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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...?
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
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.
Uh...that's completely unrelated to Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality has to do with the priorities of packets, not connection speed. This is just a case of lower population density making it not worth it in most areas and low competition making it not worth it everywhere.
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.
Net Neutrality will accomplish the exact opposite effect, in this case, as there won't be any incentive for ISP's to upgrade their networks if that bill is passed.
Finally, a real reason to hate the French.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Good to see telco PRs have now infiltrated slashdot.
15mbps? WOW.
Wait till you hear what we get in Canada for that money. And its actually gotten slower over the past 6 years (as vendors learned QoS).
Go figure.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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
Just to make you feel better: here in Indonesia we pay $60 for a 128 kbps cable modem connection.
google: verb - to search for information on the Internet.
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!
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
Who believes they'll upgrade anyway? They've said that before in order to get tax breaks, but they lied then just like they're lying now.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
They must have some big trucks, um, tubes that is in France!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
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
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.
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Net neutrality has everything to do with this. ISPs are claiming that they need the extra income from the second-tier extortion fees to be able to provide high speed access like that.
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?
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
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.
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 if they would upgrade their networks without net neutrality...
See, the issue is that the telcos have way too much power, things started going very good for us french (as far as internet connections go) around 2000 when the Free ISP appeared: their customer service sucks (and has always sucked), but they immediatly set extremely agressive prices for high speed and a usually good enough reliability (when they appeared, their offer was something like 512/128 for 30/mo, when you couldn't get 256/64 for less than 40 from France Telecom -- french historical telco, and free then promtly upped their offer to 1024/256 a year or so later -- without changing the prices). And they kept at it, Free mostly appeals to students & techies (if only because their customer service sucks so much that if you ever need them better stay on your own), but the other ISPs had to follow suit and up their offers every time Free upped theirs, they had to add a phone when Free added it, and TV when free added it, ...
You don't have that kind of disruptive ISPs in the USA, if only because your telcos are not required by law to let any and everyone use their pipes, and they can therefore strangle any ISP they don't like by fucking up with their customers. Or arbitrarily refuse to let other ISPs take control of the pipes.
The phone network should be owned by your state/federal govts, and leased to both telcos and ISPs. This would effectively remove all the power the telcos use, and allow for the birth of disruptive/innovative/low cost ISPs.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Two words: Population density.
I believe (I'm not totally sure but I'm reasonably confident) that both Japan and Korea have significantly higher population density than the U.S. I'm absolutely positive that continental Europe has a much higher population density than the U.S., which also happens to be why mass transit such as the French TGV and German ICE trains are so much more successful than in the U.S., where only a select few passenger routes are profitable for rail companies. (Namely, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and not much else.) For the same reason mass transit is more practical, it's far cheaper on average to roll out last-mile infrastructure.
Add telecom greed to that and we're screwed. That said, most of the problem is the issue of population density (or lack thereof) and the resulting high last-mile costs.
As to why you see high prices even in cities - The U.S. has laws mandating rural telecom subsidies, effectively averaging the population density across the country as far as telecom prices are concerned.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
...rather than building a better war machine, we too could have 2.5 Gb/s connections to the desktop.
Could /. actually get /.ed?
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
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.
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
... ooooh, 2.5Gb/s for freedom homes!
...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.
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...