France claiming 100% fiber by 2022? They are dreaming, or perhaps even delusional. No way they can get FTTH by 2022. There are some places that don’t have any connectivity and you have to use Satelite.
They’re going to fix that in 4 years?
In practical terms, this means that DSL has already reached its practical limit with speeds around 30-50 Mbps, whereas Cable Internet still has room to grow around 2-4 Gbps, depending on how many TV channels the operator is ready to sacrifice to Internet traffic.
Of course, this doesn't address congestion / oversubscription issues around cable, but assuming a competently managed network, FTTN with coax as the last mile is still a very good choice in 2018.
The successor, G.fast, will nominally do a gig, but about 500 Mbps over short loops.
I wouldn't go quite that far e.g. let's say you're my parents in a village of 300 (and as many cows) with the DSLAM >5km away, the best DSL you can get is 1024k on a good day (and on average closer to 512k with pings in the half-second range), my understanding is that for them the FTTN node would be roughly at the center of each village.
All of a sudden, unless the village is huge there's <2km between any home and the node and you can expect 15~20Mbps over the entire village.
The kind of engineering to distribute such a large network seems to mirror the issues with the nationwide power grid that was proposed to allow for consistent solar energy. The USA is just a very, very big place with populations, even urban, that sprawl and are not condensed like in London, Paris, Munich or other countries in the fiber fight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
> I'm not saying that a similar model wouldn't be easy to implement in the boroughs of New York, Boston, SV, Austin, etc.
Oh please, the village I'm talking about is not a borough of a major metropolis, it's a small rural village, the closest thing which could be construed as a city has a population of under 50k and is 20km away.
Boston and Austin have metro populations in the millions, there's barely 6 cities in all of France which reach that.
> you still have 20% of Americans living in not-urban environments
Oh good point, let's check the percentage of rural population in france. Hey look, it's 20%. Wow, probably an outlier, let's check Germany. Oh, 24%. Maybe Spain? 20% again.
And these are highly urbanised countries mind, Ireland and Portugal are sitting at 36% rural population.
> The USA is just a very, very big place with populations, even urban, that sprawl and are not condensed like in London, Paris, Munich or other countries in the fiber fight.
None of London, Paris or Munich are countries, they're major/capital cities inside countries which have their own non-urban populations.
I still agree with you, though, that America could do something if there was a strong enough will. Even if the cost of fiber is prohibitive, it seems like there are wireless technologies out there that would be better than the zilch broadband 23 million Americans currently have. (https://www.npr.org/2018/03/03/590546371/rural-communities-t...)
Consider this, the state of Texas alone is bigger than all of France, and while it has several huge cities in it, it still has less than half the population of France. Montana is more than half the land area of France, and only has 1 million people living in it.
It would be a lot easier to just give up on the 1% that are truly scattered to the winds with little homesteads in the middle of no-where. But hopefully we can get some really good low earth orbit satellite internet and not have to worry about all this.
The NBN failed largely because of a government ideology that neutered it from FTTH to FTTN, if that.
Australia is fairly equivalent to the US for many areas with the exception of the (relatively) uninhabited interior.
If you combined a list of US and Australian cities by population, the top five Australian cities would be in the top 10:
New York (8.5M), Sydney (5.0M), Melbourne (4.7M), LA (3.9M), Chicago (2.7M), Brisbane (2.3M), Houston (2.2M), Perth (2.0M), Philadelphia (1.6M), Adelaide (1.5M).
The notion of Australia as quaint rural villages is used as an excuse by defenders of the status quo. The US is just so unique, "Oh, it's bigger", "more dense", "cities are different here", etc., et al.
(1) New York - 20.2M (2) Los Angeles - 13.3M (3) Chicago - 9.5M (4) Dallas - 7.2M (5) Houston - 6.8M (6) Washington, DC - 6.1M (7) Philadelphia - 6.1M (8) Miami - 6.1M (9) Atlanta - 5.8M (10) Boston - 4.8M
Only Sydney would make the top 10, coming in just above Boston.
Both the US and Australia have cities / metro areas that are significant in population as well as huge low-density areas, but the US metro areas are definitely larger. This makes sense given an overall population of 323M vs 24M.
See
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Australia_by...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
For example, the Seattle MSA extends as far north as Burlington, Mt Vernon, as far east as almost Lake Chelan, and as far south as Packwood near White Pass.
No one would credibly claim that White Pass was a part of Seattle, any more than Lake Chelan.
Whereas Melbourne absolutely would consider Boronia on the east a suburb, Campbellfield on the north, and Frankson in the south all suburbs.
I do get what you are saying, and of course with that population number it is so, but I don't think that there's really a great correlation (mainly as a result of Census in the US using a non-standard definition of the internation "metropolitan area" to basically... "anywhere else".
That being said, when you look at "as a percentage of the population", Sydney and Melbourne at ~20%, the others at ~10%, there's also not the argument of "hey, these US cities are far more dense and complex than Australia's", when the complexity is far more often a result of _artificial barriers and restrictions in the market_ than anything logistical.