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%C...
> 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.
A 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...
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.
I 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.
But 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.
StarLink 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
- 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 in some way. 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.
Satellite 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.
(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.
Is 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). 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.
Glad 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.
Any 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).
How 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.
If 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.
But it's not inefficient if this fixes a chicken-egg problem: overcrowded big city and underpopulated rural area sucks.
Nobody can/wants to go in rural area if they can't make a living there. A fiber speed Internet unlocks lifestyle for many.
It's the same as investing in say a high speed railway between major cities A and B and adding a middle-of-nowhere stop C midway. That C then can flourish to become a medium/major city... So while the initial investment looked like a waste, it's beneficial to provide a better life for people living in both A,B, and C.
You can bring internet to these other places other than by running a 1km fiber cable, which may be more efficient. Think about it, run. A cable super long to one house or use a dish?
Unless there is truly no other options in france
Unless France is going to launch the satellites themselves (which is also very expensive), you become dependent on another party, which is much worse.
I don't know how it works in France, but in many European countries phone/DSL lines and fiber is highly regulated. Even if it is run by a company, they usually have to provide fair access to other providers so that there is competition. For instance, we have a XGS-PON connection to home (used to be AON) and I can probably choose at least from ten ISPs. This is nice, because they try to compete on prices and bandwidth (e.g. the company that owns the network we are on offers 4Gbit symmetric max, but a competitor offers 8Gbit over the same fiber).
Much harder to accomplish that with satellite internet and foreign companies.
Good governance is sometimes taking the money/income from dense areas (cities) and investing it in rural areas. Also, similar to how copper lasted many decades, a fiber network is a one time large investment cost and then you reap the benefits for decades.
Not everything has to be a capitalist 'minimize cost, maximize profits' game.
Spain 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?
I spent time in the interior of Portugal that had fibre internet, it was very impressive and incredibly helpful to the village. Better payment services and banking for example.
In 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...
You can use any one of many MVNOs to get unlimited data for around that price, say less adjusted for household income, in the USA.
A favorite of mine is https://www.usmobile.com/ which is $25/mo list price (and less if you pay for the year, or if they're having a sale) which will give you Unlimited Data and 1GB a month of global roaming data
Only some places. Netherlands is €45-60 for 1 gbps (we don't make 4x-6x the money Spaniards do), unless you live in an area that actually sees multi-line competition.
We do have an interesting sidegrade: 5G Klik & Klaar from Odido (formerly T-Mobile / Deutsche Telekom) for €26. If you point it the right way out your window, you can get 700-1000 mbps down and 150 (capped) mbps up. Ping is around 35ms. Horrid modem firmware though, you get ping spikes up to 400-850ms (!!) under load due to bufferbloat, but you can of course solve that with your own router and SQM :+)
In the U.S. I perceive MVNOs to be a scam. Like Tracfone was OK in 2011 but somewhere afterwards it became normal to go around rural upstate NY and no service and go around NYC and no service and go to LA and no service.
This year I got a real phone with a real plan and I have coverage in many places now me I can finally see why people get excited about apps.
That's kind of a broad brush, Google Fi is great, especially the fact that they work mostly seamlessly for the same price in like every country, and they're an MVNO.
It proves that you can’t trust the claim that “it is the same network”, I mean it is the same network but you may find yourself riding the back of the bus and there is no independent way to check what service you are actually getting.
I do use US Mobile, and I recently switched to it because T-mobile made it so difficult to pay a bill, it was nearly impossible to get them to accept money.
And a ~decade ago in SF I did have Sonic 1Gbps symmetric fiber for something like $40 or $50/month, but that too is twice the cost of Italy.
Can't speak for Italy, but there have been some consequences in many EU jurisdictions. The EU has been pushing HARD for competition, etc, but it has left many European telecoms in debt-heavy financial situations that has caused issues around future investment and in some countries the (mobile) coverage is good on paper, but the networks are themselves actually terrible (looking at you Germany).
But yeah, it's otherwise a problem with competition enforcement.
I am in Italy right now, in fact, spent a lot of time here. I can safely say, the 5G sim coverage is extremely spotty, and when you can get internet from a physical line, it's generally pretty poor speeds. I am pretty sure a lot of that 78% includes 1 bar of LTE coverage, so it's "technically" true.
