Only 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload? I guess it would be okay for rural areas, but it's awfully obsolete for cities, even today, let alone for 2023 - at least for an European country, especially one like France. And why such low upload speeds?
Most rural areas throughout Europe and elsewhere are struggling with <10 Mbps, if they can get broadband at all.
If you know any region in the world which isn't densely populated, but where every home (not just 1 or 2) has 50 Mbps download, I'd love to read about it. I know of a handful of self-starter village communities which are doing this (e.g. B4RN in the UK), and that's about it.
That sounds like Tucson, where I used to live. Now I'm in New York and getting 50 Mbs down and 5 up for $20 – $30 less than I used to get 12 down and 2 up.
It's more then an oligopoly, there's a government mandates to provide equal service to the north that also drives up prices.
I guess this is because the concept of Internet as an entirely decentralized network didn't make sense to France Telecom, the national operator which made the first investments. Why ? Because before Internet, France had the minitel, and entirely centralized network. And so as a pure client, you don't really need that much upload speed.
Also, some argued that low upload speeds were maintained to harm illegal P2P file sharing.
Nonetheless, we are seeing some symmetrical offers appear. Most notably, Orange (former France Telecom and France leading operator) is offering a 100/100Mbps connection for 45€/mo, whereas the 100/5 one costs 35€/mo.
I live in London and have 5 people on the end of a 12Mbit down and 1Mbit up and it's fine. The company I work for has 100 people on a 40Mbit fiber.
This is all fine.
People are just greedy bandwidth whores these days.
Far more often I'm sitting there going "No-one else is home, and my pipe is barely being used - why is this download so slow?". A server giving you content at 300KB/sec isn't going to go faster because you upgrade from 12Mb to 100Mb.
More speed is always nice, but seriously, the change from 2Mb to 12Mb was far less noticable than the change from dial-up to 2Mb. I guess an increased bandwidth would give more opportunity to stream hi-def video, but that's icing-on-the-cake territory, not basic-civil-right stuff.
The internet doesn't have as much penetration as you think.
Internet access is a basic human right not because of long-distance communication with family (that's a luxury), but because, like telephones, you need it to access basic services. An increasing number only have online offerings now, or require you to jump through online hoops.
Not really. Having really fast broadband completely changes what is possible, and if we want to secure future economic growth for the internet, it's a great area to invest in. I have 120 megabits and easily saturate that on a regular basis. This in turn makes it possible to watch movies in the highest of defs on-demand, or purchase and download them to keep forever in less time than it takes to walk to the shops. We can download increasingly huge video games in less time than it would take to install from discs.
We have so many online businesses making huge amounts of money off entertainment while traditional platforms are dying, but if internet speed stagnates, or the fraction of the population that has very fast internet stops growing, that will limit the potential market for online media.
Another consideration is that 1mbit up. People are finding more and more awesome uses for larger upstreams. Yes, you wouldn't need a huge increase in your upstream to have great Skype video quality, but if you want to upload videos you make to YouTube in HD, or stream your gaming session in HD, you are going to feel the pain on the vast majority of broadband plans available today. We need to move away from the old online distribution model of "people consume, servers create".