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2.5Gb/s Internet For French Homes 536

Posted by CmdrTaco from the gentlemen-start-your-envy dept.
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.'"
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2.5Gb/s Internet For French Homes More

2.5Gb/s Internet For French Homes

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  • FP (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:38AM (#15783008)
    LET THE TORRENTS BEGIN

  • Sweet Mother of Potatoes! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cap'nPedro ( 987782 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:39AM (#15783015)
    Oh the sweet, sweet pr0n! Holy crap, I wish I lived in France!

    Wait, did I just say what I think I said...?
    • Gah. My other half is literally moving from France today to come live with me in the UK. Now I'm considering turning her round, hitching a lift, and going to live in France!

      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.

    • What are the practical uses of a connection this fast? I mean, think about it, can your computer even handle that speed of connection? And how many times can you pirate Meet the Fockers before you are happy with your connection?
      • Being the tin-foil hat wearer that I am, I'd say that the french are going to ask you to install some software on your PC giving them (the French Government) the fattest, biggest zombie net in the world. Fuck with France, kiss your bandwidth good by as you get DDoS'ed in to a black hole.

      • Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes! (Score:5, Funny)

        by masklinn ( 823351 ) <<ten.nnilksam> <ta> <gro.todhsals>> on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @09:14AM (#15783827)

        From the top of my head

        • High quality videoconf
        • P2P
        • High quality streaming
        • P2P
        • Website hosting (1.5Gbps is a freaking huge upload bandwidth, quite a lot of websites currently on shared hostings could be hosted @home)
        • P2P
        • Serving a full network, or sharing bandwidth (say you poll resources with a pair of neighbours, pay a single line for 3 or 4 flats)
        • P2P
        • MOAR PR0N!
        • P2P

      • Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by manno ( 848709 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @09:43AM (#15784058)
        I can think of a number off the top of my head.

        1. VPN
        2. VNC
        3. Game Servers - Battlefield 2 reccomends a minimum of 64kb a player for a 64 player map that's 4Mb. If you want to eventualy double players to 128, or go crazy with 256 you will need 8Mb, and 16Mb respectively.
        4. HD video from youtube/google.video
        5. VOIP telephone banks
        6. Website hosting
        7. Remote backups
        9. Anything that is bandwidth intensive

        Asking what use this would have is kind of missing the point. You put this type of bandwidth in every home, and uses will be made the download speed is nice, but it's the bandwidth up that's going to cause HUGE changes.

        Make no mistake the US being this far behind is hurting us, how much does it cost for a US based buisiness a month to get a 40Mb of upload? literaly Thousands if not tens of thousands. It costs, a French company less than $90. Yes I would like to get this to my home, but the bandwidth gap in the home is not what concerns me. The US had better get its but in gear or else we will be left in the dust on this whole information age thing. It's still the wild wild west out there and anything can happen. French companies now have a huge leg up on thier US counterparts.

        -manno

        • Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by andrewman327 ( 635952 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @10:10AM (#15784320) Homepage Journal
          I just don't see most residential homes needing to play online games while working from the corporate server through a VPN while talking on the VOIP phone while streaming YouTube and Google Video at the same time while running your personal website while backing up all of your data. I do agree that businesses would benefit tremendously from cheapening the "tubes."
          • It would be very useful for residential homes, even with current usage.

            Instead of paying for cable, phone, and internet it could all be internet. 2.5 gigabit would feed several HDTVs with multiple receivers, several phone lines, and several fast computers easily. The main thing is what hugely increased bandwidth will lead to. There is something that will fill these pipes, if history is any gauge.

          • Re:Sweet Mother of Potatoes! (Score:5, Insightful)

            by manno ( 848709 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @12:50PM (#15785602)
            ...And at one point in time 1GB of hard disk spaced seemed like more than I would ever need.