The main issue with copper comes from the active infrastructure rather than the physical lines.
I work at an ISP that gets DSLAM equipment from Huawei, we run one of the few G.fast VDSL deployments in the world using this particular hardware. Huawei has stopped manufacturing this product line (the Swiss market is a rounding error ;), which will force us to fully migrate some neighborhoods, only for backup inventory.
Germany being 15 years late, I assume you can still buy similar hardware from AVM though.
UK is at 85% FTTH or 91% gigabit (including DOCSIS): https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/. Given VM are a fair way through their XGS-PON upgrade it'll probably be 90%+ FTTH imminently.
I pay £6 per month for a sim only contract, which gives me 4GB of data. In the USA I feel like I was paying closer to $40-50 for a google fi sim? Which admittedly did have better roaming. Now I just get an e-sim for travel and it works out to be £3ish per day
Over 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.
I'm incredibly lucky (even in the US) that I have symmetric 5gbit connection and can go up to 8gbit if I wanted (but I don't have everything wired for 10gbit so it doesn't make sense right now). I'd love to see more of that in the US, but know it's not happening anytime soon.
I have 5Gbps symmetrical. I love having it, but the biggest use-case has been bragging about it to my colleagues. I haven't even had the full bandwidth available at my desk for a while now (I've had a terrible time terminating cat6a for reliable 10Gbe, so I'm usually on wifi), and it hasn't really bothered me much.
In 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.
The usual complaint is that those sites are not accurate. Like back when I had 2Mbps DSL sites like that claimed I was served by 15+ ISPs that did not serve me.
I’m curious what parent personally did, I can think of several solutions and am curious of their personal journey with this
Prioritizing that while potentially facing a deadline of moving out of an irreconcilable lease, living situation, job move, immigration move, or just for a change of pace
Can'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.
There 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).
Since the FCC no longer consistently enforces 'public good' requirements on commercial exploitation of limited shared common assets, they're increasingly becoming a drag on innovation and seem to primarily protect incumbants from new emerging competition.
In the early days of broadcast radio and TV it made sense to have an agency regulating use of the airwaves, but in recent decades the downsides of such close govt agency regulation on most (but not all) digital telecom are beginning to excede the upsides. And regulatory capture has turned some FCC rule-making committees into cage fight octagons where telecom lobbyists battle each other. Net neutrality is a punch line, spectrum auctions often fail and arcane media ownership rules made in the B&W TV era don't make sense. Maybe it's time to begin gradually sunsetting some of the FCC's historical remit.
FCC: 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.
it'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
Why lie? The Gigabit Project is a £5 billion project, not $40 billion. It has delivered last mile interconnects to 296,770 residences.
It's also a UK program and not a US program. The US has a similar program called BEAD, it has allocated $42B in funding, however, that is allocated, not spent budget. Build outs have only started this year.
Ezra Klein would point how how dangerous it is. In New York we had really big talk about a fiber buildout where it was clear they kept spending money and spending money in multiple rounds but nobody I knew was getting fiber well past the 2017 deadline the program claimed. They did lay a wholesale fiber to a place where I could get FTTN at 20Mbps and 10 years late they fixed up the poles by my house and say they’re going to give me real FTTH.
Trouble is these programs that just say they’re going to spend money as opposed to solve a problem make people cynical and just want to vote no on everything to protect their pocketbooks. Ultimately they turn the people who are the greatest supporters of these programs into enemies.
Yeah I'm sorry massive infrastructure projects with mandates to properly map access and measures to prevent fraud don't fit neatly into a four year presidential term before being effectively yanked away.
The cause of the delay or the blame doesn't really matter. The fact is Starlink could serve all of these users' internet now with no extra build-out cost at a 50th of the price. It's almost certainly time to rethink the plan and have the government take some of the money back.
I 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...
Previous admin allocated a good chunk to upgrade to fiber network. Provider can claim 25% of installation cost. Frontier has been using it. I heard it's about to run out.
Their workers were staying at my hotel, and putting fiber in my community. It was fascinating how frontier practically hires contractor to lay down pipes, and another contractor to pull the fiber, and another contractor to splice it and another contractor to run fiber to the house, and another contractor to come and install in the house.
