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2.5Gb/s Internet For French Homes
Erick Lionheart at www.gamersloot.net writes "Presence-pc at reports that France Telecom just announced they are offering 2.5 Gb/s Internet connections to select cities in the Paris region. For ... $85(70 Euros) a month you also get free phone and TV. From the article (in French): 'The historical operator opted for a GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) FTTH architecture (Fiber To The Home). This technology allows up to 2.5 Gbits/s download and 1.2 Gigabits/s upload.'"
LET THE TORRENTS BEGIN
Oh the sweet, sweet pr0n! Holy crap, I wish I lived in France!
Wait, did I just say what I think I said...?
In france and other countries, people get insane connections (like the one listed in TFA)
Here in the states, what do we get? We get shit. 15mbps for 50 bucks a month is crap, and I know that we're the lucky ones getting that speed in the first place. Other spots in the US get barely a meg for that price.
Now who said we don't need Net Neutrality again?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
For... $85(70 Euros) a month you also get free phone and TV.
Ummm.... if it's $85/month, it isn't really "free," is it?
Soylens viridis homines es
"This technology allows up to 2.5 Gbits/s download and 1.2 Gigabits/s upload."""
Sounds a bit like a penis war. Especially when you consider the bottlenecks usually aren't at the last-mile.
You mean when you don't devote all the country's resources to war, you can actually spend money on developing infrastructure at home and abroad that improves the lives of citizens?!?? AMAAAAAZING!!
THE FRENCH....the french have more bandwidth. Its just not right I tell you. I want fiber to the home. Oh and I want a cooler cell phone like the Japanese. How come the terrorist are after us. All we have is crappy phones that have been out for like a year or more other places and a few Mb of bandwidth.
Okay, it was an obligatory joke... yes I know we won the revolutionary war due to the French military assistance and they gave us the statue of liberty... I just find it funny to swap out the word 'French' with the word 'Freedom' to be "PC" -- however, when talking about France should one instead use the word "Freedom"? Wow, 2.5 gigs... yeah that is freedom!
But I notice they are using GPON. I have 1Gb/s GPON in Japan (free, comes with the body corp fees) and 1Gig aint "1Gig". Yeah looks good but I would prefer dedicated 100Meg than 2.5Gig GPON.
And what, in 40 seconds you've hit your monthly cap?
Seriously though, it' s trade-off. We could have this sort of thing in parts of North America, but it would require consumers and gov't to stop moaning and griping about where telecos and cablecos pick to choose their deployments. Cherry-picking, if you will.
Because in case you didn't notice, all these Asian and European plans that seem so fast (and than always get everyone green with envy) always have the disclaimer "in select areas/markets" on them. Which means "deployed to a very few affluent areas that can likely afford it", a concept which seems to go over OK in Asia and Europe, but not so OK in North America.
For some reason, when I read news releases like these, I get all excited about the possibilities of a tremendous amount of bandwidth available to me in the home -- then realize the reality.
You are only going to get the bandwidth that you are being served.
With that said, if I'm downloading a huge ISO or other multimedia file from a site on my 2.5GB connection, and the remote site is sitting on a 256K upstream cable modem, then I'm going to get no more than 256K.
While YOU might have 2.5GB of downstream available to you, most providers these days serving upstream content don't have anything close to that availability.
And furthermore, I seriously doubt that many PCs today even have the ability to CONSUME 2.5GB of bandwidth. Are they making 10GB ethernet cards for the consumer market? Ummm... no.
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
France Telecom/Orange better improve their current offers. They are eaten alive by other ADSL providers. FT/Orange gives you 18Mb/s ADSL for 40 euros a month (includes TV channels AND NO telephone) when other providers gives you 24Mb/s for 25 to 30 euros which includes TV AND free phone calls to Europe, USA, and other countries. They lose thousands of customers per month.
Let's hope that they'll compete by innovating, but I doubt it.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
2.5Gb/s, but they will not give you any airspace with that!
Finally, a real reason to hate the French.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
As TFA is in french i can't check the facts but it sound not really plausible to me. There must be some catch as in "it's shared for a whole block". Otherwise 4 customers would be able to saturate a 10Gb switch
O la la... c'est un tas de porn.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
And here in America, we STILL fall further and further behind in broadband. Where is this 45+ M/bit sync fiber connection the telcos promised 80%+ of Americans were supposed to have by now?
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
All i know is, p2p is legal and they have 1.2 gbs up... you cant beat that with a stick.
we cant even get FTTP in San Fran where its offered
when it does come to america please invest in cisco.......
In the spirit of world communication and harmony, we should all adopt this French model.
French models usually aren't tech saavy, but this one is.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
ummm, for especially low values of 85?
By the way, if you want to understand whey they like him check out "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" by Jacques Tati, 1953.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
In my experience whenever I have travelled to these countries and used their "gigabit" connections the actual throughput is comparable to what we are getting in cable models here in the US. In particular Korea, which brags about being the most connected country in the world, offers so-called gigabit connections but the end-user isnt getting gigabit speeds - more like 300KB cable modem speeds. Its just a marketing gimmick.
BTW, I have FIOS (fiber) here in DC and I am not seeing near the speed they promise either.
As opposed to uploading the US culture which would take less then a second
Is 15 mbps shit? I wish I had that shit. I just have 4 Mbps for 20/month.
