More next-gen broadband in Brittany, France
Article – French language
Mégalis pilotera le très haut débit en Bretagne – DegroupNews.com
My Comments
There is an intent by another company to pass next-generation broadband into Brittany, which is France’s northwest rural region. Some of us might say that this has a few of the holiday homes used by British people up there.
There is a long term goal of having the fibre-optic service pass 1 million Brittany households by 2025 but the main effort in the meantime is to pass 85000 households in 12 towns through the next five years. This Mégalis-driven main effort is to focus on enabling rural Brittany with this kind of access, especially with Carhaix, Ploërmel and Redon being focused on.
This project is driven by publc and private funds with the private funds providing most of the investment in the form of EUR€400 million courtesy of Mégalis. Public funds are in the form of EUR€65.94 million from Brittany’s local governments and the European Union are pitching EUR€22 million via FEDER. This is also part of the Brittany local government’s E-government effort to provide an improved online citizen-government interface to the local people. Some experts say that the main issue is that you would need to put down EUR1.8 million and allocate 25 years of work to make sure that all the 1,642 households and businesses in that region are covered.
The questions that weren’t raised were how there would be assured competitive infrastructure access to this network. This would include whether to a single-fibre setup with common infrastructure or a multi-fibre setup with competing infrastructure.
What I like of this is that there have been some ambitious goals to work a rural French region in to the idea of next-generation broadband and expose it to the highly-switched-on French Internet scene.
