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New EU Rules Promise 100Mbps Broadband and Free Wi-Fi For All (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The European Commission has promised free Wi-Fi in every town, village, and city in the European Union, in the next four years. A new grant, with a total budget of 120 million euro, will allow public authorities to purchase state-of-the art equipment, for example a local wireless access point. If approved by the the European Parliament and national ministers the cash could be available before the end of next year. The commission has also set a target for all European households to have access to download speeds of at least 100Mbps by 2025, and has redefined Internet access as a so-called universal service, while removing obligations for old universal services such as payphones. It also envisions fully deploying 5G, the fifth generation of mobile communication systems, across the European Union by 2025. Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker made reference to many of these proposals while also promising to abolish roaming once and for all in his "State of the European Union" address on Wednesday morning.
So, since this is not communist Russia.. who's paying for this?
Seems like a good idea. Shame that the US is going to fall further behind on this front.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I appreciate the sentiment, but 120 million euro is way, waaaaay too little for a project of that scale.
Personally, I have the option of a 500Mbit line, but I have friends who live just a few kilometers away, who are stuck with ~10Mbit DSL or less. Based on my experience in the ISP/telco world, you can multiply that amount of money by ten, and maybe that'll be enough. For one country.
Eat the rich.
Paid for by Apple!
UK will get a firewall instead, while on the mainland you have free wifi. Nice trade isn't it?
Instead of a new AP for every villiage, how about one reflashed with some modern software (openwrt/lede)?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
TANSTAAFL
The commission has also set a target for all European households to have access to download speeds of at least 100Mbps by 2025,
All this means is that ISPs will put a new, premium, service on their portfolios, priced at whatever it would cost them to install - or whatever they choose: either to make a killing from, or to discourage uptake.
There is nothing in this target to say the provision has to be affordable. So if an ISP in an out-of-the-way place, maybe halfway up a mountain, decides it would cost them €250,000 to provide their half-dozen subscribers with 100MBit/s connections, they would price the product accordingly.
As such, this is just a wish, but not a practical requirement that EU citizens must be given this sort of speed, for the tenner-a-month they are paying for "ordinary" broadband, now.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the guarantee of high speed Internet.--That to secure these networks."
Oh wait... wrong country!
Something those of us in the US would do well to emulate.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Want to use the municipal wifi? well, here's your DNS servers (no, you can't change them! Why would you even ask that citizen?)
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Easy to make promises you can't keep to save your job. First the UK, then Greece, then a plethora more and there goes the EU. Those of us living in 'the zone' 20 years ago are shaking our heads mumbling 'told you so'.
What kind of data caps are we looking at here?
The most expensive German mobile broadband connections have a 15 GB data cap per month, after which you get throttled to 64 kbps for the remainder of the month.
My current ADSL connection maxes out at 448/96 kbps thanks to being too far from the DSLAM, so a 100 mbps mobile broadband connection would be very welcome so I can experience things like Skyping, Netflix-And-Chill, playing games while my friends are still playing them etc. - but it depends a LOT on the monthly cap!
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Keep Calm and Carrier on
OK, so the people who can already get 100Mb for pennies a day get an even better deal, and the people stuck on with plans calling for hundreds of dollars for a satellite dish installation and still only 10Mb for loads more money per month get nothing?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Because magic openwrt can make an 802.11b AP support Dual bad AC easily!
Is it free Wi-Fi or rather tax funded mass surveillance?
Best comment ever.
Actually, the US is way ahead of Europe on this — we tried "municipal WiFi" 15 years ago. Predictably, it failed nation fooking wide.
For this USSR-escapee, it is simply mind-boggling, how many people continue to not see, that Socialism=Fail...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Although it's obviously untrue that EU politicians are not corrupt, it's a different form of corruption to the US one. The corruption in the EU is a power grab, while in the US it is a money grab.
That's why the US has such shitty public services. Massive amounts of US taxation end up going into the US military industrial complex, not only funding widespread death and destruction abroad but also lining the pockets of billionaires, instead of building a better country for US taxpayers.
The EU is corrupt too, but money for public welfare and national infrastructure is to a degree ringfenced and open to inspection. It's not a perfect system but it does keep most of the money where it belongs, paid by the people and used for the people, not to fund billionaires.
Alas we occasionally listen to the americans and help them fight their wars and pay into their war machine, but it tends not to last long because waging war has almost zero support among citizens of EU nations. We've had too much experience with war in the past, and have no love of it. It's really quite different to the outlook in the US.
But Britain has biscuits!
A new grant, with a total budget of 120 million euro, will allow public authorities to purchase state-of-the art equipment, for example a local wireless access point.
Well, it will have been state-of-the-art at some point in time before it was purchased. It will be obsolescent by the time it's installed.
We will spend the next 20 years arguing why we can't do the same, and bribing politicians to do nothing, while the EU does it in 3.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...how you said that with a straight face. You do realize that the US average is no better than much of Europe, and in fact currently lags a fair bit of Europe (northern Europe in particular) by quite some distance, right? And given our penchant for putting internet access in the hands of government-mandated monopolies rather than in the hands of the people, if anything our speeds a decade hence will likely lag most of Europe by a significant margin. Only the completely delusional would forecast that we'd best it by an order of magnitude.
Here, do some reading:
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/o...
Fact: Bigoted ranting doesn't make it so, much as you might wish otherwise.
if the EU keeps getting snotty about who uses and who provides, it's going to be 100MBPS of nothing, as opportunities will pass them by.
users... USERS... own The Connected Internet. they determine what it's good for. not pinheaded government suits meeting at costly offsites 4 or 6 times a year.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
$120M is in no way, shape, or form enough money to provide enough WAPs and the necessary infrastructure to provide decent usable coverage to even half of the EU cities. I've done physical network buildouts in buildings before, and those can run a couple million easy depending upon things like age, construction type, pre-existing interference, building size, etc. Imagine a city vs a typical warehouse building. Now imagine every city (I wonder if they're including towns and more rural areas) in every EU country. You'd probably burn through the $120M in high-end WAPs alone to provide 100% coverage in all of the major+capital cities just by themselves. That's not including dedicated infrastructure to support such a network.
You'd hardly do much better building out an LTE network with that little amount of money.
So the question in my head is who are the proposed suppliers of this equipment and infrastructure for such a project? Who has connections where?
Follow the money, let's see what we find.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
After mishandling 2005 crisis, after destroying Greece, EU attempt to show itself in a positive light. I suspect it is too late.
There are recurring political strategies: (1) under-budget and over-promise, (2) spread the money in every jurisdiction.
The first one makes it easier to get the foot in the door. You'll have a fantastic plane with a gazillion features, but it will only cost a few millions over a couple of years.
A few years later, when the plane barely flies and a bunch of millions have already been spent, the second strategy comes into play. Not only is it really hard to resist spending "just a little bit more" when you're "this close to being done", but it is really hard to stop spending once you have concentrated interests that have their livelihood depending on the pork.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.