People like me who live in a major American metropolis (home to our regional telephone monopoly!) can only get 256 Kbps/128 Kbps for $20 (with a special offer; it's normally $25)! Getting 3-6 Mbps down costs $38-47.
Cable internet (for non cable TV customers) costs $58-68 for 4-8 Mbps (or $15 less if you're willing to pay $15-50 for TV).
I would practically KILL to have 4 Mbps for $20/month. I don't know WHERE in the US you get 15 Mbps, but I'm sure that it costs nearly 4X what you're paying. (3X if that figure is 20 EUR/month.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Would have been funnier if you didn't parade your ignorance of the English language while trying to sound condescending.
What's expensive with FTTH is the termination of the fiber to the homes, not so much the backbone.
French experts agree that getting all the homes connected in France would cost approximately 30bn (with an average cost of 1500 per house).
That may sound like a lot but in fact it's only the price of 500KM of new highway.
I think that this infrastructure should be paid for by the state and allowed access to private companies against a fee for TV, Internet and phone services.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
So my father invested in France telecom. Bought at 128, the all time high I think. They went down to 70, 40, 30. At one point they were down to 9. At that time, the company released its finacial report detailing how they had taken in I think 23 billion in revenue, and had made a loss of 1 billion.
Upon closer inspection, I discovered that their expendature had been marked as 12 billion in running costs or some such, and the other 12 billion was marked as "captial infrastructural development", or some such. The main telecoms provider in france had just invested 12 billion in its infrastructural development as was down to 9 per share.
I advised him to remortgage his house and put it all on France Telecom.
He did no such thing. I believe he sold what he had at 15. The shares are now worth about 22.
As I tried to explain, that 12 billion infrastructural fund wasn't to repaint buildings. France Telecom were giving the French telecoms system a serious upgrade, and as you can no doubt see, it's already paid off. The French can now get their phone, TV and internet over the same line. The company was never, ever going to go under as anyone who knows anything about French big business will tell you.
That's what a high bandwidth network for 70 million people costs. 12 billion, give or take. And it doesn't require any extortion policies from telecoms on internet businesses. It took a 1 billion loss in one year, and the French now have the best telecoms infrastructure on the continent, if not the world. Say what you may about the French, but when they do big infrastructural projects, they tend to get it right; TGV, Nuclear power, Millau Viaduct, etc.
May the Maths Be with you!
I'm getting internet hooked up at my new place and it's costing me $60's for just 5mb down and 1mb up... That also doesn't include cable (another 20 dollars) or phone ($30's).
because I don't see any other way of saturating a 1.2 Gb/s connection upload, even if your entire street shares it...
well, I guess Bittorrent might.
I ask because I setup a Gentoo-based webserver in my house but can't open it to the world because it's against my ISP's Terms of Service.
"Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
Sadly North America is in the stoneages where technology is concerened... or rather North America is not technology driven as much as Europe... and nowhere close to Japan and some neighbours. Viva La' France!
sure . and if you're nice they'll teach you there gramar too .
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
They're getting fibres to their homes with a capacity of 2.5Gb. It's possible that this bandwidth is only between a home and the other end of the cable. This doesn't mean it's plugged into a router with that bandwidth. They're probably going to be using it for other purposes such as HD-VoD.
They must have some big trucks, um, tubes that is in France!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Oh, so you people are the ones to blame for DSL?
If it wasn't for you guys our government might had invested 50.000.000.000 sek in fiber for everyone, but since the market forces started to pick it on themself with DSL they have only invested like 5.000.000.000 and people are sitting there with their shitty 1mbps upload.
Stupid government, over 20-30 years time fiber to everyone would be worth it, the cost per month in that perspective isn't much.
Thanks for the link to a French article. At any rate though, what will people do with all that bandwidth? What do they do with it now? No, seriously I'm just wondering. I have about 12 megabits download speed right now, and honestly I don't really need that much. I do wish my 600 kilobit upload speed were much faster. But what would I do with a gigabit of download?
Penny - plain text accounting
Same fiber to the home concept...10x+ the speed...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I recently heard that when the fiber lines that are run all over the US were originally planned and put in back in the 70's/80's, it was planned for each house in the US to get FREE 150Mb fiber. I'm unable to find any documentation for this, but I'm assuming that The Telco's bought/leased it instead and are selling it to us.
This space intentionally left blank
I'll just stand over here and hold my breath now.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yup. It'll be here any day now. We might need to give them another couple hundred billion in additional subsidies so that they can ensure that they do it right...
This guy's the limit!
We've only just started getting 10MB cable connections in the UK, and 16-20MB is still in its infancy and only available to about 0.001% of the population. Even then you need to physically reside on top of the phone exchange to get anything like the full speed.
I pay £35 (approx. $65) a month for 10Mbit, with a paltry 384kbps upload. So, you haven't got it that bad to be honest.
Wonderous.
Mega-speed internet. While France has a 10+% unemployment rate.
It's nice to see that the real problems are being solved!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
But...It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
Dear Senator Ted Stevens,
The French can figure this shit out, why can't you?
Love, rm
Can all fish swim?
So there is something better than my 56kbps dial-up connection!! Ok, so I'll have whole 2.5Gbps to send IMs, and... attempt to access slashdotted websites? COOOLLLLL
That is still a lot of money.
We are currently heading to Wimax instead to cover rural areas (DSL is considered economically unfeasible for more than 10% of french population, and unfortunately, this population is mostly composed of upper middle class, so is not really computer illiterate.
But how much will Watson get?
