France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

samudrijan

Vive la France!

MrGando

And here in SF we have like 55%? Been waiting for it for 10 years in my hood.

halestock

Meanwhile, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gi...

bitmasher9

Over the last 10 years I’ve moved 5 times. Each time having a fiber connection with at least symmetrical gigabit has been a hard requirement. Looking forward I’m considering moving again for very fast networking where I can begin to stream videos in 4k 60fps to small groups from my home, as well as offering a semi-permanent home for mid sized files (500mg-50gb). The ability to download/upload large files without worry, and the decreased latency, are well worth the handful of neighborhoods I’ve declined based on this requirement. Congratulations to France, for helping to make sure the future is more evenly distributed.

EDM115

We can all thanks Free who pushed massively fiber to no longer be dependent on Orange's ADSL copper network And also the fact that they have crazy low prices which forced the 3 other ISPs to stay competitive

gramie

Quebec has high-speed internet available to all residents. Either fibre to the home, or subsidized StarLink. Canada as a whole is expected to have 90% high speed internet by the end of 2026, and 100% by 2030.

cute_boi

And here is my house, I pay $300 just to get 300 mbit downspeed and 10mb upload speed. can government STOP this fucking spectrum(Charter Communications) monopoly.

nsbk

Spain is at 96.79% (June 2025), up from 94.79% a year before. See [0] I think France and Spain are the best of the big European countries regarding coverage, but also adoption: If we look at the adoption ranking globally, Spain sits fourth at 90%, behind the UAE, China and South Korea and ahead of France at 83.6%. Very few European countries convert coverage into subscriptions that efficiently, and I think it's driven by competition. You can get 500Mb symmetric connection for as little 10 euro [1], 20 for 2Gbps. DIGI has just gone crazy and in their own network they are offering symmetric 10Gbps for 25. Most people I know have 1Gbps because when is that not enough? [0]: https://digital.gob.es/en/telecomunicaciones-infraestructura... [1]: https://www.digimobil.es/fibra-optica/

utopiah

Yep... was on the countryside for the Summer in places so small they didn't even have a bakery, which in France matters. What did they have though? Optic fiber, high bandwidth, low latency, reliable and for a very low price. Honestly I think ADSL was already enough for most people, I mean non professionals, but now I think France has the infrastructure for a good enough Internet for the next few decades. I can't fathom normal usages that would need higher bandwidth and lower latency.

ZeroCool2u

I have 5 Gbps symmetric fiber in NYC with a Google Fi data only sim as a built-in failover to 5G on my router. It did require some specialized hardware, but it's truly a wonder coming from a kid that experienced dial up. It really changes the calculus on some things with large volumes of data on my desktop. Admittedly, my desktop maxes out at 2.5 Gbps, but everything else in the house keeps happily chugging along.

nba456_

Great job! Now they can download stuff from data centers even faster!

harel

Is that fiber to the property or fiber to the cabinet? In the UK I get FTTC which means the last bit from the cabinet down the road to my house is copper wires. My speed is bottlenecked by that. New builds and flats get services for the building giving them full fiber. My fiber is only as fast as my copper wire to the cabinet allows

bhouston

Canada also has pretty fiber coverage in urban areas but only for a single provider, Bell Canada, and its legislatively allowed resellers like TekSavvy. It is really fast and reliable. You can get symmetric 8Gbps for around $100/month USD ($140/month CAD.)

dewey

I was curious and just looked it up: Germany reached 36.8% in 2024 ( https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung... ).

TacticalCoder

Currently typing this from my vacation house in France, in a rural area, with vineyards nearby. Closest highway is a 45 minutes drive (!). Now, sure, it is a fancy place in that it's Provence's seaside and, well, I can see big yachts from my couch but it's still in the middle of nowhere . At night it's wild boars (which my cat hates), snakes (which my wife hates) and toads everywhere. It's a very sparsely populated area, we're kilometers away from the nearest village and indeed we've got fiber to the home (since years and years already now). Now it's not all rosy: they filter traffic/block IPs/force website to imposes checks (like age checks) that aren't done elsewhere, block torrents, etc. I'd say it's the least open Internet I've seen in any EU country (now of course there's VPN and I can use a SOCKS5 proxy through ssh to one of my server etc. but still: France are complete control freaks and it shows).

audidude

It's awesome. I moved to France from Portland, Oregon this year. I went from 1gb to 8gb fiber for half the cost in France.

zokier

why is there such clear empty region in the middle? some regional governance thing? also why is Brittany so much worse than rest of the country, despite having relatively high pop density

jakub_g

One thing worth mentioning is that a law was passed around 2017 in France that as a tenant, if you want to install fiber, the landlord can't prevent you from doing so (because e.g. they don't want to drill holes in the walls or other excuses). Also the vendors do not commercialize ADSL anymore since a decade ago or so if fiber is installed in the district.

chermi

Are there downsides? I'm guessing it came from state initiative, does that mean more state control of the internet, including snooping and censorship? I don't know the best solution to fast and widely available internet, but I'm pretty sure the US isnt doing it. Starlink is the best for my mom's house 5 miles from a 100k+ "metro" center, which seems kind of absurd. Who's done it best? What's wrong with the US? Just state capacity? Regulatory capture? Infrastructure incompetence, like SF? I know last mile is expensive and not super attractive from an ROI perspective, so I can see how pure market solutions might not be the best. Im talking out of my ass but we also know the grid is fucked, and I know at least part of it is a downed tree can take out an astonishingly large sector.(1) Maybe we could bundle fiber with putting power lines underground, at least rural/suburb. Reason being that 1)digging shit up in cities is not easy -- but I also imagine we're not being creative enough there either 2) one of the most expensive parts of fiber(or any network )is last mile, on a per person basis. I would've said I was confident the biggest quality internet coverage problem was rural, but I saw that SF stat in this which kind of shocked me. (1) I know grid is messed up in many more ways, but living in the country for big portions of my life, no electricity at all is painful and too frequent.

fudgy73

QQ: Who owns / operates the fiber? 100% private co? Partially subsidized?