Winextra – High-Speed Internet for everyone

I just came across an interesting tidbit of information: the Finnish government wishes to make access to the Internet a “basic right”, enforceable by law, just like electricity and land telephone are. This is already true in Estonia, one of the so-called “Baltic countries”.

According to the Finnish radio Yleisradio OY (no, I don’t listen to it, I only read about it ), Finland’s ministry of Transports and Communications has been put in charge of making sure every single inhabitant will have access to high-speed Internet: a minimum of 1 Mbps to start with, but a minimum of 100 Mbps by the end of 2015. Because most of Finland is sparsely populated, some areas will have to be served through wireless (WiMax) access points.

Meanwhile in France, dwellers of the larger cities (large by French standards, that is ) and their suburbs can connect through ADSL 2+ (up to 16 Mbps) or cable (30 Mbps) or fiber (100 Mbps). Most other places can connect through ADSL-RE (from 512 Kbps up to 8 Mbps). Only the most secluded villages still have to put up with dial-up.

Currently there are two competing fiber technologies, FTTB (Fiber To The Building) and FTTH (Fiber To The Home), and because the EU has ruled that FTTH should be the preferred technology, but that is of course more costly to deploy, not to mention the legal problems of running fibers in existing condominium buildings, deployment of optical fiber has all but ground to a halt – a paradoxical development.

There are three companies competing for the fiber market here, and a few days ago one French Representative suggested that every new building be wired for all three from the start.

The sensible solution, of course, would be to do for the Internet what has been done for gas and electricity and land telephone: let all three networks use the same “pipes” and have a separate company do the physical deployment, but I doubt this will happen, simply because our lawmakers just don’t understand what it’s all about, just like everywhere else – except possibly in the Baltic countries and Finland.

And anyway, this wouldn’t change the situation for existing buildings.

So I’m still waiting for fiber, over 4 years after its deployment in Paris started. Oh well, cable isn’t too bad, it certainly beats dial-up .