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.'"

Re:offering 2.5 Gb/s...

[Anonymous Coward]

100 meg is still better than the so called 5 meg Roadrunner offers which is never close to that

Re:And look here:

[mnmn]

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.

Re:And look here:

[jakarta-milwaukee]

Just to make you feel better: here in Indonesia we pay $60 for a 128 kbps cable modem connection.

Re:And look here:

[elrous0]

15mbps? You're very fortunate to even be getting THAT. Where I live in South Carolina, the fastest connection you can get is 3mbps.

It's a damn shame when the country that basically pioneered the internet is falling so far behind the rest of the world in connectivity. It's pretty bad when one of the world's top economic powers is getting LAPPED by countries like Sweden and South Korea. Last time I checked, we had dropped to something like 13th place.

-Eric

Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes!

[Kosi]

Also, they think that the engine de-greaser they call wine is the best stuff in the world.

France is for sure not the only country in the world with regions where very fine wines are made. There are Italy, Spain and Chile, just to name some (and Germany for white wine). But by calling a good Bordeaux "engine de-greaser", you clearly display that you do not have a bit of a clue about good wine. Although these wines are heavily overpriced:. A "Montes Alpha" from Chile for 15,- is similar in quality to Bordeaux wines pricing at 50,- and above.

Kosi

Quick Handmade Translation....

[Gobelet]

It's not well translated, as I just woke up...

FT : Testing Optic Fiber

Published on 07/25/2006 à 3:11:57PM by Sylvestre Mardont
Source : Presence PC

In a France Telecom press release, we learn that the company launched an experiment with optic fibers (Fiber To The Home). This experiment is driven in several Parisian districts, and in 5 cities in Hauts-de-Seine.

A technological breakthrough...

This offer is made for a hundred clients, and uses GPON technology - without any active equipment, like a router for example. According to France Télécom, this technology could allow bitrates of 2,5 Gbps (400 MBps) (downstream) and 1,2 Gbps (150 MBps) (upstream).
The experiment costs 70 euros a month, and is offered with free unlimited phone calls, and digital TV.
 
...but is it useful?

If such bitrates are definitely interesting, they still are utterly useless, since SATA II for hard drives tops at 3 Gbps in the best cases. We will have to see the results of the experiment, and the commercial offer coming from it, the heavy deployment of FTTH being planned for 2007/2008 by France Telecom

Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes!

[iceman2929]

just adding to your comment about countries who make good wine: South Africa, United States ( napa valley) and Canada ( yes canada makes wine, kinda like the same valley as napa but on the other side of the border)

Re:offering 2.5 Gb/s...

[justaphoneguy]

GPON provides 2.5 Gb/s downstream and 1.2 Gb/s upstream, shared among 32 endpoints (currently; the technology is supposed to evolve to support 64 endpoints). 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. In addition, the back end of the optical line terminal is typically a single GbE port into the carrier's backbone, so there's a contention factor which limits the total bandwidth available to the subscribers served by the OLT to less than 1 Gb/s.

English DOC

[bismark.a]

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 [google.com]

Re:I envy you.

[Slackus]

Is South Africa we are stuck with 512kbps ADSL at around 45$ per month with a 3GB cap. The cap is calculated for both local and international traffic. So be thankful :)

Re:Define "free"?

[OldeTimeGeek]

But really, we have government regulation to thank for our laughable phone and data networks. By trying to encourage phone companies to lay out phone wire where it would not be profitable in the 40s and 50s, we granted them monopolies, and now they've become as poorly managed as the airlines.

I would say that the telcos are managed quite well. They're maximizing shareholder revenue, just as any non-private corporation should be.

This is the difference between a government-run monopoly and a private-sector monopoly. Governments do things for "the public good" - companies don't have to. Government monopolies already have government backing. Private sector ones have to obtain it. Without guarantees of long-term profitability, do you think that the telcos are going to interested in spending the money and jumping through the regulatory and planning hurdles that will be placed in their way by every municipality that wants a cut of the action?

Besides, Just because slashdotters want high-speed connections that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the cable/phone/wireless-buying public does nor does it mean that will pay for it even if it is offerred.

bad reporting

[jean-guy69]

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.
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/journal ists/press_releases/CP_old/cp060117.html [francetelecom.com]

Re:Define "free"?

[Andy Dodd]

"I've heard this argument before, but there are places in New York and other large metropolises that are just as packed as some of less dense Asian cities and even they don't have bandwidth to compare."

At least in the United States, there are federal regulations mandating subsidizing of rural telephone (and I believe telecom in general) services.

i.e. the telcos were not only permitted, but legally MANDATED to charge high-profit low-cost customers (those in cities) more to subsidize the low-profit high-cost rural customers. I'm not sure if it applies to data services, but I believe (at least currently) that it does and I've seen it on my bill. The end effect is that costs are (at least somewhat) averaged across the country.

Sucks for the urban customers, but great for the rural ones.

Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes!

[good soldier svejk]

"Rockets" have no guidance system. They are purely ballistic. The various "Katyusha" [wikipedia.org] Hezbollah fires are not noticably different from the types the Soviets fired at the German in WWII. Hezbollah does have a few cruise missiles and medium range missiles with inertial guidance systems, [fas.org] But I have not seen evidence that they have been using them against Israeli cities. They did successfully attack an Israeli warship with a cruise missile. [haaretz.com]

Re:FP

[drwtsn32]

2.5Gbps? Since most computers have only a 1Gbps network card (at best), you would never see that kind of utilization unless you shared the connection... and you better have one hell of a router.

Downloading files at 2.5Gbit/sec? ...you can't!

[Joce640k]

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?]