            Trust me people will find awesome uses for 40Mb of bandwidth up. I honestly believe VPN for home will catch on, or a service with remote storage that works similarly. with 80Mb down, 40Mb up and a VPN connection to your home PC from anywhere an OS from MS/Apple/distro-of-the-day could create a way for you to set up a network share that would allow you to treat your WAN like your LAN. You could download your media collection from your home PC to wherever you are. Personal Video/Music on demand. Think TIVO-to-go no need to use email to transfer files from one PC to another one located at a remote location. VPN will become seamless in the not to distant future. It's that way for me already, if you haven't tried it out yet, use OpenVPN. If you use it in tunnel mode on Windows XP you can make it start up and connect to your VPN server automatically, and treat your network share as a mapped drive or folder... The only drawback? US DSL/Cable upload bandwidth. I'm talking working on remote files at local speeds.

            A more likely scenario would be a company like Google offering 50-100GB of storage, and you'll log onto it with every PC you use to get your music, videos, everything. Thinking about a 80mb down/40mb up in terms of "it's like a 6mb down 0.375Mb up only faster" is wrong. If French telecom can manage to deliver 50% of that bandwidth "to the jack" this is going to be HUGE. The key hear again is UPLOAD.

            Speaking as a US citizen to the other US citizens - We are shooting ourselves in the foot leaving our national IT infrastructure in the hands of people spending more time on finding a cheaper easier way to line their pockets rather than the old fashioned entrepreneurs who would find an undeserved market, and offer them a fair service at a fair price. If not addressed soon this will be a huge problem. Again home bandwidth would be nice but it's business BW that's really going to screw us over in the long run.

            -manno

  • Define "free"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by etherlad ( 410990 ) <ianwatson@NosPam.gmail.com> on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:42AM (#15783033) Homepage
    For... $85(70 Euros) a month you also get free phone and TV.

    Ummm.... if it's $85/month, it isn't really "free," is it?
    • Given you'd pay almost $85/mo here for a fraction of that service, I'd call tossing in phone and TV service "free".
    • Well, here in UK [ukoffer.com] they screw the people with £29.99 a month (US$55.2288 aprox) for 8 MB/s,

      UK services plain suck, they are oh so expensive...

    • Re:Define "free"? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Valdrax ( 32670 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:51AM (#15783096)
      Compared to Comcast, where you can "save up to $100" by buying a connection that is a fraction of that for $33 along with $33 for TV and $33 for VoIP, it doesn't seem all that disingenous.

      When you consider the bandwidth used by VoIP and IPTV over a 2.5 Gb/s connection, it IS practically free to provide. I would pay twice this price to get this here and more than willingly make this my largest bill. Where I live, the best that I can get is 6 Mb/s / 384 Kb/s for over $80 month.

      It's disgusting! What country invented DSL? America. What country is in dead last place among the industrialized world for DSL speeds? America.

      But, oh, our poor widdle local monopolies can't compete against all that howwibble competition. It just makes me mad enough to spit.

      • It's disgusting! What country invented DSL? America. What country is in dead last place among the industrialized world for DSL speeds? America.

        What country has the largest square footage of industrialized space in the world? America. I share your outrage at the lack of reasonably-priced high-speed internet, but there are some real geographic concerns with laying down wire in the States. For one, America is a lot more sprawling than any other European or Asian country. Even American cities tend to occupy m

        • The problem isn't just that they got monopolies in the past, it's that most telco's STILL have monopolies today. Maybe there are some cities where you actually have competition, but for many of us, we basically have ONE cable company, ONE power company, and ONE phone company to chose from, thanks to LOCAL monopoly agreements.

          -Eric

        • Re:Define "free"? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Valdrax ( 32670 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:15AM (#15783267)
          They're much more tightly packed than we are, so laying down fiber in major cities has a much greater profit/sq. ft ratio than a telco could get in the US.

          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.

          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 point out that most phone companies in European countries are also monopolies. The difference is that they're government regulated and partially (or wholly) government funded monopolies. It's that lack of state intervention that makes the huge difference. On the one hand, Americans have never really had to wait long times to get phone service for decades. On the other hand, our internet growth has become a quagmire.