Yeah it was wild watching how many contractors came out when Google was rolling their fiber through my neighborhood, like it was different contractor groups for every step of the way. I'm not complaining a 5gbit connection is quite nice.
Tell me more about this. I've yet to find a good summary! It happens here in California with PG&E with fire prevention money and infrastructure money; the executives declare victory early having spent a fraction of the allocated funds and then give themselves bonuses with the rest, for being such great managers. Then we get gigantic town-destroying wildfires that destroy people's lives.
The Biden program learned from that lesson to ensure that money was only delivered for performance rather than promises or rules-lawyering. See parent comment about Frontier actually laying fiber. But Trump had to kill it -- the GOP narrative about subsidy programs always being a waste would be disrupted if an effective program was in place.
I hate the state intervention here. But let's not pretend the track record of the status quo was great.
This intervention is embarrassing and corrupt.
Infrastructure in america is also embarrassing, which I'm guessing is also some combo of corruption and self-inflicted wounds on state capacity.
Yep... 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.
The "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.
It'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.
Check the France map. This is cheap in densely populated areas, like cities. It isn't in mountainous areas with just small groups of houses like in the middle of the country.
Pretty irrelevant to the last meter, and most ISPs do it for free when you subscribe as they can re-use conduits and sheaths for the legacy copper line, otherwise it's typically a few hours of work.
I 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)
Not 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 :_)
Because 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.
Is 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
There 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).
In UK FTTC is called “fibre” and FTTP is called “full fibre”. I only have FTTC. To be honest it’s enough for my use cases but I will upgrade if FTTP ever becomes available.
When 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.
But that's already so much faster than ADSL. I just got "Fiber to Home" last year and frankly the only difference I could see is when I download a big file with a torrent. I am convinced that direct downloads and web pages were already limited by other stuff that the bandwidth.
Also that's kind of irrelevant because it is free/cheap to get the ISP to pay for bringing fiber into the home (at least if you are in an urbanized area ? But if not, the paragraph above still applies)
I 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.
That'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.
Meanwhile we're having neighborhood groups protest running fiber through neighborhoods, calling police on the workers, removing untility marking flags in yards...
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
That’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.
I 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.
In 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.
Do 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.
Not 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.
I 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.
Do 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.
I 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.
For 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.
Sweden 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.
I was considering a move to Skurup five or so years ago, checked to see if gigabit fibre was available and it turned out the whole town had a 10Gb symmetric stadsnät.
I 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?
If 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.
The US gov was giving away a ton of money to do this in rural areas. A company came and trenched miles of roadside ditches with new fiber, and ran FTTH for free in a pretty sparsely populated area.
As a result, many rural areas have way better internet than big cities.
I 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.
The 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.
Fiber 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.
Lol 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.
One 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.
Canada 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.)
Unless 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.
Unfortunately 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.
Are 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.
It 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.
A 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.
why 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
Brittany 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.
These 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.
Welcome 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...
The 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.
`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.
> 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.
Currently 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).
Spain 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.
Here (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.
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%C...
> 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.
A 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...
> 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.
I 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.
>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.
There'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.
But 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.
Perhaps they've learned from seeing what happened when we in the États-unis did that.
Isn't starlink and its competitors a cheaper way for rural places to get fast internet?
StarLink 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
I'm guessing that right now many countries wouldn't like the idea of areas being served solely by an American ISP.
There'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 in some way. 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.
Satellite 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.
Not even remotely comparable in terms of quality
the 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.
(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.
I think about fast enough Internet the way I think about running water and electricity: essential.
There 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.
Is 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). 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.
Glad 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.
Any 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).
In the US it's going up, but there's partially due to Buy America & certain colossal grant programs.
Wonder how many thousands of taxpayer dollars was spent for this. Does not seem efficient.
How 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.
If 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.
> how many thousands of taxpayer dollars
$0. It's taxpayers euros.
But it's not inefficient if this fixes a chicken-egg problem: overcrowded big city and underpopulated rural area sucks.
Nobody can/wants to go in rural area if they can't make a living there. A fiber speed Internet unlocks lifestyle for many.
It's the same as investing in say a high speed railway between major cities A and B and adding a middle-of-nowhere stop C midway. That C then can flourish to become a medium/major city... So while the initial investment looked like a waste, it's beneficial to provide a better life for people living in both A,B, and C.
