
France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country - EwanToo
http://www.zdnet.com/france-to-invest-20bn-in-high-speed-broadband-for-the-entire-country-7000011671/
======
chaostheory
Not many people remember, but the Clinton admin offered $200 billion in
credits and tax cuts for US telcos to roll out fiber nationwide in 1996:

[http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html)

[http://www.cringely.com/2009/10/29/what-goes-around-
teledesi...](http://www.cringely.com/2009/10/29/what-goes-around-
teledesic-2-0/)

TDLR: through mergers and good lawyers, the telcos were able to get the $200
billion of Clinton tax credits in return for nothing. Obama is trying again
with a $100 billion plan

~~~
Variance
The Clinton administration bears a lot of blame for that--the government had a
unique way of not, you know, actually making the credits conditional on
rolling out nationwide fiber. Business is as business does, government is as
government does, and apparently no one had the idea of modulating ISP rewards
_after_ broadband service levels changed. I'm not sure you can blame the
telcos for maximizing shareholder value as much as you can blame regulators
for not understanding that the sky is blue.

~~~
chaostheory
> I'm not sure you can blame the telcos for maximizing shareholder value as
> much as you can blame regulators for not understanding that the sky is blue.

Actually you can. Regardless of legality, it is still stealing.

I'm just really sick of people condoning this crap just because the motivation
is to maximize shareholder value. There's a thing called ethics.

------
doe88
It's about time to massively rollout FTTH in France. Paradoxically I think its
deployment has been hampered by a good early ADSL coverage and the associated
low prices on ADSL (with uncapped data). These low prices have decided the
operators to only make minimum investments on their networks and to further
seek to make profit in mobile where data plans are capped and where profits
are better. Moreover the entry of a new actor in the mobile space last year
has further exacerbated the situation, this actor has significantly reduced
the subscriptions prices so the others actors seek to differentiate themselves
and one way they found is to invest in LTE networks. So for all these reasons
until now FTTH had low priority in France and is marginal. I hope it will
change soon.

~~~
Jacqued
Don't forget FTTLA, which is vastly available in the most densely populated
urban areas - it is not as fast as FTTH when there are a lot of households
connected to the last amplifier, but i'd say roughly 20% of households could
have access to it. On the other hand, FFTH is available for maybe 0.5% of the
country (I mean, even in Paris itself, not one building in twenty is connected
to it...)

I think you are right with your argument on cheap and good quality ADSL
services : i think for most people an uncapped 10-20Mbps, that includes TV,
phone, and our famous boxes for 30€ a month is more than enough...

~~~
bambax
I only pay 32€ every other month, and I have more bandwidth than I need.

~~~
18pfsmt
Could you imagine using your own hardware, on your own connection to run your
bootstrapped side-project for $100/mo? I'd rather not have to pay Amazon, OVH,
or whoever just to be able to service side-projects.

------
mtgx
Only 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload? I guess it would be okay for rural
areas, but it's awfully obsolete for cities, even today, let alone for 2023 -
at least for an European country, especially one like France. And why such low
upload speeds?

~~~
EwanToo
Mmmm, describing 50 Mbps down as "okay for rural areas" doesn't really mesh
with reality.

Most rural areas throughout Europe and elsewhere are struggling with <10 Mbps,
if they can get broadband at all.

If you know any region in the world which isn't densely populated, but where
every home (not just 1 or 2) has 50 Mbps download, I'd love to read about it.
I know of a handful of self-starter village communities which are doing this
(e.g. B4RN in the UK), and that's about it.

~~~
jseliger
>Most rural areas throughout Europe and elsewhere are struggling with <10
Mbps, if they can get broadband at all.

That sounds like Tucson, where I used to live. Now I'm in New York and getting
50 Mbs down and 5 up for $20 – $30 less than I used to get 12 down and 2 up.

~~~
themstheones
That sounds really good. It's not like that in Toronto. We have a
communications oligopoly in Canada though.

~~~
jpiasetz
It's coming to Toronto <http://www.beanfieldcondoconnect.com/index.html>

It's more then an oligopoly, there's a government mandates to provide equal
service to the north that also drives up prices.

------
vacri
Hopefully the French public respond more maturely than the Australian public
did to their similar plan - after years of bitching about how shit internet
speeds were here, the gummint finally said "okay, we're going to build a great
network with capacity for future use; it will be a great nation-building
project", to which the public promptly turned on its heel and started whining
about what a white elephant it was and how we have enough capacity and don't
need the benefits...