Get your own free personal location tracker
I am French and am well aware of FREE's (ISP) ambition for WI-MAX.
Just wanted to clarify why DSL is not economically feasible for ~10% of the population.
DSL needs to be within 5-6 Km of a DSLAM, which as we well know don't come cheap and need hundreds of users to amortise cost.
Fiber doesn't suffer as much from signal attenuation (I've heard things like 15KM aren't impossible). So in fact, for these people FTTH is more of a possibility than DSL.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
I think that this infrastructure should be paid for by the state and allowed access to private companies against a fee for TV, Internet and phone services.
You'd think that the average government would see it this way, but they don't. They spend billions on roads and other infrastructure but don't see the importance or benefit of providing advanced networking and bandwidth. Once in place, cheap and acessible it could make a huge difference to the economy and quality of life, not to mention create industries and tech development.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Here is an English translation of the page from Google. http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F %2Fwww.presence-pc.com%2Factualite%2Fftth-experien ce-18331%2F&langpair=fr%7Cen&hl=en&safe=off&ie=UTF -8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
GPON, like other PON fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies, uses a single fibre at the central office (telephone exchange), which splits again and again on its way to homes. A single fibre does deliver about 2.5 Gbps, but it is split up to 32, 64 or 128 times (depending on how many subscribers have signed up, and how the telco has deployed the fibre. So the real bandwidth you get is something like 20 Mbps (1:128 split) to 80 Mbps (1:32 split). Good, but not quite gigabits...
m ?ARTICLE_ID=231662&p=13 for details of the various standards.
GPON is the ITU (international) standard, while EPON, aka GEPON is from the US's IEEE - GPON is used more in Europe and US, while GEPON is bigger in AsiaPac, where NTT and others are investing huge amounts in fibre (DSL is already on decline in Japan and Korea). See http://lw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf
The other FTTP architecture of interest is Active Ethernet, in which you have a fibre per home/business, and plain old powered Ethernet kit driving the fibres. It gives you 100 Mbps bidirectionally, and possibly more depending on the kit (just upgrade the switches as technology becomes available). So it's more future-proof, but generally costs more to deploy initially, though in some cases it's a better bet according to some (in rural areas or densely populated cities, where it becomes fibre to the basement with VDSL in-building over pre-installed copper, 100 Meg end to end).
We had a new cable company come into my home city pushing fiber to the curb, and in order to get access to the rights of way they had to install in the poor neighborhoods first. Rural areas and chery picking rich neighborhoods are too different issues. If they could have gone into the rich neighborhood they would probably offer much faster services and have a much larger market share.
I was not aware that this kind of thing happened. I will retreat from my last comment.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That I think we'll start seeing a new 1337 term popping up from our fellow French gamers..."LE GPONed!1!1!!!!"
The article is in Freedom. I can't read freedom!
I surrender, and will be moving to Paris ASAP!
Or will be moving to Paris, and then surrendering - whichever French law requires.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
To put this in terms of a monetary unit I just saw (in "Science" no less), this is only 50 IWDs - "Iraq War Days" - about $190 million. (Yes, France doesn't really have IWDs and this speed broadband would cost the US much more. But I couldn't resist using the unit.)
Please, for the love of freedom, if you have one of these connections, donate some of your spare bandwidth to anonymous browsing services.
If a good upstream connection (with no bandwidth caps) were affordable where I live, I'd be doing it today.
Or, they could download YOUR whole culture, run it through a spellchecker, and reupload it again in only 3 seconds!
Thought they were talking about GB's. Since it's Gigabits, well, that's available in many parts of the world today.
We had a free upgrades from a major ISP from 1 Gbps up/down to 1 Gbps up / 10 Gbps down over here half a year ago or so.
I'm not intending to brag about my country with this; that's why I don't mention it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This technology allows up to 2.5 Gbits/s download and 1.2 Gigabits/s upload.
Translation: they will deliver 2.3Gbps downstream
and 128kbps upstream
Like they always do.
Pisses me off that I have "broadband" and can download isos in 20 minutes, but it takes a half a friggin hour to email a hanldful of photos to the folks.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Old: Cheese-eating surrender monkeys
New: Fast-surfing surrender monkeys
And if you're nice we'll teach you how to spell "grammar".
That's some cold sh... Okay, maybe not.
The article doesn't imply that France Telecom is offering a 2,5 Gbits/s Internet connexion, just that the link that connects the customer to the FT network is 2,5 Gbits/s.
l ists/press_releases/CP_old/cp060117.html
FT uses this link to provide Phone, TV, Internet. The article does not say what is the Internet bandwidth that is offered to the customer.
According to the news, the new service is offered in a few select cities of Paris Region.
In fact, the service isn't commercially available. It's only a pilot experiment, only about one hundred of people are concerned.
And finally this is old news, from january:
http://www.francetelecom.com/en/financials/journa
In other words, each endpoint gets around 80 Mb/s downstream and around 40 Mb/s upstream. 2.5 Gb/s is the downstream system capacity between the optical line terminal and optical network terminal, not the service offered to an individual customer.
Oh, well only 80 Mbps. I'd still take that. I'd still just about kill for that, especially if it was affordable.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
... as all the DDoS-botnet-masters put their eyes on the French.
They may soon. The major disaster of the teleco breakup etc was that the teleco's continue to own the lines and provide services. They do not own the lines, they were paid for by gov provided monopoly grants, and thus should truly be owned by the governments (local/state/fed) anyways. If cables are municipality owned, and service is provided by separate companies, then you can have true competition.
