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It's pretty insane. Our family has a holiday home in a fairly mountainous region in central-southern France. Dwindling population, no major tourist activity, wi
by oliwarner 1mo ago
It'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.
- PaulHoule 1mo agoSatellite services make an end run through a lot of bullshit, that’s true, but the long term costs of fiber are overestimated because cable companies want a very fast profit. Whereas thousands and thousands of satellites will need to be replaced year after year and that rate could increase considerably if Kessler syndrome develops.
- upboundspiral 1mo agothe advantage of local infrastucture is that the local government can have input on the price of the good. If starlink does something you don't like good luck doing anything about it.
- swiftcoder 1mo agoStarLink tops out in the 300mbit range, and has anaemic uplink speeds, whereas most fibre rollouts offer symmetrical gigabit. The latency over StarLink is also 2-5x higher than rural fibre. 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
- thefz 1mo agoNot even remotely comparable in terms of quality
- oliwarner 1mo agoI think we pay something like €30/month for 2gbps with ~8ms latency back to the UK. I think that answers that.
- rsynnott 1mo agoWe’re on about our third attempt at rural internet in Ireland. The first two involved wasting a lot of money subsidising dubious cellular and satellite stuff which was arguably marginally good enough 20 years ago, but not now. Thankfully on the third go the government decided to stop screwing around and just do 10gbit-capable fibre to all rural premises. Ultimately if you half-ass this you just end up doing it again later. This is one reason I’m kind of baffled by spacex’s valuation; its long term market would seem to be countries who are too poor to build out fibre. It’s unclear that there’s a trillion dollar industry in that.
- tzs 1mo agoIf you need to get internet to rural places quickly then such services are great. But if you are trying to get something that could last for decades and handle the expected growth in the speed and bandwidth that the average family might expect then fiber is the way to go. You don't necessarily need to go right to every rural house at first. There are many places where fiber to a terrestrial wireless access point and wireless to the homes would work well. Fiber can then be expanded out from those access points later.
- oliwarner 1mo agoThere's so very much rural France. They'd need a colossal influx of well paid remote labour moving to the country to make the sums work. I think the goal is social, to ensure that rural France isn't abandoned further than it was since the 1990s.
- giancarlostoro 1mo agoBut also, having dial-up in 2017 is wild for me to think about. 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.
- rdiddly 1mo agoPerhaps they've learned from seeing what happened when we in the États-unis did that.
- devy 1mo agoGlad that France built it out now. From now on the fibers price will rise significantly like HBM, NAND chips, power line transformers due to the AI boom.
- organsnyder 1mo agoAny evidence of this happening? I imagine that fiber manufacturing is much easier to scale up than chip manufacturing (of course, the devices that attach to the fiber might be a different story).
- forshaper 1mo agoIn the US it's going up, but there's partially due to Buy America & certain colossal grant programs.
- basilgohar 1mo agoA lot...and I mean a LOT of money...is wasted on things that benefit only a very, very small percentage of elite people in ways that don't translate to benefits to the larger society or regular people. 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...
- BrandoElFollito 1mo ago> very small percentage of elite people 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.
- zem 1mo agoI think you misunderstood the comment you are replying to - they are arguing that running fibre to rural communities is a good use of subsidies, and contrasts pleasantly with the usual sort of subsidy that only a few large corporation owners really benefit from.
- phtrivier 1mo agoI suspect the parent commenter agree with you : broadband access DID cost a lot of money - and in a sense, the project was rushed, and an unexpected demonstration that public / private partnerships with the wrong incentive structure can lead to as bad (if not worse) result than what a public monopoly would have done. But yeah, my mum at the border of la Creuse had a better internet access than me for a few months :D
- ffsm8 1mo ago> What's so wrong if something is done to benefit the regular people once in a while? Usually, this is money taken from people that aren't well off either... So it's not a clear cut positive. Wherever your society decides to do such is obviously not for me to judge. As a single almost 40yo person myself I'm significantly annoyed by all the money the state takes from my paycheck to sponsor people who quiet literally would spit on me and hold me in contempt. And while i ain't poor, my netto wage is lower then some of those people get From the state. But I'm not French, so no opinion on this particularly case.
- PaulHoule 1mo ago(1) communities have already committed to universal service for electricity which uses the same poles and (2) fiber investments are good for at least 50 years and are much cheaper in reality than the usual ROI metrics say they are; the awkward truth is that the LTE networks that carriers were gung ho to invest in were outrageously expensive in comparison but carriers were fine with that because they could charge an arm and two legs for it.
- frollogaston 1mo agoThere is some of that in the US due to government subsidies. People have stories about making their own ISPs in rural parts. But it's not 94.9% fiber.
- Always42 1mo agoWonder how many thousands of taxpayer dollars was spent for this. Does not seem efficient.
- bastawhiz 1mo agoHow is it inefficient? This is the whole point of government: how much economic activity is happening over 56k? Virtually none. You could make the same argument for paving the street and repairing the sidewalk in front of your house. Chances are the property taxes from the average single family home don't cover just the basic street repairs, let alone all the other services your local government provides. Yet we do it, because it turns out that having a happy, well-served population by way of redistributing wealth through services is a generally good thing.
- Always42 1mo agoIf we assume $20k to run the fiber, you could do starlink for a long time. There are internet options other than fiber. Unless there is no other options in France than fiber. What if France got a contract with starlink? Brought the cost down of that.
- rescbr 1mo agoWhy do you assume $20k as the cost to run the fiber? The cost is the contractor's hours to get up a ladder on each electricity pole from the closest PON splitter to the customer's home, plus the fiber itself which is peanuts at volume. Everything else (permits, pole rent, etc) is accounting money that can be negotiated. If there's a strategic national program to fiber up the whole country, this could be exempted on a pen's stroke, or depreciated in many decades.
- well_ackshually 1mo agoYeah, I'd absolutely _love_ that my tax money goes to funding a US company. What could go wrong with depending on a hostile country for someone as basic as Internet ? If I found out my government blew 20k to slobber on Musk's balls instead of using that money to create work for our own people, I'd personally go blow up that antenna.
- csomar 1mo agoIs it really that expensive? Many poor places are now having optic fiber for even remote areas. Algeria is having its speed boom (https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/algeria#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/algeria#fixed). I have been through some remote poor areas in Asia who had optic fiber with "crazy" speeds (ie: 500mbs). 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.
- OroPla 1mo agoI think about fast enough Internet the way I think about running water and electricity: essential.
- throw101010 1mo ago> Our area is never going to generate the return on internet alone, and that's nice. 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.