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#fiber#internet#france#more#speed#home#cable#rural#don#starlink
Discussion (200 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
We'd long suffered the worst imaginable 56k but in 2018, the local ISP just ran fibre out to everyone. I think the current service is cheaper than the 56k was too, and far cheaper than any of the 4/5G options back then.
What I mean (vis á vis insane) is that they'll have routed about a kilometre of fibre over several dozen poles, up a mountain just for our house. And the same for all the equally rural neighbours miles around. The return on this is deeply social. Our area is never going to generate the return on internet alone, and that's nice.
France does a lot of getting-shit-done-by-subsidy. The roads around Paris need some attention but they nailed internet hard. I wonder how far they blew their original €20bn budget. The Wikipedia page hasn't had a decent financial update since 2017. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_France_Tr%C3%A8s_Haut_D%C...
What's so wrong if something is done to benefit the regular people once in a while?
One may argue that this also isn't helping "regular people" but I mean the subsidy aspect in particular. I mean, oil companies in the US are subsidized, for God's sake. Most of the most profitable businesses in the US are subsized heavily and that's part of how they became so profitable. Corporate welfare is not shunned but spend money on the common man and you have protests and politicians up in arms for wastage...
Except when these "elite" people are inhabitants of a lost hole in the middle of the Creuse and suddenly all children can access Internet in a civilized way. The same way the true elites in Paris have done for some time already.
But yeah, my mum at the border of la Creuse had a better internet access than me for a few months :D
The time scale for optical fibers' profitability is much longer than copper. The media itself is passive, cheap to maintain, and easy to upgrade by lighting more fibers or moving to newer PON standards. That's why operators often overbuild the fiber count per home on purpose, something they would rarely do with copper (the time scale and upgradability being more limited by the intrinsic properties of the medium).
Fibering up a mountain becomes more rational once you view it as a 40+ year asset with very low upgrade cost (for the medium itself, not the equipment connected to it). Not a 10-year ROI project like copper often was. And even more rational when you can get subsidies by governments which are usually eager to develop the economical activity in regions that otherwise would have little to no opportunity to grow significantly.
for the isp? maybe.
for the gdp? well, i imagine that a lot of highly paid remote labor would love to be located in rural France.
I think the goal is social, to ensure that rural France isn't abandoned further than it was since the 1990s.
I do wonder if ultimately via having everyone on fiber it pays for itself ultimately, since you don't have to "convert" anyone's internet between different mediums, you can also sunset all sorts of legacy equipment that's no longer in use since fiber is it.
I think that answers that.
StarLink beats the hell out of the copper phone lines / DSL connections a bunch of these rural communities were running on before the fibre rollout, but it's no match for proper fibre. And assuming France has price controls like Spain, the fibre will be cheaper into the bargain
If starlink does something you don't like good luck doing anything about it.
I wonder if the price of fiber now is just too low that it's very viable to install at scale even for low-density areas.
$0. It's taxpayers euros.
But it's not inefficient if this fixes a chicken-egg problem: overcrowded big city and underpopulated rural area sucks.
Nobody can/wants to go in rural area if they can't make a living there. A fiber speed Internet unlocks lifestyle for many.
It's the same as investing in say a high speed railway between major cities A and B and adding a middle-of-nowhere stop C midway. That C then can flourish to become a medium/major city... So while the initial investment looked like a waste, it's beneficial to provide a better life for people living in both A,B, and C.
Not everything has to be a capitalist 'minimize cost, maximize profits' game.
I think France and Spain are the best of the big European countries regarding coverage, but also adoption: If we look at the adoption ranking globally, Spain sits fourth at 90%, behind the UAE, China and South Korea and ahead of France at 83.6%.
Very few European countries convert coverage into subscriptions that efficiently, and I think it's driven by competition. You can get 500Mb symmetric connection for as little 10 euro [1], 20 for 2Gbps. DIGI has just gone crazy and in their own network they are offering symmetric 10Gbps for 25. Most people I know have 1Gbps because when is that not enough?
