A lot...and I mean a LOT of money...is wasted on things that benefit only a very, very small percentage of elite people in ways that don't translate to benefits to the larger society or regular people.

What's so wrong if something is done to benefit the regular people once in a while?

One may argue that this also isn't helping "regular people" but I mean the subsidy aspect in particular. I mean, oil companies in the US are subsidized, for God's sake. Most of the most profitable businesses in the US are subsized heavily and that's part of how they became so profitable. Corporate welfare is not shunned but spend money on the common man and you have protests and politicians up in arms for wastage...

I think you misunderstood the comment you are replying to - they are arguing that running fibre to rural communities is a good use of subsidies, and contrasts pleasantly with the usual sort of subsidy that only a few large corporation owners really benefit from.

I suspect the parent commenter agree with you : broadband access DID cost a lot of money - and in a sense, the project was rushed, and an unexpected demonstration that public / private partnerships with the wrong incentive structure can lead to as bad (if not worse) result than what a public monopoly would have done.

But yeah, my mum at the border of la Creuse had a better internet access than me for a few months :D

> Our area is never going to generate the return on internet alone, and that's nice.

The time scale for optical fibers' profitability is much longer than copper. The media itself is passive, cheap to maintain, and easy to upgrade by lighting more fibers or moving to newer PON standards. That's why operators often overbuild the fiber count per home on purpose, something they would rarely do with copper (the time scale and upgradability being more limited by the intrinsic properties of the medium).

Fibering up a mountain becomes more rational once you view it as a 40+ year asset with very low upgrade cost (for the medium itself, not the equipment connected to it). Not a 10-year ROI project like copper often was. And even more rational when you can get subsidies by governments which are usually eager to develop the economical activity in regions that otherwise would have little to no opportunity to grow significantly.

>Our area is never going to generate the return on internet alone

for the isp? maybe.

for the gdp? well, i imagine that a lot of highly paid remote labor would love to be located in rural France.

There's so very much rural France. They'd need a colossal influx of well paid remote labour moving to the country to make the sums work.

I think the goal is social, to ensure that rural France isn't abandoned further than it was since the 1990s.

But also, having dial-up in 2017 is wild for me to think about.

I do wonder if ultimately via having everyone on fiber it pays for itself ultimately, since you don't have to "convert" anyone's internet between different mediums, you can also sunset all sorts of legacy equipment that's no longer in use since fiber is it.

Perhaps they've learned from seeing what happened when we in the États-unis did that.

Isn't starlink and its competitors a cheaper way for rural places to get fast internet?

StarLink tops out in the 300mbit range, and has anaemic uplink speeds, whereas most fibre rollouts offer symmetrical gigabit. The latency over StarLink is also 2-5x higher than rural fibre.

StarLink beats the hell out of the copper phone lines / DSL connections a bunch of these rural communities were running on before the fibre rollout, but it's no match for proper fibre. And assuming France has price controls like Spain, the fibre will be cheaper into the bargain

I'm guessing that right now many countries wouldn't like the idea of areas being served solely by an American ISP.

There's a lot more when it comes to Starlink:

- The obvious political point: that ISP is subject to laws in a country that is testing its legal framework and diplomacy in new (some may say unpredictable) ways.

- The first rule of public funding is that the money goes back to the public in some way. Roughly all (if not all) of the jobs for starlink go to the US, whereas fiber installation in France employs French people.

- Paying for Starlink is a terrible investment because the entire constellation is disposable. Every satellite will burn up in roughly 5 years and the whole network would go dead without more launches. Fiber, once installed, is at least serviceable.

- Another political point, but the only company that can launch replacements economically is also subject to laws in that same country.

Starlink hands an awesome amount of semi-soft power to whatever country controls it. It doesn't really matter what country that is: it's a huge strategic liability to anyone who doesn't hold the keys. Until there's at least another player in the game I'd expect a lot of countries to be wary.

Ironically, that could mean Starlink/SpaceX really needs a competitor before it can become a universal solution.