You can bring internet to these other places other than by running a 1km fiber cable, which may be more efficient. Think about it, run. A cable super long to one house or use a dish? Unless there is truly no other options in france
Unless France is going to launch the satellites themselves (which is also very expensive), you become dependent on another party, which is much worse.
I don't know how it works in France, but in many European countries phone/DSL lines and fiber is highly regulated. Even if it is run by a company, they usually have to provide fair access to other providers so that there is competition. For instance, we have a XGS-PON connection to home (used to be AON) and I can probably choose at least from ten ISPs. This is nice, because they try to compete on prices and bandwidth (e.g. the company that owns the network we are on offers 4Gbit symmetric max, but a competitor offers 8Gbit over the same fiber).
Much harder to accomplish that with satellite internet and foreign companies.
Good governance is sometimes taking the money/income from dense areas (cities) and investing it in rural areas. Also, similar to how copper lasted many decades, a fiber network is a one time large investment cost and then you reap the benefits for decades.
Not everything has to be a capitalist 'minimize cost, maximize profits' game.
Zero. We pay out taxes in Euros.
Spain 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-infraestructura...
[1]: https://www.digimobil.es/fibra-optica/
I spent time in the interior of Portugal that had fibre internet, it was very impressive and incredibly helpful to the village. Better payment services and banking for example.
In 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...
> 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.
You can use any one of many MVNOs to get unlimited data for around that price, say less adjusted for household income, in the USA.
A favorite of mine is https://www.usmobile.com/ which is $25/mo list price (and less if you pay for the year, or if they're having a sale) which will give you Unlimited Data and 1GB a month of global roaming data
If you pay $45 you can get unlimited data from Mint for $15/mo: https://www.mintmobile.com/plans/
It's not unheard of!
It's actually the high speed internet at home that is less competitive - the prices in Europe are unheard of.
Only some places. Netherlands is €45-60 for 1 gbps (we don't make 4x-6x the money Spaniards do), unless you live in an area that actually sees multi-line competition.
We do have an interesting sidegrade: 5G Klik & Klaar from Odido (formerly T-Mobile / Deutsche Telekom) for €26. If you point it the right way out your window, you can get 700-1000 mbps down and 150 (capped) mbps up. Ping is around 35ms. Horrid modem firmware though, you get ping spikes up to 400-850ms (!!) under load due to bufferbloat, but you can of course solve that with your own router and SQM :+)
Is this line of site to a very high mast? Enabled because the Netherlands is so flat?
In the U.S. I perceive MVNOs to be a scam. Like Tracfone was OK in 2011 but somewhere afterwards it became normal to go around rural upstate NY and no service and go around NYC and no service and go to LA and no service.
This year I got a real phone with a real plan and I have coverage in many places now me I can finally see why people get excited about apps.
That's kind of a broad brush, Google Fi is great, especially the fact that they work mostly seamlessly for the same price in like every country, and they're an MVNO.
It proves that you can’t trust the claim that “it is the same network”, I mean it is the same network but you may find yourself riding the back of the bus and there is no independent way to check what service you are actually getting.
I do use US Mobile, and I recently switched to it because T-mobile made it so difficult to pay a bill, it was nearly impossible to get them to accept money.
And a ~decade ago in SF I did have Sonic 1Gbps symmetric fiber for something like $40 or $50/month, but that too is twice the cost of Italy.
Can't speak for Italy, but there have been some consequences in many EU jurisdictions. The EU has been pushing HARD for competition, etc, but it has left many European telecoms in debt-heavy financial situations that has caused issues around future investment and in some countries the (mobile) coverage is good on paper, but the networks are themselves actually terrible (looking at you Germany).
But yeah, it's otherwise a problem with competition enforcement.
> These sorts of prices are unheard of in the US, so incredibly low.
The EU also has incredibly low salaries.
At the same time a software developer earns 40-50k, perhaps a little higher in Milan or Rome.
Gone? It started rotten with Bell and hasn't gotten much better.
State sanctioned and encouraged anti trust behavior will do that
I am in Italy right now, in fact, spent a lot of time here. I can safely say, the 5G sim coverage is extremely spotty, and when you can get internet from a physical line, it's generally pretty poor speeds. I am pretty sure a lot of that 78% includes 1 bar of LTE coverage, so it's "technically" true.