~~~
jvrossb
Are you sure it's the same public? You're making it sound like the same people
who were once for it swung against it.

~~~
vacri
I'm talking more about the general public tone, but yes, I do know some people
that made that exact switch. There's really not much cognitive dissonance
involved.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who grew up around poor people and was aware
of how they struggle with money. Her family wasn't in poverty, but they
weren't flush with money either. At around age 30, she made her way into the
finance industry and started pulling down six figures. She mentioned that she
got a raise recently, but had been infected by the finance mindset that any
raise is tainted by the marginal tax rate, and was bitching that 'half of it
went to the government' (for values where .37 = half, it seems).

Anyway, her version of the story went 'the government taxes so much money out
that I can't give as much to my single-mother sister who is scraping by on
welfare - they should lower taxes [for this reason]'. I asked what about all
the other single mothers our there that don't have sisters in high finance -
reducing the tax yield would mean they get less. My friend changed her tune
pretty fast and realised that hey, she was actually in a good position and
should be positive about it instead of negative.

The thing is, my friend wasn't someone who grew up amongst wealth, she knew
what it was like to be poor, and she herself had worked the same shitty jobs
as poor people everywhere. She was smart, and knew deeply about social
opportunity (she dated a fiery, forthright anarchist for many years). People
just tend to have short memories and short forethought and tend to think that
what concerns them in the present is the most important thing always.

------
wtvanhest
Is there anyone else out there that thinks the investment may not be smart
long term?

I enjoy the luxury of highspeed wired internet in Boston and LTE internet on
my phone. In the short term, I am considering switching to an LTE hub for my
home to get rid of Comcast completely. I could be wrong, but I feel like we
will see rapid development of wireless technology which could make the entire
20bn investment somewhat foolish.

~~~
rayiner
Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the
fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than
wireless. For the foreseeable future, you're going to want to be able to
maximize your total capacity by taking advantage of terrestrial links when you
have them.

As for switching to LTE--don't. I tried that here in New York, and it's not
what it's cracked up to be. The only service with solid LTE performance is
Verizon, and while the speeds are consistently good (5-8 megabits), they are
"good" only as far as wireless goes, and it costs you $10/GB. I blow through
10-12 GB a month just barely using the internet, and not even downloading
movies, etc. You'll spend several hundred dollars a month getting a decent
amount of bandwidth, and for that price you can just get a decent cable
connection for home and save the LTE for when you're on the go.

~~~
wtvanhest
_Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the
fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than
wireless._

I'm not an expert in physics but if cell phones use radio waves and radio
waves travel at the speed of light it seems like at some point technology will
allow for very fast over the air data transfers without breaking any laws of
physics.

I have LTE on my AT&T phone and it seems pretty good, but I am definitely
apprehensive about switching all my data to it in my house. I'll probably wait
a few years, but if Comcast does anything to really infuriate me, I am likely
to switch.

[Added] I got a few downvotes on this one, while I don't care about the karma,
I do want to say that I didn't mean to say "I'm not an expert" in a sarcastic
way. My intention was to point out that I don't know what I am talking about.

~~~
EwanToo
All those radio waves need to be shared between every phone connected to that
cell, and between all the other radio based services out there (e.g.
Television).

For a direct fibre link, all the available bandwidth is dedicated to you.

------
thomasstephn
Hopefully it'll boost this branch of the French economy. Let's hope that on
the way to reach that goal, the cost of internet stay the same (30€/month,
40$, for unlimited internet, unlimited landline phone calls and TV). Because
it's maybe the best to learn of the French internet those days, its cost :
[http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_cost_of_connec...](http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_cost_of_connectivity)

------
cletus
Ultimately I think Internet access will reach utility status (like water,
electricity, telephony), meaning it will be a given (in the developed world at
least and hopefully more and more of the developing world as time goes on).

It's still priced as a premium product and there's no reason for this other
than regional monopolies over the last mile.

The one thing that confuses me about the France proposal is how they plan on
building this for 20B euros when the NBN in Australia is estimated to cost
A$36B [1] for a country with one third the population of France.

The biggest cost in any communications network is the last mile so is
proportional to population but inversely proportional to population density.
Population density is low in Australia but there is 1/3 of the people.

Additionally, there are significant regional infrastructure costs. It is more
expensive per mile to build fibre in, say, New York City versus Tennessee.

Inter-city links are really a small part of the total cost, even in a country
as spread out as Australia (given the size, the population is 95% on the
coast).

Hopefully the NBN in Australia (which I'm a big supporter of) will survive the
next election. The Opposition is sadly against it and the present government
is hanging on by a thread and in leadership turmoil.

