Fiber and politics...

Jean-Michel Billaut posted an Open Letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy (Lettre Ouverte à Monsieur le Président de la République) on his blog. In this letter he follows Sarkozy's avowed willingness to reboost the French economy, looks at the fiber investment plans made by said president when he was Interior Minister and president of the Hauts de Seine department and asks if and when Sarkozy intends to do the same for France.

When he validated the Fibre plan for the Hauts de Seine region, Sarkozy used the following arguments (paraphrased from JM Billaut's blog post at the time):

• all citizens should be equal in the face of network access
• equipping the country (or at least his department) with fibre is a matter of internation competitivity
• the issue must be raised now and the answers must be reactive

On the basis of these affirmations, Billaut now asks Sarkozy where the Fibre Plan for France is and why the issue has not been addressed at all in the first months of his presidency. His letter remains very positive, and I think with the notoriety he has in technological and political circles, Billaut is right to take a positive approach to the issue. He uses all the usual arguments on economic impact (including the possibilities of homeworking that I mentioned a few weeks back).

I can't help being a little skeptical however.

First of all, while it's easy to agree with the above arguments, the Fibre Plan of the Hauts de Seine is, as far as I know, mostly unfinanced at this stage (the department has agreed to finance up to 30 MEUR but in order to deploy universal fibre access, a conservative estimate would necessitate 600 MEUR (600k homes at 1000 EUR per connection). I'd be curious to know how this plan - voted over a year ago - is advancing in concrete terms.

Second, the role of competitive operators in the Hauts de Seine deployment is largely unknown. I may be missing some crucial elements in the puzzle, but it seems to me that the Fibre Plan relies mostly on France Telecom deploying the fibre, which they will gladly do for the Hauts de Seine, one of the French departments with the highest revenues per capita and a very small territory, but that doesn't suggest they will do it for, say, the Pas de Calais or even Billaut's cherished Yvelines.

Finally, it was announced earlier this week that a further 5% of France Telecom was sold by the government, for 2.5 BEUR. That doesn't sound to me like a clear sign of a government willing to invest in telecoms infrastructure, even though ownership of the incumbent and infrastructure projects could, I suppose, be distinct.

I hope Billaut's clout will help make something out of this. Between this and Alexandre Modesto's Very High Bandwidth initiative (www.treshautdebit.org) I hope the grassroots activity does generate an impulsion at government level. France has the chance of being at the forefront of broadband, let's not lose that (slight advance) and make the most of a budding competitive advantage.