The main issue with copper comes from the active infrastructure rather than the physical lines.
I work at an ISP that gets DSLAM equipment from Huawei, we run one of the few G.fast VDSL deployments in the world using this particular hardware. Huawei has stopped manufacturing this product line (the Swiss market is a rounding error ;), which will force us to fully migrate some neighborhoods, only for backup inventory.
Germany being 15 years late, I assume you can still buy similar hardware from AVM though.
> In Italy we are at 78% of addresses covered
> UK is at 85% FTTH [on a sibling comment]
Meanwhile I have 1 Gb/s FTTH in an Italian village of less than 100 souls, while I couldn’t reach 300 Mbit/s on copper in London zone 4.
I have been surprised at how well they have improved the situation in Italy, and in dismay at how terrible it is in UK.
Average speeds are higher in the UK than Italy.
My brother in the UK has 1Gb/s fibre in a village of less than 100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
The UK is absolutely terrible. I've noticed this quite a bit in my travels there.
> In Italy we are at 78% of addresses covered
Complete bullshit.
BUL maybe is close to that percentage
P1G is nowhere near and is never going to reach full coverage in 2030.
UK is at 85% FTTH or 91% gigabit (including DOCSIS): https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/. Given VM are a fair way through their XGS-PON upgrade it'll probably be 90%+ FTTH imminently.
Damn, we pay $110 for 5Gbps in Seattle only because the 2Gbps would be $100.
Cellular plans are also a lot cheaper in Europe :(
I pay £6 per month for a sim only contract, which gives me 4GB of data. In the USA I feel like I was paying closer to $40-50 for a google fi sim? Which admittedly did have better roaming. Now I just get an e-sim for travel and it works out to be £3ish per day
Over 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.
I'm incredibly lucky (even in the US) that I have symmetric 5gbit connection and can go up to 8gbit if I wanted (but I don't have everything wired for 10gbit so it doesn't make sense right now). I'd love to see more of that in the US, but know it's not happening anytime soon.
I've been considering upgrading from 1 Gbps to 5 Gbps. Have you noticed any significant benefits for any particular use cases?
I have 5Gbps symmetrical. I love having it, but the biggest use-case has been bragging about it to my colleagues. I haven't even had the full bandwidth available at my desk for a while now (I've had a terrible time terminating cat6a for reliable 10Gbe, so I'm usually on wifi), and it hasn't really bothered me much.
Even 1Gbps has been hard to justify for me TBH, most things over the internet aren't fast enough.
The nice thing though, is that latency is great independent of other traffic as bandwidth is pretty much never saturated
I've found that most websites and internet service max out at around 250Mbps anyway so I don't feel like there's much point paying for more.
An exception is Steam, but I don't download games that often.
How do you go about learning this about a building or neighborhood while planning a move?
Its something I usually find out later
In 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.
The usual complaint is that those sites are not accurate. Like back when I had 2Mbps DSL sites like that claimed I was served by 15+ ISPs that did not serve me.
I’m curious what parent personally did, I can think of several solutions and am curious of their personal journey with this
Prioritizing that while potentially facing a deadline of moving out of an irreconcilable lease, living situation, job move, immigration move, or just for a change of pace
Can'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.
Same 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&...
Depends on which country you live in.
There 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-digi...
Meanwhile, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gi...
Since the FCC no longer consistently enforces 'public good' requirements on commercial exploitation of limited shared common assets, they're increasingly becoming a drag on innovation and seem to primarily protect incumbants from new emerging competition.
In the early days of broadcast radio and TV it made sense to have an agency regulating use of the airwaves, but in recent decades the downsides of such close govt agency regulation on most (but not all) digital telecom are beginning to excede the upsides. And regulatory capture has turned some FCC rule-making committees into cage fight octagons where telecom lobbyists battle each other. Net neutrality is a punch line, spectrum auctions often fail and arcane media ownership rules made in the B&W TV era don't make sense. Maybe it's time to begin gradually sunsetting some of the FCC's historical remit.
FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to Musk's Starlink
FCC: 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.
it'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
The Gigabit Project (edit: should be BEAD) has allocated 40 billion since 2021 and still has not finished any last mile projects.
Why lie? The Gigabit Project is a £5 billion project, not $40 billion. It has delivered last mile interconnects to 296,770 residences.
It's also a UK program and not a US program. The US has a similar program called BEAD, it has allocated $42B in funding, however, that is allocated, not spent budget. Build outs have only started this year.
Ezra Klein would point how how dangerous it is. In New York we had really big talk about a fiber buildout where it was clear they kept spending money and spending money in multiple rounds but nobody I knew was getting fiber well past the 2017 deadline the program claimed. They did lay a wholesale fiber to a place where I could get FTTN at 20Mbps and 10 years late they fixed up the poles by my house and say they’re going to give me real FTTH.
Trouble is these programs that just say they’re going to spend money as opposed to solve a problem make people cynical and just want to vote no on everything to protect their pocketbooks. Ultimately they turn the people who are the greatest supporters of these programs into enemies.
I was referring to BEAD by the short hand name of gigabit, my b
Yeah I'm sorry massive infrastructure projects with mandates to properly map access and measures to prevent fraud don't fit neatly into a four year presidential term before being effectively yanked away.
The cause of the delay or the blame doesn't really matter. The fact is Starlink could serve all of these users' internet now with no extra build-out cost at a 50th of the price. It's almost certainly time to rethink the plan and have the government take some of the money back.
I 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...
Previous admin allocated a good chunk to upgrade to fiber network. Provider can claim 25% of installation cost. Frontier has been using it. I heard it's about to run out.
Their workers were staying at my hotel, and putting fiber in my community. It was fascinating how frontier practically hires contractor to lay down pipes, and another contractor to pull the fiber, and another contractor to splice it and another contractor to run fiber to the house, and another contractor to come and install in the house.
Yeah it was wild watching how many contractors came out when Google was rolling their fiber through my neighborhood, like it was different contractor groups for every step of the way. I'm not complaining a 5gbit connection is quite nice.
Not The Onion
Reminder that US taxpayer money was handed to the ISPs by the truckload on the promise of fiber. They took that infrastructure money and ran with it.
Tell me more about this. I've yet to find a good summary! It happens here in California with PG&E with fire prevention money and infrastructure money; the executives declare victory early having spent a fraction of the allocated funds and then give themselves bonuses with the rest, for being such great managers. Then we get gigantic town-destroying wildfires that destroy people's lives.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
The Biden program learned from that lesson to ensure that money was only delivered for performance rather than promises or rules-lawyering. See parent comment about Frontier actually laying fiber. But Trump had to kill it -- the GOP narrative about subsidy programs always being a waste would be disrupted if an effective program was in place.
I hate the state intervention here. But let's not pretend the track record of the status quo was great.
This intervention is embarrassing and corrupt. Infrastructure in america is also embarrassing, which I'm guessing is also some combo of corruption and self-inflicted wounds on state capacity.
What an absolute clown car country, embarrassing
“Unfair to slower technologies”. Insane statements like this would make the government in Orwell’s 1984 blush.
Yep... 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.
The "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.
It'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.
> Connecting the last meters of fiber is cheap
Check the France map. This is cheap in densely populated areas, like cities. It isn't in mountainous areas with just small groups of houses like in the middle of the country.
Pretty irrelevant to the last meter, and most ISPs do it for free when you subscribe as they can re-use conduits and sheaths for the legacy copper line, otherwise it's typically a few hours of work.
I 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 ?
Where do you think is the last meter if not in the home?
Bakeries are long gone in small villages which are out of main roads. You better be prepared to have a car to get your bread or to make it at home.
We 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
I was curious and just looked it up: Germany reached 36.8% in 2024 (https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...).
Germany is planning for 2035. Everything is now pushed to 2035 - rail infrastructure , digitisation, removal of fax as an official method etc.
And in places where FTTH is available, you pay more for 250/100 Mbps than symmetrical 10 Gbps in Switzerland.
Not 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 :_)
Because 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.
My cable cost $25 and offered 200mbps — 8 years ago. So it wasn't that bad of a deal. 400mbps was possible.
Is 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
France doesn't have much FTTC, VDSL and HFC exist but are fairly rare.
