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.'"

Comments

Define "free"?

[etherlad]

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?

Re:Define "free"?

[Valdrax]

Compared to Comcast, where you can "save up to $100" by buying a connection that is a fraction of that for $33 along with $33 for TV and $33 for VoIP, it doesn't seem all that disingenous.

When you consider the bandwidth used by VoIP and IPTV over a 2.5 Gb/s connection, it IS practically free to provide. I would pay twice this price to get this here and more than willingly make this my largest bill. Where I live, the best that I can get is 6 Mb/s / 384 Kb/s for over $80 month.

It's disgusting! What country invented DSL? America. What country is in dead last place among the industrialized world for DSL speeds? America.

But, oh, our poor widdle local monopolies can't compete against all that howwibble competition. It just makes me mad enough to spit.

Re:Define "free"?

[Valdrax]

They're much more tightly packed than we are, so laying down fiber in major cities has a much greater profit/sq. ft ratio than a telco could get in the US.

I've heard this argument before, but there are places in New York and other large metropolises that are just as packed as some of less dense Asian cities and even they don't have bandwidth to compare.

By trying to encourage phone companies to lay out phone wire where it would not be profitable in the 40s and 50s, we granted them monopolies, and now they've become as poorly managed as the airlines.

I would point out that most phone companies in European countries are also monopolies. The difference is that they're government regulated and partially (or wholly) government funded monopolies. It's that lack of state intervention that makes the huge difference. On the one hand, Americans have never really had to wait long times to get phone service for decades. On the other hand, our internet growth has become a quagmire.

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.

The weakest link

[blantonl]

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.

Covering all France would cost less than you think

[OlivierB]

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.

True Story

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.

Re:You mean?

[OlivierB]

Get over it man. That whole "surrendering" thing is getting old.
I'm not even sure that you know what started it all, nevermind who helped the pilgrims settle in the US and fight for their independence against England.

So do us a favour, pick up a history book and learn something for a change.

Re:You mean?

[kabocox]

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!!

Um, no. We actually spent the money to have "hispeed" like 45 MBps to all of the US through tax cuts and deregulation of the Baby Bells during the Clinton/Gore era. Those that have paid for telephone services from I think it was around 1993-current have been basically given their phone companies more profit rather than government taxes and a regulated phone industry. It was a massive bait and switch, they promised something like this French system, and after the Feds gave the Bells their carrot, the Bells gave the Feds a stick and said we can't/won't roll out/upgrade fiber to the door and will instead offer DSL. From what I've since, DSL is ok for those who can get it. The Feds were promised more than 30 times the speed of DSL though both up and down stream to us. This is something that should have been built during our 1997-2000 the internet is the wave of the future time. The Bells have screwed us. I'd actually love for the Feds to fine each one of the billions in back taxes with interest for not providing services to us and then regulating the phone industry to bring it up to spec.

Re:You mean?

[andyclements]

Actually, the Clinton/Gore era gave the American telcos $200 BILLION in tax breaks so that we would have fiber and coax to our homes, at speeds of around 45Mbps. A decade later, we are still stuck on copper, paying insane amounts for abysmal performance. See the new networks site for more.

Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes!

[manno]

I can think of a number off the top of my head.

1. VPN
2. VNC
3. Game Servers - Battlefield 2 reccomends a minimum of 64kb a player for a 64 player map that's 4Mb. If you want to eventualy double players to 128, or go crazy with 256 you will need 8Mb, and 16Mb respectively.
4. HD video from youtube/google.video
5. VOIP telephone banks
6. Website hosting
7. Remote backups
9. Anything that is bandwidth intensive

Asking what use this would have is kind of missing the point. You put this type of bandwidth in every home, and uses will be made the download speed is nice, but it's the bandwidth up that's going to cause HUGE changes.

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? literaly Thousands if not tens of thousands. It costs, a French company less than $90. Yes I would like to get this to my home, but the bandwidth gap in the home is not what concerns me. The US had better get its but in gear or else we will be left in the dust on this whole information age thing. It's still the wild wild west out there and anything can happen. French companies now have a huge leg up on thier US counterparts.

-manno

Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes!

[manno]

...And at one point in time 1GB of hard disk spaced seemed like more than I would ever need.

Trust me people will find awesome uses for 40Mb of bandwidth up. I honestly believe VPN for home will catch on, or a service with remote storage that works similarly. with 80Mb down, 40Mb up and a VPN connection to your home PC from anywhere an OS from MS/Apple/distro-of-the-day could create a way for you to set up a network share that would allow you to treat your WAN like your LAN. You could download your media collection from your home PC to wherever you are. Personal Video/Music on demand. Think TIVO-to-go no need to use email to transfer files from one PC to another one located at a remote location. VPN will become seamless in the not to distant future. It's that way for me already, if you haven't tried it out yet, use OpenVPN. If you use it in tunnel mode on Windows XP you can make it start up and connect to your VPN server automatically, and treat your network share as a mapped drive or folder... The only drawback? US DSL/Cable upload bandwidth. I'm talking working on remote files at local speeds.

A more likely scenario would be a company like Google offering 50-100GB of storage, and you'll log onto it with every PC you use to get your music, videos, everything. Thinking about a 80mb down/40mb up in terms of "it's like a 6mb down 0.375Mb up only faster" is wrong. If French telecom can manage to deliver 50% of that bandwidth "to the jack" this is going to be HUGE. The key hear again is UPLOAD.

Speaking as a US citizen to the other US citizens - We are shooting ourselves in the foot leaving our national IT infrastructure in the hands of people spending more time on finding a cheaper easier way to line their pockets rather than the old fashioned entrepreneurs who would find an undeserved market, and offer them a fair service at a fair price. If not addressed soon this will be a huge problem. Again home bandwidth would be nice but it's business BW that's really going to screw us over in the long run.

-manno