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THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION IN FRANCE IS TRAVELLING OVER FIBRE

Since the spring of 2013, France has been committed to a high speed broadband plan which aims to cover the entire territory by 2022.The plan represents a total investment of 20 billion Euros, divided between public and private funds. The deployment of FTTH optical fibre in 2018, the preferred medium for high speed broadband, continues to progress and should provide very high broadband coverage in almost every department by between 2025 and 2030. Other technologies are already providing access to high speed broadband networks, such as 4G and VDSL2, but broadband and ADSL are still predominant throughout the territory. Despite this, the price of fibre traffic is becoming very close to, and even cheaper than, that of ADSL.

In its last report at the end of March 2018, the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications and Email (ARCEP), confirmed that 18 million French homes are eligible for very high speed broadband, including over 11 million via Fibre To The Home (FTTH).

It should be noted that FTTH is the preferred method in new constructions to bring fibre networking directly to users, without using copper or coaxial cables.

Beyond the deployment strategies of the opera- tors (Orange, SFR, Free, Bouygues Telecom), a lot of extra coverage is still required to hit the targets. Within this context, the entire industry must provide technical solutions to accelerate progress in this major project.

FIBRE