2.5Gb/s Internet For French Homes 536
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.'"
offering 2.5 Gb/s... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes! (Score:3, Interesting)
Holy hell, this is quicker than my Gigabit LAN. My hard-drives already aren't quick enough to saturate the network, I'm trying to imagine downloading files at 2.5Gbit/sec. The mind boggles.
FT (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's hope that they'll compete by innovating, but I doubt it.
Sigh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Are webservers allowed? (Score:3, Interesting)
well, I guess Bittorrent might.
I ask because I setup a Gentoo-based webserver in my house but can't open it to the world because it's against my ISP's Terms of Service.
Re:Define "free"? (Score:3, Interesting)
US gov fiber (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And look here: (Score:1, Interesting)
We won't upgrade until this condition is met, a few years or months later, we won't upgrade our network until a different condition is met. Rinse lather repeat.
I live to far from from the CO to use DSL. Verizon has not touched a single thing in my area for over 20 years
Re:2.5Gbps? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is we just bought a house in an area we could afford. Not the ghetto, but not an area where I compete with cars in morning rush hour that cost more than my new house, either. I probably won't have FiOS available for another year. And I am bitching, but Verizon's answer every time is that they're laying the lines down as fast as they can. *sigh*
Re:Define "free"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, no. The phone companies are happy soaking us for what we little bandwidth they'll sell you. I want a $15-20 a month bill that pays for Gigabit speeds up and down. I want to be able to watch IP TV and use IP telephones instead of the piece of crap system that we currently have. We should have not just full video conferencing now, but we should have hi-def video conferencing anywhere in the US by now. Our entire communications infrastructure is a disgrace.
Re:Sigh.... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.utopianet.org/ [utopianet.org]
Seriously, we have FTTH here and its great. It probably covers 50 to 75% of the population center for the state. At home its 5Mb up/down with no restrictions on use. We also have it at the office which gives us 30 Mb up/down and its only $130 per month. Yesterday at work, I checked something out from sourceforge and was downloading at peak 5 MBytes per second and averaged about 2.2 MBytes per second. So its starting to come, but you have to live in Utah.
Ok, so I'm gloating a little bit.
-br
Re:And look here: (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe (I'm not totally sure but I'm reasonably confident) that both Japan and Korea have significantly higher population density than the U.S. I'm absolutely positive that continental Europe has a much higher population density than the U.S., which also happens to be why mass transit such as the French TGV and German ICE trains are so much more successful than in the U.S., where only a select few passenger routes are profitable for rail companies. (Namely, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and not much else.) For the same reason mass transit is more practical, it's far cheaper on average to roll out last-mile infrastructure.
Add telecom greed to that and we're screwed. That said, most of the problem is the issue of population density (or lack thereof) and the resulting high last-mile costs.
As to why you see high prices even in cities - The U.S. has laws mandating rural telecom subsidies, effectively averaging the population density across the country as far as telecom prices are concerned.
AOL (Score:1, Interesting)
Now if we only spent money on infrastructure... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Define "free"? (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, not [cnn.com] really. [cnn.com] This is a sentiment on Slashdot that sometimes makes me wonder why everyone here seems to be so anti-business. (Not that I'm accusing you of it, OldeTimeGeek--your comment just reminded me of it.) Sometimes the right business decision is also the moral one--personally, I think it always is, although if you think only in terms of profits I'm sure you could convince yourself otherwise.
Anyhow, my point is, the decisions the subsidized companies are making are clearly losing them money. They're not innovating anymore, and their pricing isn't competitive, and as a result any time a competitor comes into the market they start losing money like wildfire. Where I live, Cavalier Telephone has made serious headway into the phone industry here, simply because they continue to drive their prices down and raise their bandwidth. (I pay $25 a month for 1Mbps/768Kbps DSL. It's rated at 10Mbps/1Mbps, but because of my loop length, I get much lower speeds. Believe it or not, it is by far the most reasonable internet access available--Verizon DSL at 768K would cost me $15 a month more, and Comcast would get me for $60 a month.) Most of the telecommunications industry consists of old, stupid companies who don't understand that real profitability doesn't mean squeezing every last dollar out of the consumer that you can--it's about providing a quality product, and standing behind it.
Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes! (Score:4, Interesting)
How many French people read this site? (Score:3, Interesting)
I call bullshit as well (Score:3, Interesting)
Every time some other country's telco produces a better service than our own, this comes up. It didn't explain why consumers can't get 100mbps in our most dense cities, or 1gbit, and it still doesn't explain why we can't get 2.5gbps now. Even in the places that already have fiber to the home, the best I can do on FiOS is 30M/5M for $180. Meanwhile ATT seems to be giving up on SBC's fiber deployment, at least for this iteration. According to that article they're possibly hoping to come out ahead sometime in the hazy future with 100mbps connections.
It also doesn't explain why rural canada has faster and cheaper consumer bandwidth available than downtown Chicago (I live in downtown Chicago, and what I pay $70/month for is slower than what folks I know in rural Alberta pay $25 CND for). Canada is a larger country, with less dense industrialization, and is far better wired and serviced for internet connectivity than our densely populated metropolitan city centers.
So I call bullshit. Our position as last place among industrialized nations when it comes to Internet connectivity has absolutely nothing to do with our nation's size, and everything to do with a corrupt government in bed with corrupt telcos and corrupt copyright cartels deliberately keeping connectivity artificially slow and prices artificially high. Of course, the war spending that's putting us into record debt isn't helpful, but nor is it directly responsible.
One of my European friends put it best. America is an interesting blend of first and third world. The sad thing is, most of us never travel and don't realize just how third world we're becoming. The rest of the world really is moving along in leaps and bounds, and we have already been left in its technological dust. But don't tell anybody...they'll label you as "unpatriotic."
Re:Define "free"? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's for POTS only. That doesn't have any affect on DSL, other than at most an additional $5 to the base line. That means that this would be $85 in NY, compared to $80 in Paris. I think you won't find too many New Yorkers that would take 2.5 Gbps for $80 that would reject it for $85.
I work for a company that is an ILEC in some places and a CLEC in others, so I see both sides of the regulations. They are annoying, but they don't really move money around that much, especially for a company with as many subscribers as Verizon. Sure, a line in the middle of nowhere up-state NY might cost $30 or $40 per person, but there are so few of them that they don't affect the cost of NYC lines much. But, "It's the evil government regulations" makes a great excuse. The real excuse is "I'm a monopoly, I don't have to improve service to maintain high profits."
Re:...and here in America (Score:3, Interesting)
DSL? Too far from the CO.
Dish? Gigantic pine trees everywhere that can't be cut down on pain of death from the homeowners association mean that satellite dishes are useless.
Because of this one issue, I'm considering moving. And nobody hates moving more than me. Gawd, I wish I had an alternative.