Of course, and the thing that keeps this from happening, is that then the affluent areas that desire the "best" will get it, while "under-privledged" areas (defined as those that have something less) will then "unlawfully be discriminated" against.
That could be regulated by imposing line fees to maintain and upgrade the network as needed, while allowing the affluent areas to upgrade when they want by paying for it themselves. A sort of public/private partnership where the public sector maintains ownership. It's not like they public "owner" can shift the cabling to another area, much like a road or water main cannot be shifted to another area. The output of power generation plants, however, can be.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
This kind of bandwith is useless for most people at this time, and probably for years; I would rather spend my tax money spent in expanding DSL infrastructure everywhere, which is probably not very expensive now.
This is not an offtopic post.
Please read up on the Bell Curve. There are people on the bottom of the curve that can not work and look after themselves. We will always have elements in society that can not and do not work. This is the very reason why some people will be rich and why others will not be.
Back to speaking about fiber. Once it is installed, you'll see the effects of the bell curve once again. Some people will use it to improve their lives, Video/Voice Chat, research, distributed computing. You'll then have those that even with this amazing technology will remain uneducated and poor.
Just like mass transit requires mass, so does getting any kind of reasonable return out of setting up fibre to the door infrastructure. It should come as no surprise that sprawling, sparse North America should be way behind the likes of western Europe.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" - Einstein
If a SATAII drive can only do 300 MB/s (assuming we're talking about bits for both speeds), surely the hard drive speeds will start hampering the speed of connection? In this case unless my maths is very wrong, it'll deliver faster than the hard disk can write.
Nothing costs nothing
ah ! ah !
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
I never thought I'd say this, but: I kind of wish I lived in France. [ewww]
Haiku for you!
$30 BILLION for 500 miles of new highway? Where, exactly, are you getting your figures? That's about $18,500 per linear foot of highway. Contrast that to a recent proposal for building a "new" Interstate 69 in Indiana, which came in at $1.9B for 140 miles, or about $2600 per linear foot. Assuming your example highway was three times as wide as I69, where does the $11,000 per linear foot go?
I understand the concept of a bell curve.
I understand that total employment is a myth.
I even understand the whole concept of people "at the top" and people "at the bottom".
However, a 10% unemployment rate is a rather vicious bell curve. Especially for a country with 63 million people.
Additionally, reducing it to a bell curve and then just turning people into statistics always tends to trivialize the severity of a problem.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Are the French Government subsidising this in anyway?
if not, what has the French unemployment rate got to do with anything?
Acid House saves Souls
That's comedy gold, right there.
there should be their gramar should be grammar Never follow a full stop with the word 'And'. Perhaps you could sign up for the same course....?
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
So wait, you are saying you will be able to download anything all day long at 2.5GB/s? yah, right... This plan will have lots of caches, and, well, it's like Gmail - you use a lot of what it gives, but did anyone of you really used up all the space?
Sheesh. Of all the words to leave out...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why are you American's all bitching? After all you do have AOL!
pay a thousand bucks a year to have some stupid wire come to your house. yeah, that's progress/// life sure is getting better.
...rather than building a better war machine, we too could have 2.5 Gb/s connections to the desktop.
i've been seeing lots of people posting about how much their connections cost - i finally have 1.5/384 adsl (after waiting 1.5 mo for the install) @ $60/mo and my actual speeds are more like 1.3/200. I specifically moved to my current apartment because i was told that this location could hit 6/512, but after 3 weeks of waiting for covad, i was told that at&t misrepresented the distance to the CO and it was actually about 5000 feet further...the only local competition to this dsl is TW cable which costs about the same ($55/mo) and while the download is about 5mbps, the upload is 128kbps and the AUP doesn't allow for any hosting (in fact, i had my connection disabled for a week once after ssh-ing into my own box when i had TW last year). i'm being continually tempted to move out of the states to someplace where i can get a decent connection at a decent price.
To another location within Korea, or across the Pacific Ocean to another continent?
Well, there is always Verizon Fios. Verizon is also using Fiber Optics to do the same very thing. And it hooks up to your cable line. Also it enables direct competition with local cable companies with Verizon Fios TV.
\
Could /. actually get /.ed?
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
the_complete_jerry_lewis.torrent, 50,000 seeds... I can see it now.
Task Mangler
People, for God's sake please RTFA! They are talking about an 'experiment' deployed 'in a very few select places' - right now there are *only* 100 (one hundred) such users.
You can't buy it, it's not on sale, it's not announced as a product. Someone should at the very least re-title this misleading slashdot entry.
I don't think everyone realizes just how far behind America is in the field of Internet access. Yes, our broadband connections are significantly slower, and we're falling further back every year.
.5 miles away from our house.
But a lot of us don't even have broadband access. As I'm sitting at home, my laptop is connected to my local dial-up ISP at 31.2 Kbps and I'm downloading a codec pack at 3.3 Kbps. I have never once broken the 4 mark.
The worst part is that we can't change. We're forced to buy phone service, even though we always use our cell phones. Together, we're paying $100 a month for dial-up. Why? Because the nearest broadband provider (Cebridge), stopped laying cable
I don't mean this to sound like I'm whining and complaining. In fact, I'm moving in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to fall in love with high-speed. I'm just pointing out that not only are our broadband connections a problem, but so is the broadband availability.
