2.5Gb/s Internet For French Homes

Slashdot reports:

"Presence-pc at reports that France Telecom just announced they are offering 2.5 Gb/s internet connection to select cities in the Paris region. For... $85(70 Euros) a month you also get free phone and TV. From the article (in French): "The historical operator opted for a GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) FTTH architecture (Fiber To The Home). This technology allows up to 2.5 Gbits/s download and 1.2 Gigabits/s upload.""

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Suddenly I feel like crying.

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[censored] [censored] [bleeps] at [bleep]kom [bleep] [censored] [bleep]its [bleepchs] [censored] [censored] [bleep]kits
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Actually, it is happening in South Africa as well, however it is happening with the GE-PON standard (Gigabit / 10 Gigabit Ethernet Passive Optic Network) FTTH and FTTB (Fiber to the home / business).

It costs a lot less to roll out than ADSL & DSLAM, it costs a lot less to maintain, the bandwidth is 1 or 10Gbps symmetrical (contended between 32 or 64 homes) depending on which product and which version of the standard it supports. It supports Penta-play (Satellite RF, CATV RF, TDM voice / telephone, Ethernet, IP-TV, VOD etc.)

And there is allready some deployments running in SA in security estates.

Obviously the Internet speed in these estates depend greatly on what external connections the estate has. Usually E1, Diginet or satellite.

Except..

Will it ever become a mainstream product?

thorin1 said:

Will it ever become a mainstream product?

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In the US and Europe FTTH is currently the fastest growing communications technology. In texas one particular company has recently rolled out to 1. million homes. They deliver 20 HD IP-TV channels and about 400 Standard Def channels.

In SA it is being rolled out in no small scale to new developments. Unfortunately this is all happening in new developments. There is a technology whereby they can easily deploy it to existing neighbourhoods as well without digging everything up.

The problem with wireless is that it is a shared frequency spectrum, the maintenance on towers are pretty demanding, it has limited bandwidth, it is influenced by weather, geographical location etc. The problem with copper is that due to the laws of physics it can only handle that mutch bandwidth, maintenance on it is extensive etc. Satellites are too expensive to launch, and it too has limited spectrum to operate on. Fiber resolves all of this. The tree-like PON concept solves the issue of having to pull a dedicated fiber for each home, since it splits like a tree structure (point-to-multipoint). GE-PON gives you point-to-multipoint low cost IP bandwidth everywhere.

So yes, I think it is allready a mainstream product overseas, and I am certain that it is going to hit SA pretty hard as well. It just makes sense from a future-proofing and low maintenance perspective.