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France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
- samudrijan 1mo agoVive la France!
- MrGando 1mo agoAnd here in SF we have like 55%? Been waiting for it for 10 years in my hood.
- chalupa-supreme 1mo agoIn metro Atlanta, just outside of city limits, I was desperate for fiber for a long time. Forced to watch other neighboring cities get Google Fiber at great monthly rates. I pay a bit more with AT&T now, but it’s so worth every penny between streaming, gaming, and personal projects.
- testing22321 1mo agoDo you really notice it with streaming? I have 80Mbps cable, and nothing has ever slowed down. If I download something over a couple of gigs I just get a glass of water and it’s done.
- kccqzy 1mo agoThey are probably talking about streaming to an audience (upload speed).
- RiverCrochet 1mo agoDo you have a data cap? The cable provider near me charges you $10 for every 50GB over 1.25TB monthly. A while ago they offered an "unlimited" plan without that cap at a higher monthly rate. 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.
- testing22321 1mo agoI intentionally get the slowest speed possible that has no data cap. Was 50, then it went up to 80 a year ago.
- outworlder 1mo agoNot the person you are asking, but definitely yes. Bandwidth isn't the only metric at play here. 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.
- AndrewDucker 1mo agoAbsolutely. Buy multi-GB game, watch it download quickly at gigabit speeds, be able to play it two minutes later. Can't do that on 80Mbps.
- frollogaston 1mo agoI don't notice. I had 60mbit/s for a while and it was fine. That's two typical 4K streams. Now I have 1gbit/s that I never use. 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.
- chalupa-supreme 1mo agoI think there were big issues in my area because there are only two providers so congestion would peak in the evening from 4pm - 8pm. Netflix/Youtube would playback lower resolution and we’d be stuck with loading circles if we manually set it higher. If I remember correctly, that issue became less frequent before the switch, but I haven’t had the lower resolution issues since.
- bob1029 1mo agoI think it's pretty wild that parts of the Houston metro have a better ISP story than SF. The last home I was in had multiple competing fiber providers available. My current home is in the middle of the woods and I have a 5gbps symmetric link.
- lotsofpulp 1mo agoFor a new build or overhead wiring, it's a trivial cost that is easily recouped. 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.
- nemomarx 1mo agoI wonder why companies do run new fiber in the US in cities, given all this? 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?
- lotsofpulp 1mo agoIf stuff is already being dug up for another reason, then the numbers can pencil out. But it’s pretty rare for somewhere that does not have fiber to gain access to fiber, at least on any reasonable timescale.
- piva00 1mo agoSweden pushed for FttH even though all outdated cabling was already buried, no idea why just a city like SF cannot do the same. 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.
- robin_reala 1mo ago
- inigyou 1mo agoWhy haven't you run your own fiber from your house to the nearest carrier hotel? 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.
- PaulKeeble 1mo agoThe expense for one is enormous. Getting all the rights to dig and running the job is a full time job for a long period time. In many cases its not even possible and the existing firms might tie you up in court and bankrupt you long before you complete.
- pocksuppet 1mo agoWhat if you dug without rights? Be an Uber?
- forgotaccount3 1mo agoI don't have Fiber. I have never needed more bandwidth. 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.
- wmichelin 1mo agoDamn! We had it in the sunset when I lived there back in 2017
- dietr1ch 1mo agoIt's ironic that SF has such a bad network. 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
- vlovich123 1mo agoThat’s because infra telecom is done incorrectly. Look at Sweden’s municipal fiber model how you make infrastructure cheaper and make competition actually work for customers. Having each carrier have to run lines to each customer is the wrong model. Sweden somehow got it done in a moment of sanity when the leading telecom pushed for this model.
- chermi 1mo agoLol yeah it's basically early days of electricity
- outworlder 1mo agoI guess we need to burn more stuff on the streets? It worked for the French.
- epistasis 1mo agoIn SF they burn stuff on the streets to prevent any change to the physical structure. No new apartments, no new infrastructure allowed.
- sonar_un 1mo agoI spent a lot of time in SF in the early 2010s and I couldn't believe how absolutely terrible the internet was in the heart of silicon valley. It's incredibly sad honestly. You'd expect that SF would have the worlds top internet speeds, but nope. It was quite disappointing.
- halestock 1mo agoMeanwhile, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gigabit-speed-goal-suggesting-it-is-unfair-to-slower-technologies/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gi...
- rwmj 1mo agoNot The Onion
- pbkompasz 1mo agoFCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to Musk's Starlink
- dguest 1mo agoFCC: high standards are unfairly prejudicial against subpar infrastructure. > 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.