It is pretty amusing how the internet was supposed to save the world for suburban sprawl by allowing everyone to work from home but it turns out that suburban sprawl makes good internet service cost several times as much so it is countries where most of the population lives in dense urban areas that can afford it. :)
This is what the French do while we make fun of them... game over man, they win :(
It's France Télécomcastic!
What country has the largest square footage of industrialized space in the world?
Every time some other country's telco produces a better service than our own, this comes up. It didn't explain why consumers can't get 100mbps in our most dense cities, or 1gbit, and it still doesn't explain why we can't get 2.5gbps now. Even in the places that already have fiber to the home, the best I can do on FiOS is 30M/5M for $180. Meanwhile ATT seems to be giving up on SBC's fiber deployment, at least for this iteration. According to that article they're possibly hoping to come out ahead sometime in the hazy future with 100mbps connections.
It also doesn't explain why rural canada has faster and cheaper consumer bandwidth available than downtown Chicago (I live in downtown Chicago, and what I pay $70/month for is slower than what folks I know in rural Alberta pay $25 CND for). Canada is a larger country, with less dense industrialization, and is far better wired and serviced for internet connectivity than our densely populated metropolitan city centers.
So I call bullshit. Our position as last place among industrialized nations when it comes to Internet connectivity has absolutely nothing to do with our nation's size, and everything to do with a corrupt government in bed with corrupt telcos and corrupt copyright cartels deliberately keeping connectivity artificially slow and prices artificially high. Of course, the war spending that's putting us into record debt isn't helpful, but nor is it directly responsible.
One of my European friends put it best. America is an interesting blend of first and third world. The sad thing is, most of us never travel and don't realize just how third world we're becoming. The rest of the world really is moving along in leaps and bounds, and we have already been left in its technological dust. But don't tell anybody...they'll label you as "unpatriotic."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So will this 2 GB home connecton spur a multitude of french home based hosting providers ?
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
When are the French going to surrender this bandwidth to me?
Where I live (Toronto), I have two choices: Bell DSL or Rogers Cable for "high-speed" service.
Cost -- about the same ($45/month + tax). Rogers keeps "boosting" the d/l speed (now they claim 5 or 6Mbps AFAIK). Rogers wants me to BUY my own DOCSIS modem, and will offer "Extreme" speed. Upload is 128kbps (reasonably reliable, 256kbps is claimed). Which is ok; I can finally stream music from home to work.
However, Rogers has a draconian AUP. No servers, no how. I did talk to them, and they "ok'd" (unofficially) a limited inbound mail service, and ssh (as long as the bandwidth consumed is below their radar (they have never complained). I still don't like the AUP, and would like faster outbound speed. Also, Rogers no longer offers Usenet.
The other alternative is Bell DSL. These pedants drop bother outbound and INBOUND port 25. Making the issue moot. I would need to subscribe to a mail redirector service, which completely negates any price advantage they have. Not even moving to "business class" service solves this -- the only "free" email would have a "sympatico.ca" (whatever) domain.
So I use the Rogers service. Since the DOCSIS modem is attached straight to the cable, I prefer to "rent" the modem, and I don't get the Extreme service. Upload is limited (and, because I access the songs via http/https protocol) and not allowed according the terms of the AUP. Inbound email is ALSO not allowed by the AUP. I do these things anyway, but my connection is at the sufferance of Rogers.
Couple that with a data cap of 60GB a month, and I would say service in my area sucks (not that I use 60GB a month, but I signed up to an "unlimited" service, with Usenet).
All I can say is "it does work, and it meets my needs". I just feel annoyed. Its good that other places get faster connections; mostly I just want a better and more understanding company to deal with (I would like to be able to negotiate port blocking, data caps, services).
YMMV
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
... ooooh, 2.5Gb/s for freedom homes!
Maybe they're kinda like Sampson or something.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Anybody else read GPR0N instead of GPON? :-)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4720409.stm
... Critics point to new cost information that indicates the project could cost several times that amount."
"MPs Colin Challen and John Hayes, say building just one mile of motorway costs on average £23m and a mile of dual carriageway £12m."
So, assuming £1 => $2 we get, £23,000,000/mi / 1600m/mi / * 2$/£ => $28750/meter => ~$8700/ft. I think a motorway is a 4 lane divided highway, but not sure. Now, $30 billion for 500 miles is, $30,000,000,000/500mi => $60,000,000/mi => $37500/meter => ~$11363/ft. I don't understand how you get $18500/ft, but this seems realistic. Contruction costs depend on your terrain and other things.
http://www.taxpayer.net/road2ruin/roads/i-69.htm
"1.9 billion
And it will cost more than that. ALL costs are up including construction and material especially for oil-intensive operations like road building. The other cost different between Europe and US is the value of the land.
I wonder if French have bigger and fatter pipes. May be Senator Ted Stevens should move to France to get his internet delivered faster.
..... best things in life are not so free..........
It's not 500 miles, it's 500km, which is more like 311 miles... Unless the "KM" above was kilo-miles. :)
Oh, and that cost was probably in Euros, which are worth more than dollars at the moment.
I read the internet for the articles.
And perhaps this grammar nitpicking will end. But probably not.
By the way, at English Non-Errors you'll see that the third entry indicates that it is acceptable to begin a sentence with a conjunction.
