neutrino38's Journal: France is getting ready for Fiber to Home Internet Access

Orange (Ex France Telecom) will launch [fr] Fiber to Home Internet access

on March 1st, 2007. The offer includes 100 Mbit/s of downlink and 10 Mbit/s of uplink and unlimited nationwide call for 44.90 euros. This initial deployment will be limited to central areas in five cities of France were only 14000 people will be able to beneficate from the offer. The full scale deployment is due on 2008.

This follows intense competition with the challenger Free Telecom which [fr] announced a 1 billion euro investment on Fiber to Home Internet access. This offer is supposed to be available mid 2007 and provide: 50 MBit/s symetric + static IP and unlimited nationwide calls for 30 euros / month (29.90 exactly including V.A.T.). Of course, no bandwith cap whatsoever.

This will certainly kill part of the SDSL market where companies pays premium prices (400 to 600 euros / month) for 4 Mbit/s symetric access. I also suspect that a lot of people will start to host their own server at home.