One year and a half ago, the French government announced €750m to deploy FTTH.
A year ago, the PM increased his bid to €2 billions.
One month ago, he received a report from a Senator estimating the total investment at €25 billions to be funded by a special tax on copper of €600m per year.
Sounds like a plan? Yet the mountain of commitments seems to be giving birth to a mouse. To be exact, 7 tiny mice, in the form of 7 "pilot projects" of a few hundred homes each funded by the government up to €500,000.
At least this is the explanation of why the French national debt isn't exploding: we are good at committing large sums of moneys but excellent at not actually spending them (to be fair, 0.01% of the committed amount will be spent).
Yet it is not as bad as it seems, and in a way quite good:
- we're moving. These projects kick-off the involvement of the central government in FTTH. Next steps will be hopefully larger projects
- the projects will allow to define standards and processes on which large scale deployment projects will be based, thus allowing economies of scale through standardization
- the project are supported by large service providers Orange, SFR and Free, which account for 90% of the broadband lines in France. Their commitment is essential for the economic viability of FTTH deployment
- the projects have to be deployed and operated by neutral operators. This is a boost to the neutral operator model and an encouragement to local communities to seek a neutral operator to deploy their digital infrastructure.
And last but not least, Covage has been approved for a pilot project in Seine et Marne, where it operates the 1000km public network for the department!