- micromacrofoot 1mo agoit's a regulatory change that opens up fiber infrastructure money for other uses, so it certainly is another Starlink handout, in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars they've already received from taxpayers though if we want to be fair, the competition is other telecoms that were also abusing the handouts until very recently
- rsynnott 1mo agoBloody hell, what’s next? “The requirement for 300km/h for high speed rail is unreasonable prejudicial to technologies such as steam”.
- sib 1mo agoI mean given that effectively all other ISPs delivered nothing under these programs, it's a lot better for folks living in rural areas to get Starlink than nothing...
- bitmasher9 1mo agoOver the last 10 years I’ve moved 5 times. Each time having a fiber connection with at least symmetrical gigabit has been a hard requirement. Looking forward I’m considering moving again for very fast networking where I can begin to stream videos in 4k 60fps to small groups from my home, as well as offering a semi-permanent home for mid sized files (500mg-50gb). 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.
- yieldcrv 1mo agoHow do you go about learning this about a building or neighborhood while planning a move? Its something I usually find out later
- TonyTrapp 1mo agoCan't speak for France but in Germany, you can usually check on each ISP's website what their coverage for a specific street address is. It's one of the things I always do when I look for a new home.
- dolmen 1mo agoSame in France. 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&mode=debit&techno=filaire https://maconnexioninternet.arcep.fr/?lat=46&lng=2.3&zoom=7&...
- robin_reala 1mo agoDepends on which country you live in.
- rconti 1mo agoIn the US, there are various websites for checking service availability based on zip code. You can fairly easily find local ISPs in a region and then use their own service checker to see if service is available at a specific address -- in other words, the same method you'd use if you already lived there and wanted to order service.
- EDM115 1mo agoWe can all thanks Free who pushed massively fiber to no longer be dependent on Orange's ADSL copper network And also the fact that they have crazy low prices which forced the 3 other ISPs to stay competitive
- aennassiri 1mo agoXavier Niel did a lot of good to France
- gramie 1mo agoQuebec has high-speed internet available to all residents. Either fibre to the home, or subsidized StarLink. Canada as a whole is expected to have 90% high speed internet by the end of 2026, and 100% by 2030.
- betaby 1mo ago`high-speed internet` is not necessary a fiber though. As recent as 2025 Videotron had been receiving subsidies to build cable network in a newly constructed neighborhood.
- gramie 1mo agoYou are right, there is cable as well. I'm in an area that does not have cable, so our internet is all fibre. 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.
- betaby 1mo ago> cable can get up to 1Gbps, and probably higher, so it's a distinction without a difference. 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.
- thunderfork 1mo agoAnd there's been almost no fiber laid for the last two years after Bell bought up the companies that were actually doing innovative rollout :/ "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.
- bryanlarsen 1mo agoThe Quebec Starlink subsidy program was terminated in early 2026, AFAICT. I'm not sure if it was for explicitly political reasons like the termination of the similar Ontario program was.
- cute_boi 1mo agoAnd here is my house, I pay $300 just to get 300 mbit downspeed and 10mb upload speed. can government STOP this fucking spectrum(Charter Communications) monopoly.
- outworlder 1mo agoFunny. For me, Comcast is the monopoly.
- gramie 1mo agoHere (in Canada), we are paying about USD$65/month for 500Mbps down and 500Mbps up. Our only choice is Xplornet (the provincial government sold monopoly rights to each area of the province) but I think their prices are regulated. You have more problems than just the monopoly. Like the FCC, among other federal agencies, being completely captured by big business.
- WarmWash 1mo agoI'd look into starlink or 5G services if I were you.
- rconti 1mo agoThis must be bundled with TV at that price, right? 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.
- frollogaston 1mo agoSpectrum was ok where I live, but Cox has faster upload speeds, so I switched. Spectrum acquired Cox about a week after I did that.
- nsbk 1mo agoSpain is at 96.79% (June 2025), up from 94.79% a year before. See [0] 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-infraestructuras-digitales/areas-interes/banda-ancha/informacion-cobertura https://digital.gob.es/en/telecomunicaciones-infraestructura... [1]: https://www.digimobil.es/fibra-optica/ https://www.digimobil.es/fibra-optica/
- alerighi 1mo agoIn Italy we are at 78% of addresses covered. That doesn't mean automatically that one gets fiber. First at all, if someone doesn't need to download heavy stuff and has a good coverage a 5G SIM with unlimited data (something you can get for 10/15 euros a month) is cheaper than a fiber connection (that starts from 25 euros). 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...
