France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

As a result, many rural areas have way better internet than big cities.

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 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.

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

It worked for the French.

> 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.

though if we want to be fair, the competition is other telecoms that were also abusing the handouts until very recently

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.

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.

Any money given to fiber rollout is still paying dividends in 40 years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Its something I usually find out later

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&...

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

The nice thing though, is that latency is great independent of other traffic as bandwidth is pretty much never saturated

An exception is Steam, but I don't download games that often.

And also the fact that they have crazy low prices which forced the 3 other ISPs to stay competitive

Canada as a whole is expected to have 90% high speed internet by the end of 2026, and 100% by 2030.

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.

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.

"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.

You can get 8 Gigabit symmetric home internet from Bell but not IPv6.

can government STOP this fucking spectrum(Charter Communications) monopoly.

You have more problems than just the monopoly. Like the FCC, among other federal agencies, being completely captured by big business.

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.

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/

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...

These sorts of prices are unheard of in the US, so incredibly low.

Something has gone deeply wrong with US telecommunications.

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.