          I think some sort of boost is needed, but I'm not sure what. Obviously, the market is providing enough incentive to innovate and expand services.

          • Re:Define "free"? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by kabocox ( 199019 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @09:30AM (#15783956)
            I think some sort of boost is needed, but I'm not sure what. Obviously, the market is providing enough incentive to innovate and expand services.

            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:Define "free"? (Score:3, Informative)

            by Andy Dodd ( 701 )
            "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

            • Re:Define "free"? (Score:3, Interesting)

              by AK Marc ( 707885 )
              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.

              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

        • Re:Define "free"? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by josecanuc ( 91 )

          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.

          Interesting you mention airlines. Telecom and airlines are both industries that are either government-run or government-subsidized in the typically social-leaning European nations.

          For good or bad, those are the kind

        • Re:Define "free"? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          What country has the largest square footage of industrialized space in the world?

          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 [verizon.com] for $180. Meanwhile ATT seems to be giving up [arstechnica.com] on SBC's fiber deployment, at least for this iterati
          • What country has the largest square footage of industrialized space in the world?

            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

      • Re:Define "free"? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Eivind ( 15695 )
        Oh, I don't know. I live in Norway, and I can tell you, 2.5 Gb/s to the home is also here not available. I don't think USA is all that bad. We too have to make do with paltry 100Mbit/s connections. (they're symetrical, so it's full duplex, same speed up and down, which is some consolation.)
      • Oh, so you people are the ones to blame for DSL?
        If it wasn't for you guys our government might had invested 50.000.000.000 sek in fiber for everyone, but since the market forces started to pick it on themself with DSL they have only invested like 5.000.000.000 and people are sitting there with their shitty 1mbps upload.

        Stupid government, over 20-30 years time fiber to everyone would be worth it, the cost per month in that perspective isn't much.
    • Free as in "we know you don't want it because you are already using another provider for those; but because it is included in the package for 0$, if you ask politely (or if any antitrust law or whatever regulation ask for it) we will suppress your access and give you a reduction of 0$ on your monthly bill"
    • ummm, for especially low values of 85?
    • Maybe it's a phone where you are allowed to say anything you want, and television where you can watch anything you want with no censorship.

  • You mean? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by abscissa ( 136568 )
    You mean when you don't devote all the country's resources to war, you can actually spend money on developing infrastructure at home and abroad that improves the lives of citizens?!?? AMAAAAAZING!!
    • Yeah, too bad all of that "infrastructure" spending hasn't helped their 9.1% unemployment rate [forbes.com].
      • Numbers such as these doesn't tell shit anyway, here in Sweden the official numbers are probably lower but that is just because they don't count people in projects, sick people, people who are retired early and so on, I think that among the people which is in working age 1/3 or so really doesn't work. Sweden is fucked up.

      • Re:You mean? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bombadillo ( 706765 )
        Yeah, too bad all of that "infrastructure" spending hasn't helped their 9.1% unemployment rate.

        Take away the extreme amount of home construction the past few years in the U.S. and I think you would find U.S. unemployment at a similar if not higher rate. We are very fortunate to have large amounts of spare land to buoy the economy. Europe on the other hand does not have this luxury.

    • Re:You mean? (Score:5, Funny)

      by thelost ( 808451 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:36AM (#15783485) Journal
      Citizen, do not believe Oceania's flaccid lies, their so called gigabit web is really just a series of interconnected tubes. They move information over long distances in dump-trucks. War is Peace Citizen. - This state announcement has been sponsored by Fox Networks Inc.

    • Re:You mean? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kabocox ( 199019 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @09:21AM (#15783877)
      You mean when you don't devote all the country's resources to war, you can actually spend money on developing infrastructure at home and abroad that improves the lives of citizens?!?? AMAAAAAZING!!