- epistasis 1mo ago> a 5G SIM with unlimited data (something you can get for 10/15 euros a month) is cheaper than a fiber connection (that starts from 25 euros). These sorts of prices are unheard of in the US, so incredibly low. Something has gone deeply wrong with US telecommunications.
- utopiah 1mo agoYep... was on the countryside for the Summer in places so small they didn't even have a bakery, which in France matters. 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.
- cassepipe 1mo agoThe "sad" thing is that it is generally not advantageous for people to have both a phone data plan and an internet box plan if the latter is not shared so a lot of people have a fiber connection on their wall but still use their phone as hotspot since bigger data plan < reasonnable data plan + internet box plan It's not the end of the world but it feels like a wasted effort. I don't know what the solution is.
- hocuspocus 1mo agoIt's not really a big issue. Connecting the last meters of fiber is cheap, either done by default in new constructions, or on demand for older houses. ISP's hardware to run PON is cheap. Once street level fiber deployment is done, whether market penetration follows or not isn't a huge deal.
- cassepipe 1mo agoI am clearly not talking about the last meter issue, I am talking about when the fiber is already in the home and sits unused. That seems like a pity (yes not a huge deal) But maybe I misunderstood your point ?
- hocuspocus 1mo agoWhere do you think is the last meter if not in the home?
- ZeroCool2u 1mo agoI have 5 Gbps symmetric fiber in NYC with a Google Fi data only sim as a built-in failover to 5G on my router. It did require some specialized hardware, but it's truly a wonder coming from a kid that experienced dial up. 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.
- ishtanbul 1mo agoget a 5Gig network card if you have a spare PCIe or M2 slot on your motherboard. should be about $30.
- nba456_ 1mo agoGreat job! Now they can download stuff from data centers even faster!
- bhouston 1mo agoCanada also has pretty fiber coverage in urban areas but only for a single provider, Bell Canada, and its legislatively allowed resellers like TekSavvy. It is really fast and reliable. You can get symmetric 8Gbps for around $100/month USD ($140/month CAD.)
- thunderfork 1mo agoUnfortunately I haven't heard much about build-out since Bell bought the company that was laying all that fiber (Start.ca) 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.
- sourthyme 1mo agoI think this was Telus, not Bell. But I'm feeling the same way.
- bryanlarsen 1mo agoUnless it has quietly resumed, Bell has stopped laying fiber. The government forced them to share the fiber and so threw a hissy fit and stopped laying new fiber. 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.
- bhouston 1mo agoYou are right: https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/business/bells-fibre-footprint-to-plateau-after-ottawa-sticks-with-crtcs-wholesale-policy/article_5d413ecb-1632-5359-9cca-ec6322e9c951.html https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/business/bells-fibre-foo... I didn't realize that Ebox was Bell. Interesting.
- harel 1mo agoIs that fiber to the property or fiber to the cabinet? In the UK I get FTTC which means the last bit from the cabinet down the road to my house is copper wires. My speed is bottlenecked by that. New builds and flats get services for the building giving them full fiber. My fiber is only as fast as my copper wire to the cabinet allows
- have_faith 1mo agoWhen I moved a couple years ago and got fiber with Virgin they came and pulled fiber from the cabinet down the road to the house, with no extra charge.
- 1e1a 1mo agoIt is FttH (fibre to the home)
- harel 1mo agoYes... Semantics and old age don't mix
- nehalem501 1mo agoThere are a few places that had cable before mainstream fiber deployment (so FTTC), but the norm in France for new installations for at least the last 10 years has been FTTH (including in the countryside).
- hocuspocus 1mo agoFrance doesn't have much FTTC, VDSL and HFC exist but are fairly rare. Orange has started decommissioning its legacy copper network.
- ahartmetz 1mo agoI think FTTC is just called (V)DSL in most places. IME it's uncommon to call anything less than FTTB (basement / building) fiber.
- P-Nuts 1mo ago
- dewey 1mo agoI was curious and just looked it up: Germany reached 36.8% in 2024 (https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2024/20241205_Giga.html https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...).
- hocuspocus 1mo agoAnd in places where FTTH is available, you pay more for 250/100 Mbps than symmetrical 10 Gbps in Switzerland.
- nixass 1mo agoNot sure if I'm surprised negatively or positively by the fact. My apartment (Germany) was built in 2017 and coax in every room was the choice planners made :_)
- ketzu 1mo agoBecause back then cable TV was a common inclusion in apartments that could be unilaterally be added to "Nebenkosten" and was therefor sold to landlords as such a nice benefit by cable providers.
