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France Plans 20-Billion Euro National Broadband Plan
judgecorp writes "France is planning a €20 billion programme to get super-fast broadband to its rural population. About half the funds will come from government investment, and President Hollande believes the work will create 10,000 jobs. Half the population should have fast broadband in the next five years, and the whole country in ten years. France is at a disadvantage for broadband as it is a large country with a lot of rural areas. However, it also has a more left-leaning government willing to take on infrastructure projects."
Hollande!
You call that a large country with a lot of rural areas? Now this is a large country with a lot of rural areas!
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I hope this works out for them, but I'm not holding my breath...
If your nations economy can support this, then why not?
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
How on earth does "willing to take on infrastructure projects" mean left-leaning?
I have a suggestion - since "left wing" vs "right wing" means different things in different places we should not use them.
Why does the President of Holland need to get involved? Surely the responsibility for a national broadband network should fall to the President of France?
I don't know where the claim of 10,000 jobs created came from. Perhaps it was just the overactive imagination of the submitter. But given that the figure is 2 million euro per alleged job created which is a ridiculous figure should job creation have been any sort of priority, it seems incredibly stupid to try to make that a selling point of the scheme.
Consider for example, the global flood that is the main point of drama in the classic story of Noah's Ark. It kills almost everyone and everything; it cleanses the world of sin for a time; and it creates 8 high value jobs!
Robin Hood wore red and not green?
Australia is a large country with a lot of nothing. There are like 4 city centres where most people live, a bit of rural population, and then a whole bunch of empty nothing. Not surprising, given the climate and geography really.
The US is probably one of the most rural nations over all. Lots of big cities too, of course, but a substantial amount of population that is spread out over a substantial amount of land.
And look at how that worked in the US... do you think the same should apply to roads as well, they are becoming almost as important for the ecconomy.
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Or Australia, where they are already doing the same thing. (Although if the elections go the way they look like they are going to go, I expect that few will actually recive it)
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Is this person serious?
If so then wow, you americans really are brainwashed..
If your tax dollars being spent for your benefit is communism, then I guess your tax dollars spent against your interest like in the US is despotism, feudalism, and slavery.
Make that 12.
As we learned recently, French workers work only 3 hours a day of the 7 they should.
Then most of the world is communism...
The government builds roads and all manner of other infrastructure for the benefit of all the people.
Many things are simply not economically viable to do in a capitalist system, so they would never get done at all without government intervention.
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.. I'd love it if they finished rolling out fiber-optic in Paris first.. Depending which arondissement you're in, the only option is super-saturated ADSL (800k/s down, 70k/s up) - or cable, which is even worse..
Um, think there laying infrastructure, not giving away internet.
The article doesn't say France is the largest, just that it is large. Yes, Canada is larger, as are a bunch of other countries. That does not stop France itself from being large.
wasnt most of Franch is telecommunciation infra structure built BY the tax payers until privatised?
Brainwashed?
What part of if you don't fucking work then you don't fucking eat do you not understand?
As others talk of roads, you do understand that roads are funded by taxing the fucking GAS that EVERYONE USES TO DRIVE THE FUCKING ROADS. I agree that it's not quite that simple and the statist has worked very hard to pervert this over the years to make taxes as "progressive" (spit) as possible, but the end here in the US we are supposed to value EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY not OUTCOME.
Now go fuck yourselves you Euroweenie trash commies.
Brainwashed indeed, it's you lot that are brainwashed.
As does the Arctic. Okay, but Russia's next - you don't think they'd be laying down fiber in either of these 2 continents, do you? Whereas, if Russia chose to do that, they could employ the entire world's population in just laying that out.
Americans already have universally available Internet access. There is not one square inch of the United States where one cannot purchase Internet access.
Australia seems to think they can convert to an almost entirely fibre network for roughly the same amount of money,....... something doesn't add up here.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=france%20australia%20landmass
Joking aside, for total ISP success you couldn't do better than imitating the UK. We have hundreds of ISPs as a result of the regulator Ofcom making things difficult for the old guard, all trying to outdo each other in a total frenzy of competition that would amaze Americans. The amount of choice is bewildering.
Why this bit of centralized "planning for competition" worked out so well we're not entirely sure, but it did. :P
How is the army funded? Are non-taxpayers entitled to protection? e.g. the unemployed, children, ...
You seem to have some anger management issues.
Oh, by the way, the French equivalent of the US interstate system is privately funded and paid for by tolls.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Americans already have universally available Internet access. There is not one square inch of the United States where one cannot purchase Internet access.
So does France. This is not talking about internet access, this is about broadband.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Or at least the west. Otherwise, China will dump on you and work to destroy your industry.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
France is at a disadvantage for broadband as it is a large country with a lot of rural areas
The European territory of France covers 547,030 square kilometres (211,209 sq mi). France is smaller than New Mexico and Colorado combined. It is not a "large" country and has a population density (116/sq km) comparable to PA (110/sqkm) or OH (109 /sqkm), not NM (7) or CO(19).
But in a socialist utopia like France, any excuse for a government boondoggle is a good one.
