ZOOM, ZOOM...
It's not just South Korean and Japanese companies who are beating US companies in providing the fastest and cheapest broadband services (wired and/or wireless) to their mainstream consumers. French companies are getting their chops in as well, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal titled "How France became a leader in offering faster broadband". Om Malik has written about this for some time, as he reminds us in this post.
Some excerpts from the WSJ article:
"For years, France's telecommunications industry was a state-owned monopoly with one of the world's most backward broadband markets. But thanks to deregulation six years ago, French consumers have access to high-speed Internet service that is much faster and cheaper than in the U.S.
One telecom company in particular has exploited the changes and created competition in France -- a start-up called Iliad. Over 1.1 million French subscribers pay as low as €29.99 ($36) monthly for a "triple play" package called Free that includes 81 TV channels, unlimited phone calls within France and to 14 countries, and high-speed Internet. The least expensive comparable package from most cable and phone operators in the U.S. is more than $90, although more TV channels are generally included..."
"How did France get ahead of the U.S. in broadband services? In 2000, French regulators required the country's dominant France Telecom SA to make its national network of phone lines available to other providers of phone and Internet services.
France Telecom had to allow alternative providers like Iliad, Neuf-Cegetel, and Telecom Italia SpA's Alice to install their own equipment in the massive underground centers that collect thousands of phone lines..."
"Indeed, Iliad has created intense competition in France, and that has resulted in faster broadband speeds. Free offers download speeds of up to 24 megabits per second. In the U.S., the average broadband connection offered by telephone and cable companies is about 1.5 megabits per second, although a few companies offer speeds comparable with Free's or even faster.
The connection speed enables Free to deliver new services. For example, users can simultaneously watch one channel on their TV and another on a laptop or computer screen. Free says it will make high-definition TV a part of its package by September, beating major telecom providers in Europe to the punch."
It's not the first time France has beaten the US in terms of online services. Thanks to a government-lead initiative back in in 1982 to found Minitel, French consumers enjoyed a text-based online service that offers much of the content, commerce and community of the web today while America Online was not even a gleam in Steve Case's eye.
We only had CompuServe in the eighties, which was more oriented towards geeks, and much too expensive for mainstream consumers.
So maybe we'll get affordable 24 megabits per second broadband in a decade or so, using France as a relative benchmark.
However, it may just be a darkest before the dawn situation here. I choose to be more optimistic on the wireless broadband side in the US. Again, see this post titled "Five years for a nation-wide Wi-Fi" by Om for more on how companies like Google and MetroFi can potentially change the game.
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