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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

#81

Post by vacri »

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.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree that only being able to upload vga video is a violation of basic human rights.

Internet access is a basic human right not because of long-distance communication with family (that's a luxury), but because, like telephones, you need it to access basic services. An increasing number only have online offerings now, or require you to jump through online hoops.

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

#82

Post by vacri »

demallien wrote: post #77
vacri wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%

That doesn't really matter though, since the goal is 100% coverage. I mean, technically, the NBN was 'useful' even when it just covered the couple of test-run blocks (one ended about 500m from me...).

I've been a city boy all my life, but we really need to stop treating regional and rural Australia as second-class citizens when it comes to these kinds of things.

The other thing you point out is interesting - the urbanisation rate of Australia. It's in the top 5 'big' countries, sitting at 90% - above France at 85%, and the US/UK at 80%. It kinda goes against the mythical image we have of ourselves, the rugged outback-seeker. Sod the wide brown land, give us tarmac!

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

#83

Post by joonix »

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…

Not to mention NBN includes the launch of two satellites into orbit to provide coverage for the most remote (think outback) parts of Australia.

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

#84

Post by meaty »

ZoFreX wrote: post #79
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.

> 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 foreve…

So basically it's an opportunity as always to monetize everything rather than lead to real social improvements?

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

#85

Post by 18pfsmt »

bambax wrote: post #39
Jacqued wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget FTTLA, which is vastly available in the most densely populated urban areas - it is not as fast as FTTH when there are a lot of households connected to the last amplifier, but i'd say roughly 20% of households could have access to it. On the other hand, FFTH is available for maybe 0.5% of the country (I mean, even in Paris itself, not one building in twenty is connected to it...) I think you are right wit…

I only pay 32€ every other month, and I have more bandwidth than I need.

Could you imagine using your own hardware, on your own connection to run your bootstrapped side-project for $100/mo? I'd rather not have to pay Amazon, OVH, or whoever just to be able to service side-projects.

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

#86

Post by ricardonunez »

morphle wrote: post #80
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

Thank you for your offer. Right now I can't get into more detail. As soon as I can (Without getting into trouble), I'll post more news.

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

#87

Post by ZoFreX »

meaty wrote: post #84
ZoFreX wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 foreve…

So basically it's an opportunity as always to monetize everything rather than lead to real social improvements?

Personally I think shifting creation from centralised gatekeepers to smaller organisations and individuals is a social improvement, and a lot of what is driving the need for upstream is things like video chatting which again is a social need.
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