Looks like 100 very lucky people have just had the ultimate in high speed internet access installed at their place in Paris.

Here I was thinking 10Mbit would be nice on ADSL2 - these people have a 2.5Gbit link installed.
The line serves digital TV (presumably High-def, since they’ve got the bandwidth), video on demand, video conferencing, and phone services apart from regular internet access - so they probably won’t be able to max out the link. (Oh noes! I can’t max BOTH Gbit network cards out when I’ve got 10 TVs running different VoD streams)

From the article, France Télécom are in a similar regulatory situation as Telstra - they own the copper network, but are required to provide access to competitors at a reasonable price.

However, France Télécom are taking a different approach to Telstra.

Instead of going with Fibre to the Node, it looks like they’re planning to deploy Fibre to the Premises.

Sure, this is only a trial (100 homes initially, but there’s about 100KM of fibre laid throughout Paris) , and the economies of scale are vastly different.

The vastly improved bandwidth (ADSL2 or VHDSL at 3-30Mbit vs Fibre at 100Mbit-3Gbit) allows for a much greater range of services to be provided over a single link.

There is, ofcourse the problem of the backhaul bandwidth for all of that - but there are ways to overcome that.

As an example: In the TV/Video space, pre delivering VoD content to multiple distributed nodes, and using Multicast to push live content out would help.

Since there’s a fairly large upstream capacity (1.2Gbit), it wouldn’t be unreasonable to deploy “Media Boxes” to homes (think a PvR), which would deliver content to neighbouring services (no user intervention allowed/required) if the local node is busy/unavailable.

Would you, honestly, say no to having a quiet little box sitting in your home (attached to your TV and Fbire) that let you get Video on Demand, live TV in high def, super-fast wireless internet access (802.11n, anyone?), and phone calls.

It just happens that when you told the TV you wanted to watch the latest Stargate episode, it streamed a copy down from the main media server, and from anyone else who was watching it. And tomorrow, when Jim next door watches the same episode - he gets some of it from you, and some of it from other people in the local area who watched it recently - and he doesn’t even know it. (It just works)

Uhh… so this is kinda going on a bit of a ramble.

I’ve had this handy language reference in my bookmarks for ages - it’s a good place to quickly lookup how to say various things in many languages.
Great for that instant comeback to annoying salespeople. (”What part of Bu shi zhe yang don’t you understand?”)

My favorite bits however are from “Do you speak english?“:

English (America, Australia, UK) Do you speak English?
English [Strine dialect] (Australia) Jew speak Strine?
English [Texan] (Texas United States) Do ya speak English?

You may not know this, but work kindly paid for a MSDN subscription for me - this effectively gives me access to all the Windows Vista betas.

I had played around with previous betas of Vista, but never actually installed it properly (it always ran inside a VMWare / VPC session).

I decided to give it a shot, and rather than risking my entire PC - got a USB HDD (a tiny little 320GB unit) to run Vista from, so I could switch back to XP any time I needed to by simply pulling the cable.

Apparently, Vista won’t boot if it’s system drive is a removable device.

Now, that was a whole lot of wasted effort.

Hrm… get an internal SATA HDD? No… I shouldn’t…