      Um, no. We actually spent the money to have "hispeed" like 45 MBps to all of the US through tax cuts and deregulation of the Baby Bells during the Clinton/Gore era. Those that have paid for telephone services from I think it was around 1993-current have been basically given their phone companies more profit rather than government taxes and a regulated phone industry. It was a massive bait and switch, they promised something like this French system, and after the Feds gave the Bells their carrot, the Bells gave the Feds a stick and said we can't/won't roll out/upgrade fiber to the door and will instead offer DSL. From what I've since, DSL is ok for those who can get it. The Feds were promised more than 30 times the speed of DSL though both up and down stream to us. This is something that should have been built during our 1997-2000 the internet is the wave of the future time. The Bells have screwed us. I'd actually love for the Feds to fine each one of the billions in back taxes with interest for not providing services to us and then regulating the phone industry to bring it up to spec.

    • Re:You mean? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by andyclements ( 863025 ) <clem0141 AT umn DOT edu> on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @09:35AM (#15783999)
      Actually, the Clinton/Gore era gave the American telcos $200 BILLION in tax breaks so that we would have fiber and coax to our homes, at speeds of around 45Mbps. A decade later, we are still stuck on copper, paying insane amounts for abysmal performance. See the new networks [newnetworks.com] site for more.

  • Damn it (Score:3, Funny)

    by lapagecp ( 914156 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:44AM (#15783043)
    THE FRENCH....the french have more bandwidth. Its just not right I tell you. I want fiber to the home. Oh and I want a cooler cell phone like the Japanese. How come the terrorist are after us. All we have is crappy phones that have been out for like a year or more other places and a few Mb of bandwidth.
    • It is not that the terrorists are after you, it is you who are after the so called invented terrorists.

      I will tell you a tale, it is about a terrible creature called "El Chupacabras". It usually went out sucking cow's blood in Mexico when an election was going to take place. The people got so concerned about "El chupacabras" that they did not saw the frauds that the government was doing.

      On these las elections "El Chupacabras" didnt arise but instead the government arrested and tried to send to prision one e
  • Okay, it was an obligatory joke... yes I know we won the revolutionary war due to the French military assistance and they gave us the statue of liberty... I just find it funny to swap out the word 'French' with the word 'Freedom' to be "PC" -- however, when talking about France should one instead use the word "Freedom"? Wow, 2.5 gigs... yeah that is freedom!

  • offering 2.5 Gb/s... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kzharv ( 175360 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:45AM (#15783051)
    But I notice they are using GPON. I have 1Gb/s GPON in Japan (free, comes with the body corp fees) and 1Gig aint "1Gig". Yeah looks good but I would prefer dedicated 100Meg than 2.5Gig GPON.

    • Re:offering 2.5 Gb/s... (Score:5, Informative)

      by justaphoneguy ( 877050 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:31AM (#15783431) Homepage
      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.

      • STILL WANT. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Valdrax ( 32670 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @09:17AM (#15783850)
        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.

        Oh, well only 80 Mbps. I'd still take that. I'd still just about kill for that, especially if it was affordable.

      • Re:offering 2.5 Gb/s... (Score:5, Funny)

        by raddan ( 519638 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @09:48AM (#15784119)
        So, at worst, assuming 64 endpoints and a GbE line from the multiplexer, I get 16 Mbit downstream and 8 Mbit upstream? And, at best, at home, I get 768 Kbit down and 128 Kbit up? Plus TV, which I don't currently get. For the same price? Sounds pretty damn good to me.

  • 2.5Gbps? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Primis ( 71749 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:47AM (#15783065) Homepage
    And what, in 40 seconds you've hit your monthly cap?

    Seriously though, it' s trade-off. We could have this sort of thing in parts of North America, but it would require consumers and gov't to stop moaning and griping about where telecos and cablecos pick to choose their deployments. Cherry-picking, if you will.