Universal access is damnably expensive but a lot can be done on the cheap. Like hooking up the highest density areas first and requiring all new construction to have fiber. Better something than nothing.
Okay.
There is not one square inch where one cannot purchase broadband in the United States. 100% of the US is covered by one broadband provider or another. Every address, every plot of land, every square inch.
Anyone in the US who wants to purchase broadband can do so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_States
As per usual the Slashdot socialist class gets everything wrong.
Excerpts from the "commie" past of US (i.e a more sane US):
Brooklyn Bridge
Route 66
Golden Gate Bridge
Hoover dam
Moon landing
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
That was done by height minimums in the Napoleonic wars IIRC.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Only if you include satellite service as broadband.
France would make a good sized state. People who think the situations are comparable need to get out more.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Then most of the world is communism...
The government builds roads and all manner of other infrastructure for the benefit of all the people.
Many things are simply not economically viable to do in a capitalist system, so they would never get done at all without government intervention.
Two things, your last statement about things never getting done without government is easy to say, very difficult to prove.
Second, our crumbling and dangerous and non-innovative roads in the US seem to bend more rims on potholes and keep car repair shops in business than they do to help anybody. :)
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
Okay.
There is not one square inch where one cannot purchase broadband in the United States. 100% of the US is covered by one broadband provider or another. Every address, every plot of land, every square inch.
Anyone in the US who wants to purchase broadband can do so.
No they can't. There are plenty of people, especially in rural areas, who can't purchase broadband and it depends on your definition of "broadband". More then enough companies regard 256 kbit ADSL as "broadband".
Phones were free and efficient when the government telco was a monopoly? No. Well you're an idiot then.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
broadband minitel! the government is here to save you! QSD!
liar, plenty of areas are out of reach of internet in the USA. I've relatives in some of them, with analog phone line that only support 9.9kps and no cell service...
France is planning a €20 billion programme to get super-fast broadband to its rural population
I thought they French government was trying to kick people off the internet, not get them on it.
Maybe instead of getting these people on the internet and then off again, they should just save the time and effort and give the €20 billion to the entertainment industry for nothing.
Why would one not include multi-megabit satellite service in the classification of "broadband?"
Ignoring the politics a little bit, there was a really good example of how this CAN work recently with the B4RN project.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21442348
A consortium of local farmers came together and allowed the use of their farmland and spare time to place fibre and hook up the local residents with gigabit internet speeds. By coming together as a consortium and being cooperative (rather than greedy) they have combined both entrepreneurial vigour with a sense of social awareness. I don't see why this model couldn't work in France too...
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
The problem is voters and ideologues who give away the store every time some shyster promises whatever they want to hear. Free high speed internet installed everywhere in the country? You got my vote!
If I were French, the first question I'd be asking is it really worth 20 billion euro to connect all of France via high speed broadband to the internet? Second, could we get the same result for less?
No offense, but I just don't see that much value to hooking up society completely to the internet. Plus anyone who really wants to get on the internet in a developed country can find a way. My take is that most of the value of the internet is already here. Making it a little faster on the user side or adding a few more users, just isn't that valuable.
Cost-wise, I gather you're spending something like a thousand euro per household to connect up. That seems rather pricey especially given that a good fraction of those households are already connected.
Saying that it's just about getting a little faster is very short-sighted, switching from DSL to fiber means an immediate and minimum 100x increase in upload bandwith or more, for the same monthly ISP payment (going from 15M/1M to 100M/100M). Latency is slightly lower. This is pretty useful if you're running a business or something, probably! Now you can do video-conferencing, offsite back ups, media upload without thinking about it twice nor having to blow a shit ton money on aggregating four SDSL lines to get less than 10% the performance.
The bigger implications of such a level of affordable, ubiquitous network connectivity aren't really known but for a start more stuff can be done without requiring physical trips ; some other stuff will be possible that wasn't before (need to upload 10GB of video rushes in less than a hour?)
Now what about some more rural (or even unlucky suburban) place that gets 512Kbps down, 128Kbps up on DSL : if switched to fiber, it technically can get symetrical gigabit. That's a 2000x increase one way, and a 8000x increase the other way. In fact it's more than the difference between DSL and dial-up, even if you consider commercial offerings will be 100Mb/100Mb at first, rather than gigabit.
I do think a 20 billion euro plan to help deployment of that thing is very worth it, actually 20 billions aren't that much for the task at hand.
I don't know about Australia and Canada but French rural areas contain a large number of small villages (about 35000-40000). It results in a complex network of small roads and I believe it is much more difficult to connect than a few farms along a highway with huge fields in between.
The disadvantages is not just the size (population density and area are somewhat average) but the fact that the population is more evenly spread out than in most other countries.
Here is an example of what I'm talking about :
- USA : https://maps.google.com/?ll=38.350273,-99.51416&spn=0.98327,1.983032&t=m&z=10
- France : https://maps.google.com/?ll=44.570904,2.411499&spn=0.893188,1.983032&t=m&z=10
Why would one not include multi-megabit satellite service in the classification of "broadband?"
ping
Watch this Heartland Institute video