One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much, is that the Internet connection here, at my mother’s house in Santa Monica, California, is terrible. It’s so slow it feels like dial-up.
Of course, I’m spoiled. Back home in Paris, my connection is blazingly fast. It’s also quite fast in the family home in Normandy, even though it is in a tiny village miles away from any city.
This just reinforces my usual impression that the US is a third-world country when it comes to infrastructure. All those above-ground telephone lines, the brown outs, the black outs, the craters in the roads, the collapsing bridges and exploding steam pipes don’t do anything to dispel that impression.
But when it comes to boradband Internet, the difference between the US and Europe (or at least France) is enormous. In fact, Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote about this a few days ago.
In Paris this is what I get from Free.fr, my ISP:
- An ADSL modem (FreeBox), which is also a 4-port Ethernet switch, a wireless router with high-speed Wi-Fi of the MIMO variety (basically redundant Wi-Fi).
- Download speed is unlimited, up to 28 Mbits depending on how far you are from the switch. I get about half that where I live. (Upload speed is capped at 1 Mbit)
- No limits on the quantity of uploads or downloads.
- You can connect a standard telephone to this box, and make totally free phone calls to all the major countries in the world.
- A second box, the FreeBox HD, that you connect to your TV and that communicates with the first box via MIMO. It pipes a couple of hundred channels of TV and pay-per-view into your TV, including in HD.
- It has a built-in hard disk which gives you all of the functionality of a TiVo.
- You can even connect a camcorder to the box and broadcast your own TV station to other FreeBox owners.
- Other goodies include the ability to pipe the TV signal to your Windows or Linux PC, or Mac, using the open-source VLC program, and the ability to pipe multimedia content from your PC or Mac to your TV.
Most of these features were added over time.
The only thing that hasn’t changed is the price: 29,99 Euros a month (about US$40 at today’s miserable exchange rate).
You only pay extra for some premium TV channels, and of course, for pay-per-view.
Free.fr is starting to deploy fiber to the home, and they don’t intend to change the price for that either.
Contrast all that with my mother’s miserable Verizon Internet connection, which only and barely allows you to surf, for $78 a month!