    Because in case you didn't notice, all these Asian and European plans that seem so fast (and than always get everyone green with envy) always have the disclaimer "in select areas/markets" on them. Which means "deployed to a very few affluent areas that can likely afford it", a concept which seems to go over OK in Asia and Europe, but not so OK in North America.
    • Which means "deployed to a very few affluent areas that can likely afford it", a concept which seems to go over OK in Asia and Europe, but not so OK in North America.

      You obviously don't have relatives that live in a rural area. It took my parents YEARS to get DSL after it was available for the first time in our state, and it took them over 3 years to get the higher speeds that I had living in the city. They still don't have cable TV where they live and use satellite TV.

      I'm sure that the concept flies just
    • You can get high speed FTTH from the phone companies in select areas of the US as well.
    • ...always have the disclaimer "in select areas/markets" on them.

      FLAF (FTFA en francais):
      Cette expérience est conduite dans certains arrondissements parisiens.
      Or 'certain areas in Paris'.

      Still, it has to start somewhere. I'm sure at somepoint some neighborhood was the only one with 56kb/s.
    • You can probably get xDSL more or less everywhere in Sweden but of course speed will warry depending on how long from the telephone station you live, there was ideas to build a fiber network to almost everyone (as many as have electricity) ~5 years ago but that was scrapped for whatever reason, probably because DSL picked up.

      Of course ethernet/fiber connections is limited to different areas but if you live in any of the larger cities I don't think it's that hard to find an appartment which has it even if 10

  • The weakest link (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blantonl ( 784786 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:47AM (#15783067) Homepage
    For some reason, when I read news releases like these, I get all excited about the possibilities of a tremendous amount of bandwidth available to me in the home -- then realize the reality.

    You are only going to get the bandwidth that you are being served.

    With that said, if I'm downloading a huge ISO or other multimedia file from a site on my 2.5GB connection, and the remote site is sitting on a 256K upstream cable modem, then I'm going to get no more than 256K.

    While YOU might have 2.5GB of downstream available to you, most providers these days serving upstream content don't have anything close to that availability.

    And furthermore, I seriously doubt that many PCs today even have the ability to CONSUME 2.5GB of bandwidth. Are they making 10GB ethernet cards for the consumer market? Ummm... no.

    • Re:The weakest link (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Wojski ( 670095 )
      More importantly, where do we find a hardware firewall that would handle that kind of bandwidth? Be pretty funny watching a Linksys trying to coup with that kind of bandwidth.

  • FT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lovebyte ( 81275 ) * <lovebyte2000@gma ... minus physicist> on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:47AM (#15783068) Homepage
    France Telecom/Orange better improve their current offers. They are eaten alive by other ADSL providers. FT/Orange gives you 18Mb/s ADSL for 40 euros a month (includes TV channels AND NO telephone) when other providers gives you 24Mb/s for 25 to 30 euros which includes TV AND free phone calls to Europe, USA, and other countries. They lose thousands of customers per month.
    Let's hope that they'll compete by innovating, but I doubt it.
    • Kick ass, here the regular lowest price for Internet is 200 sek, TV starts of at 159 sek or something around that and I pay 75 sek for my voip with free calls to regular phones in sweden. 434 sek or 46 euro. And that is terrestial digital tv not over the Internet. Also those 200 sek with xDSL might be so low band width that the phone doesn't work ;)

  • Internet, Phone and TV for $85.00? (Score:5, Funny)

    by twmcneil ( 942300 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:48AM (#15783081)
    Finally, a real reason to hate the French.

  • Sigh.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nonillion ( 266505 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:53AM (#15783110)
    And here in America, we STILL fall further and further behind in broadband. Where is this 45+ M/bit sync fiber connection the telcos promised 80%+ of Americans were supposed to have by now?

    • Re:Sigh.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by blurryrunner ( 524305 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @09:34AM (#15783987) Homepage
      They spent it all here in Utah :)

      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
  • All i know is, p2p is legal and they have 1.2 gbs up... you cant beat that with a stick.
    we cant even get FTTP in San Fran where its offered
    when it does come to america please invest in cisco.......