Satellite services make an end run through a lot of bullshit, that’s true, but the long term costs of fiber are overestimated because cable companies want a very fast profit. Whereas thousands and thousands of satellites will need to be replaced year after year and that rate could increase considerably if Kessler syndrome develops.

Not even remotely comparable in terms of quality

the advantage of local infrastucture is that the local government can have input on the price of the good.

If starlink does something you don't like good luck doing anything about it.

(1) communities have already committed to universal service for electricity which uses the same poles and (2) fiber investments are good for at least 50 years and are much cheaper in reality than the usual ROI metrics say they are; the awkward truth is that the LTE networks that carriers were gung ho to invest in were outrageously expensive in comparison but carriers were fine with that because they could charge an arm and two legs for it.

I think about fast enough Internet the way I think about running water and electricity: essential.

There is some of that in the US due to government subsidies. People have stories about making their own ISPs in rural parts. But it's not 94.9% fiber.

Is it really that expensive? Many poor places are now having optic fiber for even remote areas. Algeria is having its speed boom (https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/algeria#fixed). I have been through some remote poor areas in Asia who had optic fiber with "crazy" speeds (ie: 500mbs).

I wonder if the price of fiber now is just too low that it's very viable to install at scale even for low-density areas.

Glad that France built it out now. From now on the fibers price will rise significantly like HBM, NAND chips, power line transformers due to the AI boom.

Any evidence of this happening? I imagine that fiber manufacturing is much easier to scale up than chip manufacturing (of course, the devices that attach to the fiber might be a different story).

In the US it's going up, but there's partially due to Buy America & certain colossal grant programs.

How is it inefficient? This is the whole point of government: how much economic activity is happening over 56k? Virtually none. You could make the same argument for paving the street and repairing the sidewalk in front of your house. Chances are the property taxes from the average single family home don't cover just the basic street repairs, let alone all the other services your local government provides. Yet we do it, because it turns out that having a happy, well-served population by way of redistributing wealth through services is a generally good thing.

If we assume $20k to run the fiber, you could do starlink for a long time. There are internet options other than fiber. Unless there is no other options in France than fiber. What if France got a contract with starlink? Brought the cost down of that.

Why do you assume $20k as the cost to run the fiber?

The cost is the contractor's hours to get up a ladder on each electricity pole from the closest PON splitter to the customer's home, plus the fiber itself which is peanuts at volume.

Everything else (permits, pole rent, etc) is fake money that can be negotiated. If there's a strategic national program to fiber up the whole country, this could be exempted on a pen's stroke, or depreciated in many decades.

> how many thousands of taxpayer dollars

$0. It's taxpayers euros.

But it's not inefficient if this fixes a chicken-egg problem: overcrowded big city and underpopulated rural area sucks.

Nobody can/wants to go in rural area if they can't make a living there. A fiber speed Internet unlocks lifestyle for many.

It's the same as investing in say a high speed railway between major cities A and B and adding a middle-of-nowhere stop C midway. That C then can flourish to become a medium/major city... So while the initial investment looked like a waste, it's beneficial to provide a better life for people living in both A,B, and C.

You can bring internet to these other places other than by running a 1km fiber cable, which may be more efficient. Think about it, run. A cable super long to one house or use a dish? Unless there is truly no other options in france

Unless France is going to launch the satellites themselves (which is also very expensive), you become dependent on another party, which is much worse.

I don't know how it works in France, but in many European countries phone/DSL lines and fiber is highly regulated. Even if it is run by a company, they usually have to provide fair access to other providers so that there is competition. For instance, we have a XGS-PON connection to home (used to be AON) and I can probably choose at least from ten ISPs. This is nice, because they try to compete on prices and bandwidth (e.g. the company that owns the network we are on offers 4Gbit symmetric max, but a competitor offers 8Gbit over the same fiber).

Much harder to accomplish that with satellite internet and foreign companies.

Good governance is sometimes taking the money/income from dense areas (cities) and investing it in rural areas. Also, similar to how copper lasted many decades, a fiber network is a one time large investment cost and then you reap the benefits for decades.

Not everything has to be a capitalist 'minimize cost, maximize profits' game.

Zero. We pay out taxes in Euros.