- qmmmur 1mo agoCollusion between Virgin and other companies and the developers. Just plain old corruption and ineptitude. Our 2019 new build apartment had coax too, which resulted in some really crap internet that was expensive.
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- TacticalCoder 1mo agoCurrently typing this from my vacation house in France, in a rural area, with vineyards nearby. Closest highway is a 45 minutes drive (!). Now, sure, it is a fancy place in that it's Provence's seaside and, well, I can see big yachts from my couch but it's still in the middle of nowhere. At night it's wild boars (which my cat hates), snakes (which my wife hates) and toads everywhere. 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).
- rtsil 1mo agoUsing DNS over HTTP instead of the ISP's DNS solves most of these blocks, for now.
- juliie 1mo agoSpain is worse, to prevent illegal soccer match streaming they ban a ton of IPs during matches. So tons of hosts (like Cloudflare) become inaccessible. And that's managed by a private organization. In France I'm not aware of any ISP that even blocks torrents, though there is hadopi so you can get a fine. All blocks I'm aware of are DNS only, so trivial to bypass.
- UncleSlacky 1mo ago> they filter traffic/block IPs/force website to imposes checks (like age checks) that aren't done elsewhere, block torrents, etc. Is that with Orange (France Telecom)? I don't have such issues with Free.
- audidude 1mo agoIt's awesome. I moved to France from Portland, Oregon this year. I went from 1gb to 8gb fiber for half the cost in France.
- ricardobayes 1mo agoThat's a pretty interesting move. Any other experience you are willing to share about France compared to Portland? I'm actually curious and have always considered Oregon to be one of the nicest places in the US.
- audidude 1mo agoVery much depends on what you look like. I'm white, but my wife is not. The moment you step out of Portland the racism is palpable. And even in Portland you have a bunch of white people that try so hard to not be racist that they come off super awkward and weird. It's a thing. Not that France isn't, but it's different. Some white guy was cat-calling my wife the other day in Mandarin. She is not Chinese...
- zokier 1mo agowhy is there such clear empty region in the middle? some regional governance thing? also why is Brittany so much worse than rest of the country, despite having relatively high pop density
- dolmen 1mo agoSubsidizing works up to when most of the area has high cost for few people.
- jaylaal 1mo ago"Toute la Gaule est occupée par les Romains. Toute ? Non! Un village peuplé d’irréductibles Gaulois résiste encore et toujours à l’envahisseur."
- frollogaston 1mo ago"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres"
- cornichon622 1mo agoThese two regions are filled with a whole lot of nothing, especially the middle. That's not a reason to not cover them, but it's a reason to cover them after the others, 80/20 rule I guess.
- dguest 1mo agoThere are two smaller empty regions in the east that are filled with a whole lot of mountains. I suspect covering them might be more expensive.
- vinc 1mo agoBrittany was a lot more behind a few years ago, and we had a big storm in the region that caused a lot of damage and slowed down the work but looking at the map today the issue looks almost resolved. I live in a forest in the middle of nowhere, the poles got installed at some point and then I had to wait for years for the fiber to finally arrive, but now it's there and it's great! In the meantime we also got 5G and Starlink so plenty of good options for fast internet.
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- jakub_g 1mo agoOne thing worth mentioning is that a law was passed around 2017 in France that as a tenant, if you want to install fiber, the landlord can't prevent you from doing so (because e.g. they don't want to drill holes in the walls or other excuses). Also the vendors do not commercialize ADSL anymore since a decade ago or so if fiber is installed in the district.
- chermi 1mo agoAre there downsides? I'm guessing it came from state initiative, does that mean more state control of the internet, including snooping and censorship? I don't know the best solution to fast and widely available internet, but I'm pretty sure the US isnt doing it. Starlink is the best for my mom's house 5 miles from a 100k+ "metro" center, which seems kind of absurd. 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.
- juliie 1mo agoIt was managed by the state, but built and owned by private companies. The installer would get 1 year of exclusivity, then any other ISP gets to use the fiber. Cost is pretty low, I get 7gb for 50€ per month, and there are cheaper plans for just 1gb 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.
- chermi 1mo ago50 a month for 7gb?! Jeebus I'm jealous.
- fudgy73 1mo agoQQ: Who owns / operates the fiber? 100% private co? Partially subsidized?
- nehalem501 1mo agoIn rural areas it's publicly owned by local authorities (and then opened to the various internet providers). In suburban / medium density areas it's privately owned by one single internet provider (most of these areas where assigned to either Orange or SFR) but they must open access to others. In cities / high density areas each internet provider has it's own fiber.