  • Le Net (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @07:53AM (#15783115)
    In the spirit of world communication and harmony, we should all adopt this French model.

    French models usually aren't tech saavy, but this one is.

  • Covering all France would cost less than you think (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OlivierB ( 709839 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:03AM (#15783182)
    What's expensive with FTTH is the termination of the fiber to the homes, not so much the backbone.
    French experts agree that getting all the homes connected in France would cost approximately 30bn (with an average cost of 1500 per house).
    That may sound like a lot but in fact it's only the price of 500KM of new highway.

    I think that this infrastructure should be paid for by the state and allowed access to private companies against a fee for TV, Internet and phone services.

  • True Story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ObsessiveMathsFreak ( 773371 ) <obsessivemathsfr ... om.net minus bsd> on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:03AM (#15783187) Homepage Journal
    So my father invested in France telecom. Bought at 128, the all time high I think. They went down to 70, 40, 30. At one point they were down to 9. At that time, the company released its finacial report detailing how they had taken in I think 23 billion in revenue, and had made a loss of 1 billion.

    Upon closer inspection, I discovered that their expendature had been marked as 12 billion in running costs or some such, and the other 12 billion was marked as "captial infrastructural development", or some such. The main telecoms provider in france had just invested 12 billion in its infrastructural development as was down to 9 per share.

    I advised him to remortgage his house and put it all on France Telecom.

    He did no such thing. I believe he sold what he had at 15. The shares are now worth about 22 [google.com].

    As I tried to explain, that 12 billion infrastructural fund wasn't to repaint buildings. France Telecom were giving the French telecoms system a serious upgrade, and as you can no doubt see, it's already paid off. The French can now get their phone, TV and internet over the same line. The company was never, ever going to go under as anyone who knows anything about French big business will tell you.

    That's what a high bandwidth network for 70 million people costs. 12 billion, give or take. And it doesn't require any extortion policies from telecoms on internet businesses. It took a 1 billion loss in one year, and the French now have the best telecoms infrastructure on the continent, if not the world. Say what you may about the French, but when they do big infrastructural projects, they tend to get it right; TGV, Nuclear power, Millau Viaduct, etc.

  • Are webservers allowed? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SeanMon ( 929653 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:06AM (#15783205) Homepage Journal
    because I don't see any other way of saturating a 1.2 Gb/s connection upload, even if your entire street shares it...

    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.

  • Wow... (Score:5, Funny)

    by just_another_sean ( 919159 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:14AM (#15783264) Journal
    They must have some big trucks, um, tubes that is in France!

  • What do they do with that bandwidth? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by massysett ( 910130 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:16AM (#15783282) Homepage
    Thanks for the link to a French article. At any rate though, what will people do with all that bandwidth? What do they do with it now? No, seriously I'm just wondering. I have about 12 megabits download speed right now, and honestly I don't really need that much. I do wish my 600 kilobit upload speed were much faster. But what would I do with a gigabit of download?
  • Same fiber to the home concept...10x+ the speed...

  • US gov fiber (Score:2, Interesting)

    by konigstein ( 966024 )
    I recently heard that when the fiber lines that are run all over the US were originally planned and put in back in the 70's/80's, it was planned for each house in the US to get FREE 150Mb fiber. I'm unable to find any documentation for this, but I'm assuming that The Telco's bought/leased it instead and are selling it to us.

  • Quick Handmade Translation.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Gobelet ( 892738 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:26AM (#15783381)
    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

  • SERIES OF TUBES! (Score:5, Funny)

    by rmadmin ( 532701 ) <rmalek@@@homecode...org> on Wednesday July 26, 2006 @08:27AM (#15783390) Homepage
    But...It's a series of tubes.

    And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

    And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

    Dear Senator Ted Stevens,
    The French can figure this shit out, why can't you?
    Love, rm

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