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.