- dguest 1mo agoThis is also a nice map of beautiful places in France (if you like mountains and nature). Maybe also some places that aren't beautiful but are at least cheap.
- oliwarner 1mo agoIt's pretty insane. Our family has a holiday home in a fairly mountainous region in central-southern France. Dwindling population, no major tourist activity, wine production. 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%C3%A9bit https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_France_Tr%C3%A8s_Haut_D%C...
- ruined 1mo ago>Our area is never going to generate the return on internet alone 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.
- jazzkingrt 1mo agoIsn't starlink and its competitors a cheaper way for rural places to get fast internet?
- organsnyder 1mo agoI'm guessing that right now many countries wouldn't like the idea of areas being served solely by an American ISP.
- dguest 1mo agoThere's a lot more when it comes to Starlink: - The obvious political point: that ISP is subject to laws in a country that is testing its legal framework and diplomacy in new (some may say unpredictable) ways. - The first rule of public funding is that the money goes back to the public. Roughly all (if not all) of the jobs for Starlink go to the US, whereas fiber installation in France employs French people. - Paying for Starlink is a terrible investment because the entire constellation is disposable. Every satellite will burn up in roughly 5 years and the whole network would go dead without more launches. Fiber, once installed, is at least serviceable. - Another political point, but the only company that can launch replacements economically is also subject to laws in that same country. Starlink hands an awesome amount of semi-soft power to whatever country controls it. It doesn't really matter what country that is: it's a huge strategic liability to anyone who doesn't hold the keys. Until there's at least another player in the game I'd expect a lot of countries to be wary. Ironically, that could mean Starlink/SpaceX really needs a competitor before it can become a universal solution.
- zero_k 1mo agoLol in Germany, internet is soooo slowwwwwwww. I used to live in France, and Free (i.e. free.fr = kind of a bad choice of name) was absolutely demolishing the local big carrier (France Telecom?), but in Germany, there is very little competition to Telekom, so it's really bad.
- 4d4m 1mo agoMakes me very jealous as an American. This could have been our stat.
- devy 1mo agoThe highest in Europe might be Romania, 96% fiber coverage due to the late buildout of Internet infra. https://www.fierce-network.com/broadband/romania-beats-germany-and-austria-fiber-penetration-rates https://www.fierce-network.com/broadband/romania-beats-germa...
- swiftcoder 1mo agoWelcome to the club! Here in Spain we hit this milestone last year. It really is pretty incredible, compared to the state of rural broadband coverage in countries that haven't put in this level of investment...
- DrBazza 1mo agoThe Uk could have been in 100% in the 90s and saved us decades of copper theft. https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
- qwe----3 1mo ago> saved us decades of copper theft We don't have to work around crime! This is a defeatist attitude! Accommodating crim subsidizes it! It does not solve anything
- xboxnolifes 1mo agoOh no, accommodating crime by upgrading a country's internet infrastructure... and removing an avenue of crime...
- mococa 1mo agoFiber is also very very common in Brazil, I type from a small city near to the coast (beach yay!) and I've 1Gbps for about 20 dollars, it never get down or slow.
- bluedino 1mo agoMeanwhile we're having neighborhood groups protest running fiber through neighborhoods, calling police on the workers, removing untility marking flags in yards...
- BrandoElFollito 1mo agoA friend of mine has family in the middle of nowhere. Actually in the nowhere of the middle of nowhere. Beautiful place but you better not forget to buy the salt. 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.
- geniium 1mo ago[starlink enter the room] Ooh just got 99.9% coverage
- geniium 1mo ago[starlink enters the room] Ooh we just got 99.9% coverage
- rootusrootus 1mo agoCompared to a wire, Starlink is low bandwidth, high latency, and does still have short outages. I use it for my backup, but I would never choose it as my primary even over Comcast.
- donalhunt 1mo agoThere is an official European Union goal to achieve 100% Gigabit network coverage for all European households by 2030. While it does not exclusively specify fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), fiber is the primary technology utilized to meet this standard, which requires networks to deliver speeds of 1 Gbps and above. It is underpinned by Regulation (EU) 2024/1309, known as the Gigabit Infrastructure Act (GIA). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/2030-digital-decade-policy-programme.html https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/2030-digi...
- therealdrag0 1mo agoI think stability is more important than speed. 15 years ago living in apartments in Seattle I had a lot of time of day service disruptions, but the last 10 years I have used both cable and fiber and they’ve been perfectly fine.
- natas 1mo agoAs always with the french government: don't trust the numbers they give you.