is possible, and if we want to secure future economic growth for the internet, it's a great area to invest in. I have 120 megabits and easily saturate that on a regular basis. This in turn makes it possible to watch movies in the highest of defs on-demand, or purchase and download them to keep forever in less time than it takes to walk to the shops. We can download increasingly huge video games in less time than it would take to install from discs.

We have so many online businesses making huge amounts of money off entertainment while traditional platforms are dying, but if internet speed stagnates, or the fraction of the population that has very fast internet stops growing, that will limit the potential market for online media.

Another consideration is that 1mbit up. People are finding more and more awesome uses for larger upstreams. Yes, you wouldn't need a huge increase in your upstream to have great Skype video quality, but if you want to upload videos you make to YouTube in HD, or stream your gaming session in HD, you are going to feel the pain on the vast majority of broadband plans available today. We need to move away from the old online distribution model of "people consume, servers create".

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

#80

Post by morphle »

ricardonunez wrote: post #29

I'm working in bringing high speed broadband to rural areas in the U.S. We are putting all energy in securing funding right now. You can't imagine how hard is for a start-up to secure funding for it. It has been exhausting. I applaud any initiative by the governments to invest in high speed internet.

We have ways of funding fiber to the home and farm in the US and Europe. We have ample backbone capacity. Send me an email to discuss funding you. info at eigenglasvezel dot net
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