And have a nice day.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
As someone who in theory has 100mb services... and who downloads most web pages, files, media, at closer to 1.5-1mb, I can tell you that the theoretical maximum speed of your bandwidth is not important. Most servers serve data at 1.5 mb, and even big servers with lots of bandwidth have to divvy it up between lots of people, bringing it down. Once in a while there is a fast server, and traffic is light, and I hit the jackpot.
In the U.S., we see a price like "26 dollars a month for 100 channels".
But by the time state, local, federal, spanish war, indigent korean war veterans with dependents, and other taxes are added on the bill is double that.
How is it in france? Is that $85 really going to be $150?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In Greece for 55 euros+VAT=65 we get 0.5Mb..
With all the chatter about net neutrality, the other question is, what's going to be out there in a few years if the telco's win?
yeah, maybe you can get multiple Mbps actual speeds to google or CNN but anything else is going to timeout on you.
My current 8mbit line is 50:1 contented, so at that rate you could easily share your 2.5Gb with 16,000 of your neighbours!
I think some sort of boost is needed, but I'm not sure what. Obviously, the market is providing enough incentive to innovate and expand services.
In many cities, villages, and other places local governments or other groups are trying to bring broadband, wired if not wireless, to the area they are in yet the telcom and cable companies are fighting this. If these businesses were to offer the service then the local governments wouldn't be trying to do it themselves. Normally I prefer a freemarket but when it comes to things where a natural monopoly occures, as with cable, fiber, and phone lines are concerned I'd rather they be owned by the locals whether it's the government or not, Then have the infracture open to whomever wants to provide, sale, the services to consumers. An excellent example of this is what a group of communities is doing in northeastern Utah:
"A Broadband Utopia"
Utopia, as described by Sir Thomas More, the man who originated the term in the early 16th century, is an imaginary place of few laws, great natural abundance, and an absence of poverty and want. We still don't know how to cure poverty and want. But in a western U.S. desert, a utopia of sorts is taking shape for broadband users who would like to get their phone, television, and Internet services from the providers of their choice.
As it turns out, this Utopia, known formally as the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, promises to be just that, a broadband utopia. And it is very much a real place, encompassing 14 cities in northeastern Utah. It delivers to each of its 3000 subscribers high-speed Internet access, telephony, and television programming through a fiber-optic cable at data rates that now reach 30 megabits per second. Soon, service providers there will be offering speeds of 50 and even 100 Mb/s. That's enough to download a 2-hour movie in about 6 minutes, 10 to 20 times as fast as the typical U.S. cable or digital subscriber line connection, 6 times as fast as Verizon Communications Inc.'s much-publicized fiber-to-the-home service (called FiOS) and twice as fast as the new DSL now being introduced in Europe by France Telecom and others.
This is just the first two paragraphs and there's a lot more.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A handful of cities in UT are on the UTOPIA network, among them Murray (where I live). I get 15mbit (each way) fibre to my home for under $45/mo (including taxes, etc).
:( )
I consistantly (every day, any time of day) see 8-11mbit down, speed tests peg me at 6-9 mbit up but I do not upload enough to verify.
Google UTOPIA+UTAH for more info. Not bragging, just giving a positive example of one rare thing Utah is doing right (now please forgive us for voting for Hatch
-Jazz
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Parts of the Salt Lake valley (ironically not including Salt Lake City) have 15mbit (each way) fibre to the home currently for ~$45 including taxes.
:)
Not trying to make anyone feel bad they don't have it, just telling ya where it is
(Google UTOPIA+UTAH if you want to learn more)
-jazz
PS: yes it does rock. 5GB DLs (and uploads for that matter) in under 1 hour . . . I can about saturate the connections my family has in Ohio when sending stuff to them.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Interesting you mention airlines. Telecom and airlines are both industries that are either government-run or government-subsidized in the typically social-leaning European nations.
The past few years I've read some interesting articles in business and economics magazines on how new airlines are doing in Europe and most of them talk about how those airlines are doing much better than US airlines. Whereas the US airline industry is suffering financially in general those in Europe are doing terrific. They said a few of those in the US are doing well also but these are newer airlines such as Jetblue and Southwestern. Admittedly I don't know how the industry, here or there, is doing now and things may of changed somewhat.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This is the difference between a government-run monopoly and a private-sector monopoly. Governments do things for "the public good" - companies don't have to.
Actually when governments first chartered corporations a corporation would only be chartered if doing so provided a public good. But the corporations have paid politicans to move away from that position. This was one of the things Thomas Jefferson warned of, he feared corporations especially banks would come to own the politicans and have them pass laws favoring them other others. Here's some of what he says about banks:
Banks
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction... I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity ... is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
FalconThomas Jefferson
Should there be a Law?
... that France is going to climb to #1 in the list of countries that hosts the most botnets..
to pack one end of the fiber in her bags ....
In Spain, and I guess in France it's the same, you pay for all your calls. Local calls, regional calls, national calls, international calls, calls to mobiles, ... errr and that's all of course. And AFAIK in America you don't that's why you don't find it quite a deal.
The phone is metered in Spain too? I was kind of shocked when I heard phone service was metered in Britain, the more you use it the more you pay. I can see that for cellphone but not landline phone service. And with the way the cellphone industry is going in the US I wouldn't be supprised if within a few years if they got rid of metering for cellphones as well the way many providers are offering 1000 minutes plans and such.