For those not from Australia, the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard,
became PM after ousting Kevin Rudd in a partyroom coup d'etat in Rudd's first
term, something with little precedent in Australian politics and certainly not
in a PM's first term. For example, then-Treasurer Paul Keating ousted fourth-
term PM Bob Hawke in much the same way.

This sort of thing isn't generally favoured the electorate because (IMHO) it's
perceived as the Number 2 saying "it's my turn to be Number 1" yet it plagues
politics (Hawke-Keating, Howard-Costello, Blair-Brown in the UK, etc). Keating
went on to narrowly win the "unwinnable" 1993 election and then get destroyed
in 1996.

Gillard narrowly won the last election with a minority in the House of
Representatives [2]. Who became PM came down to horse-trading with minor
parties and independents such that the change of a single seat changes the
government. Obviously this is not a stable situation.

Anyway, things look grim for the Gillard government as Kevin Rudd won't go
away. He has already failed (twice?) to take back the top job in a partyroom
ballot and the issue is rearing its ugly head again.

Tony Abbott (the Opposition leader) has campaigned on a half-assed cheaper
version of the NBN that is basically the same ADSL system for most people.
Technically the proposal is FTTN (fibre to the node) where nodes are within
1.5km of premises and copper the rest of the way, which should improve
bandwidth (ADSL2+ can do about 12Mbps at 1.5km and VDSL/VDSL2 could
potentially raise that).

The worst thing for Australian broadband (IMHO) would be for the NBN to be
gutted in this nascent stage but it could happen if the Opposition wins big in
the next election.

Luckily for the NBN, the National Party, which notionally represents "rural"
interests, the traditional party of the Liberal Party, is in favour of the NBN
because current (and proposed) broadband solutions for rural areas suck hard.

Now all we need is non-backwards reasonably priced broadband in the United
States. We can but hope.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network>

[2]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillard_Government#Minority_gov...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillard_Government#Minority_government)

~~~
cturner
Telecommunications has been headed in the other direction. State monopolies
get privatised and lose their monopoly status.

I don't think your other examples are standardised in the way you suggest
either. Control of electricity becomes less and less centralised.

I wouldn't want internet to be treated as one-size-fits-all. With competition,
if one company tries to block certain features, you can change to another.
Also, having a government carrier makes it easier to regulate. This makes it
easier for the state to mould the network to its convenience, something the
Australian government have tried to do repeatedly. The most effective
opponents to this are a handful of small private internet service providers.

~~~
quink
The extenuating circumstance here is that the opposition, which is now trying
to get elected, privatised the national telco starting in 1997.

What that meant is we had a for profit company, Telstra, owning both the
entire phone network and the biggest cable network, with big stakes in PayTV
and joined at the hip through that to the biggest media organisation in the
country, Murdoch's. The only competition worth speaking of is another HFC
rollout by a competitor that Telstra overbuilt at every turn and made much
less viable and DSLAMs by other providers in a minority of local exchanges
that still require payments to Telstra including ULL fees. Telstra was also
privatised without any vertical separation worth speaking of.

The NBN, evil as government run business may be, represents the most viable
and sensible solution to the problem of Telstra. The people putting it
together and the ACCC have made sure that it wouldn't be like Telstra at all.
What it represents is, like water or electricity infrastructure, a single path
to the premise at the lowest possible cost, a mandate of falling prices in
real and nominal terms and restrictions by the ACCC being planned out until
2040 already.

How do we know it will be good for competition? Because every telco in the
country, Telstra included, is unhappy wih particular details, but they are on
board, and Telstra included, happy enough to be there.

Also, the NBN is fairly dumb as a network. A lot of things are handled by the
provider, the FTTH deployment of the NBN goes up to layer 2 only. We've tried
your proposal of letting private enterprise do the lot, and all it has led to
is an increasingly decaying copper network and no HFC rollout of any major
note since about 1997.

If broadband becomes a right, not a privilege, especially in a country of
suburban sprawl, then you need to treat it like water or electricity. Dumb
wholesale network at the bottom, vibrant conpetitive market at the top.

------
ricardonunez
I'm working in bringing high speed broadband to rural areas in the U.S. We are
putting all energy in securing funding right now. You can't imagine how hard
is for a start-up to secure funding for it. It has been exhausting. I applaud
any initiative by the governments to invest in high speed internet.

~~~
morphle
We have ways of funding fiber to the home and farm in the US and Europe. We
have ample backbone capacity. Send me an email to discuss funding you. info at
eigenglasvezel dot net

~~~
ricardonunez
Thank you for your offer. Right now I can't get into more detail. As soon as I
can (Without getting into trouble), I'll post more news.