Orange has started decommissioning its legacy copper network.
It is FttH (fibre to the home)
Yes... Semantics and old age don't mix
There 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).
I think FTTC is just called (V)DSL in most places. IME it's uncommon to call anything less than FTTB (basement / building) fiber.
In UK FTTC is called “fibre” and FTTP is called “full fibre”. I only have FTTC. To be honest it’s enough for my use cases but I will upgrade if FTTP ever becomes available.
When 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.
But that's already so much faster than ADSL. I just got "Fiber to Home" last year and frankly the only difference I could see is when I download a big file with a torrent. I am convinced that direct downloads and web pages were already limited by other stuff that the bandwidth.
Also that's kind of irrelevant because it is free/cheap to get the ISP to pay for bringing fiber into the home (at least if you are in an urbanized area ? But if not, the paragraph above still applies)
The 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-germa...
I 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.
get a 5Gig network card if you have a spare PCIe or M2 slot on your motherboard. should be about $30.
It's awesome. I moved to France from Portland, Oregon this year. I went from 1gb to 8gb fiber for half the cost in France.
That'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.
Meanwhile we're having neighborhood groups protest running fiber through neighborhoods, calling police on the workers, removing untility marking flags in yards...
The 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...
> 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
[starlink enters the room]
Ooh we just got 99.9% coverage
And here in SF we have like 55%? Been waiting for it for 10 years in my hood.
It'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
That’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.
Lol yeah it's basically early days of electricity
I guess we need to burn more stuff on the streets?
It worked for the French.
In SF they burn stuff on the streets to prevent any change to the physical structure. No new apartments, no new infrastructure allowed.
I 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.
In 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.
Do 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.
Not 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.
I 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.
Do 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.
I intentionally get the slowest speed possible that has no data cap. Was 50, then it went up to 80 a year ago.
Absolutely. 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.
They are probably talking about streaming to an audience (upload speed).
I 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.
For 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.
Sweden 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.
I was considering a move to Skurup five or so years ago, checked to see if gigabit fibre was available and it turned out the whole town had a 10Gb symmetric stadsnät.
I 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?
If 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.
The US gov was giving away a ton of money to do this in rural areas. A company came and trenched miles of roadside ditches with new fiber, and ran FTTH for free in a pretty sparsely populated area.
As a result, many rural areas have way better internet than big cities.
Why 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.
I 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.
The 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.
What if you dug without rights? Be an Uber?
Damn! We had it in the sunset when I lived there back in 2017
[starlink enter the room]
Ooh just got 99.9% coverage
Fiber 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.
Lol 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.
One 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.
This 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.
Makes me very jealous as an American. This could have been our stat.
Canada 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.)
Unless 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.
You are right: https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/business/bells-fibre-foo...
I didn't realize that Ebox was Bell. Interesting.
Unfortunately 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.
I think this was Telus, not Bell. But I'm feeling the same way.
QQ: Who owns / operates the fiber? 100% private co? Partially subsidized?
Are 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.
It 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.
50 a month for 7gb?! Jeebus I'm jealous.
A 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.
why 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
Brittany 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.
These 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.
There 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.
Check the "Débit à l'adresse" alternative map: it shows every home, and so population density.
Subsidizing works up to when most of the area has high cost for few people.
"Toute la Gaule est occupée par les Romains. Toute ? Non! Un village peuplé d’irréductibles Gaulois résiste encore et toujours à l’envahisseur."
"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres"
Welcome 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...
Quebec 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.
The 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.
`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.
You 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.
> 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.
How high speed is "high-speed" internet in this context? In the US, high-speed internet can mean anything better than DSL.
A random blight in Canada in that Bell still hasn't enabled IPv6 for residential plans.
You can get 8 Gigabit symmetric home internet from Bell but not IPv6.
And 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.
Vive la France!
Currently 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).
Spain 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.
Using DNS over HTTP instead of the ISP's DNS solves most of these blocks, for now.
And 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.
Spectrum was ok where I live, but Cox has faster upload speeds, so I switched. Spectrum acquired Cox about a week after I did that.
Here (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.
This 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.
Funny. For me, Comcast is the monopoly.
I'd look into starlink or 5G services if I were you.
Great job! Now they can download stuff from data centers even faster!