FalconShould there be a Law?
go here The US is still embarrasingly far behind the likes of South Korea, ahead of France though. Broadband penetration in ROK is running at about double that of the states, but as far as I know France is set to overtake the US soon if it hasn't already.
these data rates must be in metric or someting because 2.5GB/s is stupidly fast for a home user -- or even a normal business
I think there will be a lot of upstream over-subscribing and over-selling of bandwidth here
...I pay the same $60 for 64k ISDN.
PLUS a penny a minute for when I dare to use it.
7 miles from town...in a canyon, no line of site for wireless.
But come ON....this is friggin Southern California. We're supposed to be civilized...instead we have rolling blackouts and spotty internet coverage.
The US is already a 3rd world country...the rest of the world is just afraid to collect on all the bad debt.
As said in the article, this is a 'pilot test' only, it's not obvious at all that the real price will be similar..
but we've had this for ages, and better. 100 Mbit/s is roughly $30 in sweden, and you get something like 24Mbit upstream with that, handy when you want to have a webserver etc.. Americans really need to get their stuff sorted, we have this in all major cities and our population density is nothing like that out asian countries etc, in fact I suspect it's closer to that of North America..
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
Here in Sweden, the government gives a tax rebate to people who want to install their own true broadband. So our entire council area (maybe 30-40,000 population) has laid their own fibreoptic backbones and dug trenches and blown in fibre themselves. It requires a bit of thought to be able to weld fibre optic cables and configure the routers but I think that it is quite a nice social activity, and it also means you have control over your own telephone, internet, and TV lines. Theoretical max is 7GB/s per household.
http://www.bikef.se/
(Swedish)
I can't imagine how fast a fiber to the curb minitel connection is going to be. Text streaming by at 1.2Gbps. Astounding.
Yeah, IEEE's Spectrum had an article a few months back about a A Broadband Utopia. Good article. And while I prefer a freemarket I think they've got a good idea in that the communities themselves own the infrastructure, backbone but allow others to offer different services.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I wonder if French datacenters offer their customers that kind of speed? And at what cost?
I live in Arizona and dial-up is all that is available where I live. Neither cable or DSL from the phone company is available here. The telephone lines in my neighborhood are only good for 26.4K, so here I am right now, on my 2.4 GHz computer, with a 56K modem, connected with a 26.4K dial-up connection.
I live in a smaller city, up in the mountains in Arizona, but I am not way out in the middle of nowhere. When I look outside, not too far away, I can see a small airport, a private university, a hospital, a golf course, a gated community, an Indian casino, a hotel and hundreds of homes. Lately I have seen the TV commercials from QWest which make disparaging comments about dial-up and suggest getting inexpensive QWest DSL instead. So I called them and they told me that DSL is not available where I live. Unofficially, a QWest repairman recently told me that he had heard that my neighborhood is scheduled to be upgraded by adding a switch nearby sometime within the next year. Lately, someone is digging a 2 mile long ditch nearby and laying plastic conduit. QWest telephone trucks have occasionally been parked along the ditch so I hope that means that they are finally upgrading our neighborhood.
A local Internet provider recently placed an antenna on another hill which might possibly be accessible from where I live and would offer a reasonably high-speed wireless Internet connection at an acceptable price. A more expensive satellite connection from Starband is another option but I don't really want anything too expensive. It's not like 26.4K dial-up is really that bad if you don't have sypware, if you block as many ads as possible, and mostly visit less graphics intense websites such as Slashdot. If I need to download a large file I have it download most of the night while I am asleep or else take a laptop over to a small Cafe which has free WiFi.
Let's see... 2.5Gb/1.2Gb for EU 70/month.
Meanwhile, I get 1.2Mb/1.2Mb for the equivalent of EU 50/month. So, for maybe EU 20/$25 US more a month, I could get 1000 times the bandwidth, if only I lived near Paris. Tough choices...
Given how likely it is that I'll see that sort of home bandwidth at that price here in the US of A within the next 20 years (~0.00000001%), I guess it's time to look into a comfy little gite.
2.5 Gbps of bandwidth to the end-user? What kind of interface would their connection plug in to on our home computer? If it's 100 Mbps Ethernet, you may not be able to get more than say around 12 MB/s (or 97 Mbps) over TCP. Let's say if they expect their end-users to have a GigE card and UTP Cat 6 cable, you'll still be falling well short. Also, how can you possibly download to your hard-disk at 2.5 Gb/s (312 MB/s) when most ATA hard-disks in modern desktops have a transfer rate of about 55 MB/s? Well, that would mean that its potential may be fully realized for things like on-demand DVD-quality video streaming etc. (streaming being done by the ISP itself or the 'weakest link in the chain' issue would come in).
What about the costs in sharing such a connection when we have multiple users at home (roommates, family)? Lots of people use broadband home routers with NAT. Obviously, if we want to share a 2.5 Gbps connection, these routers need to have GigE switches and have to be a lot faster. That'll increase costs very much.
I don't agree that much with the 'weakest link in the chain' argument as you may be using applications downloading stuff from different places on the web (say a normal HTTP download, streaming video from somewhere, P2P, etc.). As an aside, I think that the P2P applications like Bittorrent are an ideal fit to realize the potential of such connections.
so I don't think they will be on the cutting edge anytime soon.