------
bjhoops1
If you'd like to know more about why the U.S. lags insanely far behind in the
broadband race, and why we pay ~ 4 times as much for our inferior service,
check out David Cay Johnston's The Fine Print. I don't recommend it for anyone
with blood pressure issues.

------
elmotri
Germany and UK were not even able to get in the ranking of the FTTH Council
Europe… They do both not have 1% of all and at least 200.000 households
connected to fiber… what a shame

~~~
Nux
The internet in UK (London, Virginmedia) is terrible; whenever I need to
download and especially upload something (some video, hires pictures, system
backups) there is serious swearing involved. In comparison, _eight_ years ago
in Bucharest I had 100/100 Mbps, just like anyone else.

At least Virgin realised they suck at it and sold the Broadband division to
UPC/Chello, but that's not much reason to be optimistic.

------
kayoone
As we are moving more and more towards cloud/web based services and streaming
content, the quality of our internet connections is getting more and more
important while the performance of our local hardware is losing importance as
time moves on. Sometime it will probably end with big mainframes in
datacenters and thin clients in forms of phones/tablets/pcs, much like it was
before the PC revolution :)

------
kl0nk
Like every ideas there is some good and some bad. It's stupid to think about
FTTH and FTTLA in the french countryside because nobody cares about it. We
just have to wait and see how much will be actually spent in a useful way. I'm
confident because in the past, France showed that it can make a success in
telco.

~~~
Vlaix
France is larger than Paris. The countryside isn't populated by cows only and
I'm very much concerned about it.

------
seanp2k2
Meanwhile in the US where technology is a huge part of our GDP

[http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Our-National-Broadband-
Pl...](http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Our-National-Broadband-Plan-is-a-
TwoYearOld-Dunce-118909)

------
sambeau
Britain would be better-off doing this rather than building ahigh-speed line.
High speed internet for the whole country would be a massive stimulus to all
sorts of new business ideas and working practices.

~~~
alan_cx
Could be argued that if done properly and thoroughly, the rail line might not
be necessary at all.

~~~
rayiner
Eh, people doing internet things overestimate how game-changing fast internet
is. I don't care how fast the internet is, people are still going to want to
meet each other for dinner, see grand-babies in person, etc. Faster internet
doesn't obviate the need for travel.

~~~
Retric
Cut even 1 trip in 50 and you can avoid building a lot of infrastructure.
Netflix vs video rentals is one clear example of less trips, but there are
plenty of others.

~~~
rayiner
1) Cutting 1 trip in 50 is actually a lot; 2) A 2% reduction in travel doesn't
do much when e.g. U.S. air traffic alone is growing 2-3% every year and car
traffic is increasing at 2-4% each year.

~~~
Retric
Air travel is substituting for other forms of travel because it has become far
cheaper with a 50% average cost savings between 1997 and 2006.

------
lifeisstillgood
Thats a much better idea than a railway no one cares about to birmingham

------
OGinparadise
It's about $3 Billion a year. Not bad at all.

US could have done this and fixed the power grid when we had that $800 Billion
stimulus plan, at least we would have gotten something worthy out of it.

------
martinced
Desperate move...

It's a desperate move and it may not be that smart in face of ever faster
wireless.

The problem with France is that for years they were bragging that they were
the "4e plus grand puissance du monde" (world's 4th most powerful nation). Now
they're fifth. By the end of Hollande's first mandate they'll be sixth (Brazil
passing in front of them).

If Hollande is re-elected, France could very well be out of the G8 by 2022
(ouch: three more places lost).

Germany today said that french people only working 35 hours a week and only
until 60 years simply isn't going to cut it.

Oh, sure, it may somehow work. But not if you plan to stay relevant compared
to the other countries.

These are more words by Hollande: some more little faerie dust to dodge and
delay discussing the real issue. Most notably: public spending representing
56% of the GDP and the private sector being taxed like crazy and which, hence,
keeps shrinking and shrinking.

------
lucb1e
Last time I heard, they were so poor they got more money from the EU than they
paid. Category Greece and Spain. Meanwhile we're only paying...

~~~
seszett
That's always been wrong
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/europe/09/eu_budget_...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/europe/09/eu_budget_spending/img/graph_net_contrib_466x485.gif)

~~~
kl0nk
I don't know where this gif comes from but I have this source:
<http://ec.europa.eu/budget/figures/2011/2011_en.cfm> So in terms of "Total
'national contributions'": DE: 21 189.9 FR: 19 075.6 IT: 14 517.6 UK: 12 918.3

It was published the 20/09/2012.

~~~
riffraff
the two things are not necessarily at odds: states put some money in (total
national contributions), then take some more money out (resulting in net
contributions).