[0]: https://digital.gob.es/en/telecomunicaciones-infraestructura...
[1]: https://www.digimobil.es/fibra-optica/
Second a lot of people has still FTTC even if it has FTTH, mostly because FTTC offers a speed that is enough for most people (100Mbit/s) and upgrading may have costs (the installation of the fiber is at the expense of the ISP, but if you need to make modifications, such as put a pipe from your house to the street in which they will put the fiber, it's at your expense). In some cases even if fiber is present it's difficult/not possible to get it into your house (for example you live in a condo and the other tenants doesn't want to spend money to make the modifications that are needed to pass the wires).
In any case they have started to switch off copper (since it costs money to maintain an infrastructure that has decades), so either way customers will be forced to move to fiber or 5G network in the upcoming years. In any case a fault on a copper line is likely not to be repaired...
These sorts of prices are unheard of in the US, so incredibly low.
Something has gone deeply wrong with US telecommunications.
A favorite of mine is https://www.usmobile.com/ which is $25/mo list price (and less if you pay for the year, or if they're having a sale) which will give you Unlimited Data and 1GB a month of global roaming data
If you pay $45 you can get unlimited data from Mint for $15/mo: https://www.mintmobile.com/plans/
It's not unheard of!
It's actually the high speed internet at home that is less competitive - the prices in Europe are unheard of.
But yeah, it's otherwise a problem with competition enforcement.
The EU also has incredibly low salaries.
I work at an ISP that gets DSLAM equipment from Huawei, we run one of the few G.fast VDSL deployments in the world using this particular hardware. Huawei has stopped manufacturing this product line (the Swiss market is a rounding error ;), which will force us to fully migrate some neighborhoods, only for backup inventory.
Germany being 15 years late, I assume you can still buy similar hardware from AVM though.
> UK is at 85% FTTH [on a sibling comment]
Meanwhile I have 1 Gb/s FTTH in an Italian village of less than 100 souls, while I couldn’t reach 300 Mbit/s on copper in London zone 4.
I have been surprised at how well they have improved the situation in Italy, and in dismay at how terrible it is in UK.
My brother in the UK has 1Gb/s fibre in a village of less than 100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
Complete bullshit.
BUL maybe is close to that percentage
P1G is nowhere near and is never going to reach full coverage in 2030.
Cellular plans are also a lot cheaper in Europe :(
The ability to download/upload large files without worry, and the decreased latency, are well worth the handful of neighborhoods I’ve declined based on this requirement.
Congratulations to France, for helping to make sure the future is more evenly distributed.
An exception is Steam, but I don't download games that often.
Its something I usually find out later
Prioritizing that while potentially facing a deadline of moving out of an irreconcilable lease, living situation, job move, immigration move, or just for a change of pace
The information is available publicly on the same web site as mentioned in this thread, with even information about the expected network throughput: https://maconnexioninternet.arcep.fr/?lat=46&lng=2.3&zoom=7&...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/2030-digi...
> The Carr FCC said last year that the gigabit goal “may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds.”
I don't know if this is so much a handout to Starlink, seems like a way to win the race by moving the finish line.
though if we want to be fair, the competition is other telecoms that were also abusing the handouts until very recently
It's also a UK program and not a US program. The US has a similar program called BEAD, it has allocated $42B in funding, however, that is allocated, not spent budget. Build outs have only started this year.
In the early days of broadcast radio and TV it made sense to have an agency regulating use of the airwaves, but in recent decades the downsides of such close govt agency regulation on most (but not all) digital telecom are beginning to excede the upsides. And regulatory capture has turned some FCC rule-making committees into cage fight octagons where telecom lobbyists battle each other. Net neutrality is a punch line, spectrum auctions often fail and arcane media ownership rules made in the B&W TV era don't make sense. Maybe it's time to begin gradually sunsetting some of the FCC's historical remit.
