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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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 :+)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I don't notice. I had 60mbit/s for a while and it was fine. That's two typical 4K streams. But what I did notice was 1mbit/s upload speed. Uploading large files to Google Drive was impossible, not just slow but would actually time out.
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.
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.
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.
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 1Gbgb
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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...
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.
https://www.fierce-network.com/broadband/romania-beats-germa...
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.
An exception is Steam, but I don't download games that often.
Its something I usually find out later
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 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&...
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.
But yeah, it's otherwise a problem with competition enforcement.
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.
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 :+)
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.
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 [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.
Cellular plans are also a lot cheaper in Europe :(
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.
> 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
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.
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.
It's not the end of the world but it feels like a wasted effort. I don't know what the solution is.
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.
But maybe I misunderstood your point ?
And also the fact that they have crazy low prices which forced the 3 other ISPs to stay competitive
Orange has started decommissioning its legacy copper network.
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)
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.
Maybe also some places that aren't beautiful but are at least cheap.
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.
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'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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Also the vendors do not commercialize ADSL anymore since a decade ago or so if fiber is installed in the district.
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.
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.
It is really fast and reliable. You can get symmetric 8Gbps for around $100/month USD ($140/month CAD.)
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.
I didn't realize that Ebox was Bell. Interesting.
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.
In the meantime we also got 5G and Starlink so plenty of good options for fast internet.
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.
You can get 8 Gigabit symmetric home internet from Bell but not IPv6.
"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.
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).
can government STOP this fucking spectrum(Charter Communications) monopoly.
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.
You have more problems than just the monopoly. Like the FCC, among other federal agencies, being completely captured by big business.