> On 5 Aug 2022, at 02:34, [email protected] wrote: > > On jeudi 4 août 2022 19:16:02 CEST Rod Beck - [email protected] > wrote: >> Why so much interest in Starlink in a country like France? Ghana, I would >> understand, but France has had a successful broadband deployment and >> actually a rather competitive DSL market. >> >> >> Roderick Beck > > > You simply got your assumption wrong. France did not have such a successful > broadband deployment and the DSL market is not really competitive.
[…] I would add that the problem has recently been compounded by the ‘massive’ exodus of people out of city centres to the countryside, driven by Covid 19 and the rise of home working. So far, the situation was not ideal but there was no real rushing ahead to connect remote hamlets, mainly inhabited by old people who don’t care about Internet. When 30/40 year old yuppies arrived, ‘rediscovering the quality of life in the countryside’, they immediately asked for something that had probably been prioritised very low on the providers’ roster. You know those people: they like the rural way of life, as long as it doesn’t deprive them of the amenities of the urban civilisation. It may not appear so, but France is still a very rural country, with plenty of areas very sparsely populated, especially in hilly/semi-mountainous parts. In those areas, laying a multi-kilometre fibre for just one remote farm doesn’t make much sense economically speaking, and the hilly terrain makes reliable microwave coverage almost as dear and complicated. So that’s it, I suppose. V. --------------------------- Liste de diffusion du FRnOG http://www.frnog.org/