Their workers were staying at my hotel, and putting fiber in my community. It was fascinating how frontier practically hires contractor to lay down pipes, and another contractor to pull the fiber, and another contractor to splice it and another contractor to run fiber to the house, and another contractor to come and install in the house.
This intervention is embarrassing and corrupt. Infrastructure in america is also embarrassing, which I'm guessing is also some combo of corruption and self-inflicted wounds on state capacity.
What did they have though? Optic fiber, high bandwidth, low latency, reliable and for a very low price.
Honestly I think ADSL was already enough for most people, I mean non professionals, but now I think France has the infrastructure for a good enough Internet for the next few decades. I can't fathom normal usages that would need higher bandwidth and lower latency.
It's not the end of the world but it feels like a wasted effort. I don't know what the solution is.
Once street level fiber deployment is done, whether market penetration follows or not isn't a huge deal.
Check the France map. This is cheap in densely populated areas, like cities. It isn't in mountainous areas with just small groups of houses like in the middle of the country.
But maybe I misunderstood your point ?
And also the fact that they have crazy low prices which forced the 3 other ISPs to stay competitive
Orange has started decommissioning its legacy copper network.
Also that's kind of irrelevant because it is free/cheap to get the ISP to pay for bringing fiber into the home (at least if you are in an urbanized area ? But if not, the paragraph above still applies)
https://www.fierce-network.com/broadband/romania-beats-germa...
It really changes the calculus on some things with large volumes of data on my desktop. Admittedly, my desktop maxes out at 2.5 Gbps, but everything else in the house keeps happily chugging along.
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
We don't have to work around crime! This is a defeatist attitude! Accommodating crim subsidizes it! It does not solve anything
When I moved there like 10yrs ago I thought I would finally have 1gig fiber, but bandwidth was on par with what I had with my parent's VDSL connection from the country side, and latencies were worse, I went from sub-5ms to 30ms because many servers were actually in LA and the routes were bad (I expected ~1ms per 100km, not ~5ms/100km).
ISP gerrymandering to avoid competition was unexpected coming from the land of free markets
For buried infrastructure where the coaxial cable company already sells internet, you will almost never recoup your investment to bury new fiber and run it to all the homes. You can have the superior product, but insufficient people will pay enough more than the existing coaxial cable prices.
Probably a main difference is that the Swedish infrastructure was deployed by municipalities with an open access model, so no need for 10 different ISPs to dig their own cabling.
I got underground fiber direct to the basement of a student apartment years ago and it was basically a hundred dollars for install fees. They must have already been laying it on the street, but still. Competition?
As a result, many rural areas have way better internet than big cities.
It worked for the French.
Bufferbloat was horrendous with Comcast so latency varied wildly depending on what was happening on the network. The only way around it was to cap download and upload to 80%, and that's a large dent on the already anemic upload. And I had to cap client upload too, otherwise one client could easily saturate upload and now not even TCP ACK packets were being reliably sent.
The main problem isn't cable per se, is the asymmetric link.
EDIT: Also 1Gbps symmetric allows me to backup my NAS offsite without impacting anyone else.
What I did notice was the 1mbit/s upload speed that came with it. Uploading large files to Google Drive was impossible, not just slow but would actually time out, plus bad things happen when you saturate the uplink that way.
I've never heard of a fiber connection with a data cap like that. I ended up moving to fiber eventually, it was cheaper for the same speed and the upload speed matched the download speed as well.
I'm not expecting you to do that, but I want to trigger some discussion on what are the exact reasons we all don't do that.
I work from home 1 or 2 days a week. My current bandwidth is more than sufficient for my personal usage. And I exclusively use Wifi, other than a TV and a Nintendo Switch that happen to be right next to the router so are plugged in. So even if I had fiber, I literally wouldn't know a difference because my wifi would be the bottleneck still.