Actually what you get in france is either:
:-))
25mb/s download and 8mbs/upload with Internet, about 30 tv channel and phone (free to call fixed lines) for 45/month (at FT)
or
8mb/s for 30Month (at Free) for the same kind of triple play
This is in Paris
In a small village in the woods you get either dialup (this is still the only option for approx 2% of the population) or some "experimental" satelite + wifi 1mb/lines for 30/month
or your own bidirectional satelite dish for approx 150/month for 512 down 128 up
But in 12 month you will have a WiMax option almost everywhere (probably 0.5% of the population will still be able to hide
I think Cisco just bent Foundry networks over its knee and spanked it good:
h tml
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/index.
I'm not sure how much aggregate bandwidth the entire United States of America uses up, but it shouldn't take more than a few of these to satisfy it!
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Gizoogled!
l ashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/127205&from=rss
http://sites.gizoogle.com/index2.php?url=http://s
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
I live in a small town in the USA when I am not living in a small town in France. These towns are equidistant (MOL) from large telecoms centers.
In France I pay something like euros 37 a month for 8 Mbps/1.2 Mbps ADSL. In the USA I pay $69 a month for 1.5 Mpbs/128 Kbps ADSL. Both run without problems.
Even in non-select towns - burgs in the sticks with farm tractors driving through the streets - France Telecom kicks every US provider's butt.
DSL has been available in some cities of France since 1995.
Great news for the upper/middle class French citizens. Now maybe they should focus on the homeless problem. Can I get fiber to the tent in Paris?
My business partner has (and I'm getting in about 2 months) the Verizon FIOS service. Good and bad: Good: 15 MB/sec down - 2 Mb/sec up. I've tested and consistnetly see number snorth of 13 Mb down You can bundle it with your phone and TV service $44 a month Bad: Its Verizon. And that means eventually you will have to call customer service. Do yourself a favour, and shoot yourself. Or use hard drugs. Is a Fiber Optic offering, probably similar to what they are talking about here. In some areas Verizon has already bumped it to 20/4 for the same cost.
Your hard disk isn't fast enough to write that to disk.
Even if it was, you'd fill up a terabyte disk in an hour or so.
[I bet the ISPs are counting on this....does it count as false advertising?]
No sig today...
I know you're a fraud because you didn't end with, "God Bless America"
Don't forget that lovely anagram proverb:
Saru mochi kara okiru -- Monkeys arise from mochi. Mmm, chewy!
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
*smirk*
DSL was invented in 1988 by Bellcore.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Make no mistake the US being this far behind is hurting us, how much does it cost for a US based buisiness a month to get a 40Mb of upload? [...] The US had better get its but in gear or else we will be left in the dust on this whole information age thing. [...] French companies now have a huge leg up on thier US counterparts.
And we all know that the only thing holding back France from being Silicon Valley is that bandwidth was too expensive there.
Of course, we are being left horribly behind. The primary language of the internet is, as you all know, French.
It won't matter since most people only have 100Mbits/s routers and network cards anyway.
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
Even the US government knows that the internet is not a dump truck.
The series of tubes, however, is real.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
This has to be BS. Either that, or I'm moving to France. This amazing speed of 2,500 Mbits/second will revolutionize computing, computer software, multiplayer computer games, and much more. Expect to see (more) video on demand, (such as youtube and ifilm), amazing LAN-style p2p software, and probably something else awesome...perhaps an easier to use network API than remoting, rpc, or sockets...plus those counter-strike maps would download at a reasonable speed, perhaps allowing 3D games to update resources on the fly. This amazing speed (unless they actually meant mb/s, in which case it's between dsl & cable) would even allow the network computer to exist, and you could toss your HDD and boot from a shared drive on the network. Perhaps a shared drive with all the software already installed. You could also run software 'on the fly', reading the instructions into memory from another computer on the network, instead of from the HD. Also, those MMORPGS wouldn't lag up with 30 people on the screen at the same time. ;O, and CDs could be discontinued since they could be downloaded in 2 seconds.
Bastard.
P.S. I'm an American living in the backwoods of the Internet. I just _upgraded_ to a 1.5Mbit DSL, and thought it was peaches.
But now the peaches taste like ashes.
Seriously, USA citizens, we need to get our act together and do something. I'll at least start complaining more. :-)
Skype rocks.
Great if I would live in Paris... Tokyo also has 1G bit connections to home... don't know the costs.
Do Us need fast connections when all there engineers are in India?
This is old, but I thought I'd reply anyway:
...thus: $60M / 3280 feet = $18,293 per linear foot.
...this: $13.6M / 5280 feet = $2,575 per linear foot.
$18,500 per foot calculation is simply:
$30bn (the orig. figure) divided by 500km = $60,000,000/km...
Contrast that to my figures, which I googled, which detailed a 140-mile hiway in Indiana estimated to cost $1.4bn.
$1.4bn divided by 140mi = $13,571,428/mi...
The only thing i didn't include in my original post was the conversion between GBP and USD. While I'm not a mind reader, my guess is the 30bn figure was given in US Dollars, NOT pounds sterling. I came to this conclusion for 2 reasons:
1) 1 GBP is worth much more then USD. If that figure WAS in pounds, it makes the hiway nearly twice as expensive as my math shows it to be, which is just ludicrous.
2) The poster used "billions" as a Unit of Measure. I took this to mean 10^9, or "one thousand million" as it's commonly used in the US. In the UK, one billion is used to describe 10^12, or "one million million" which is the number we call "trillion" in the US. (and this goes on and on... a trillion in the UK describes 10^18 or what we call a quintillion in the US)
Either of these interpretations would push the values out of the range of good sense.