Back when Google Fiber was rolling in, no one I knew was looking forward to it because they had need for the increased bandwidth. They looked forward to it because the expectation of a 'Google' branded product was better than the expectation of a 'Comcast' branded product. It was more about the expected uptime and consistency.
Ooh we just got 99.9% coverage
Ooh just got 99.9% coverage
Also the vendors do not commercialize ADSL anymore since a decade ago or so if fiber is installed in the district.
Maybe also some places that aren't beautiful but are at least cheap.
It is really fast and reliable. You can get symmetric 8Gbps for around $100/month USD ($140/month CAD.)
Never mind that the sharing rules are harshly tilted in Bell's favor. They charge Teksavvy ~$80 a month for that access, but then will sell it directly to consumers for $50/month under their house discount brands like Ebox and Distributel.
I didn't realize that Ebox was Bell. Interesting.
I had to move to a place that didn't have fiber but by all means should be getting it Real Soon Now (urban, surrounded by fiber build-out, on an arterial) but I'm basically accepting that I'll be doomed to DOCSIS for the foreseeable future.
Who's done it best? What's wrong with the US? Just state capacity? Regulatory capture? Infrastructure incompetence, like SF? I know last mile is expensive and not super attractive from an ROI perspective, so I can see how pure market solutions might not be the best.
Im talking out of my ass but we also know the grid is fucked, and I know at least part of it is a downed tree can take out an astonishingly large sector.(1) Maybe we could bundle fiber with putting power lines underground, at least rural/suburb. Reason being that 1)digging shit up in cities is not easy -- but I also imagine we're not being creative enough there either 2) one of the most expensive parts of fiber(or any network )is last mile, on a per person basis. I would've said I was confident the biggest quality internet coverage problem was rural, but I saw that SF stat in this which kind of shocked me.
(1) I know grid is messed up in many more ways, but living in the country for big portions of my life, no electricity at all is painful and too frequent.
The issue is that the whole infrastructure is run at super low cost. I sometimes see a neighborhood's fiber distribution cabinet just open to the elements. Happens maybe 1-2 per year which is way too much. And there are many reports of people getting unplugged when a technician installs someone else's fiber. Low cost is good but it can go too far.
Overall it's still pretty good, and mobile is also very cheap.
When I was calling him, he had to climb a tree to get basic voice reception. Data was absent.
And then one day fiber came, together with a nano emitter for GSM. His family life changed considerably. This is real progress.
In the meantime we also got 5G and Starlink so plenty of good options for fast internet.
Canada as a whole is expected to have 90% high speed internet by the end of 2026, and 100% by 2030.
Still, cable can get up to 1Gbps, and probably higher, so it's a distinction without a difference.
The push to make sure that 100% of people have access to high-speed internet is the most important thing.
Heavily disagree. There is a distinction with a big difference. Currently deployed by Videotron cable solution is 940Mbps down and only 50Mbps up. That's an abysmal upload speed.
Of course Videotron is aware that cable is dead end. (even though they still building it on subsidies). That's why Videotron is offering to switch to Bell's fiber in some locations.
You can get 8 Gigabit symmetric home internet from Bell but not IPv6.
"Cable is equivalent" only if you don't need/want a symmetric connection - until they lay fiber I'm stuck with an awful upload speed.
It's a very sparsely populated area, we're kilometers away from the nearest village and indeed we've got fiber to the home (since years and years already now).
Now it's not all rosy: they filter traffic/block IPs/force website to imposes checks (like age checks) that aren't done elsewhere, block torrents, etc.
I'd say it's the least open Internet I've seen in any EU country (now of course there's VPN and I can use a SOCKS5 proxy through ssh to one of my server etc. but still: France are complete control freaks and it shows).
can government STOP this fucking spectrum(Charter Communications) monopoly.
You have more problems than just the monopoly. Like the FCC, among other federal agencies, being completely captured by big business.
Though I know from experience that if you try to get rid of TV service they find a way to charge you more for just internet.