Isn’t it irritating when the French are so much better at things than us Brits? Their car industry is in the best of health and producing futuristic if a little unreliable vehicles. Go to a market in France and see the beautiful array of foods instead of the chips-with-everything offerings of British supermarkets. A bottle of Minervois bought in the UK is a Jimmy Nail compared with the Pearce Brosnan wines of Languedoc. The French hang onto the best for themselves as Rick Stein found when he sampled Pierre Cros’ wines in Badens as he travelled the Canal du Midi for his TV show.

Coincidentally, it was in Badens last week where Alan, a British ex-pat, told me about the French broadband service. He and his partner Sue run an architectural design and project management business from their base in the Black Mountains, a little hamlet with a population of 162. Catering mainly for Australians, who find the summer climate in the south of France to their liking, and a few Brits who enjoying moaning about how hot it is, they manage their business almost entirely via the Internet.

Until recently this meant slow telephone-based services. Good enough for e-mailing and finding suppliers but a nightmare for sending plans and photographs to customers around the world. Alan and Sue petitioned their village mayor who in turn pressured France Telecom to upgrade their local telephone exchange. It took less than 6 months to achieve and now they enjoy up to 20MB/sec ADSL services for €29.90 (about 20 quid) a month, complete with free telephone calls throughout France as well as to UK, North America and Australia. Plus a UK number so they can be called at local rates. All this from an English-speaking ISP.

Do you feel lucky?
There are still many parts of ‘built-up’ Britain waiting for broadband to arrive and even those with services running at up to 8MB/sec rarely see more than 2.7MB/sec, according to a recent Which survey. Our own line, nearly 3km from the exchange, manages a healthy 5.75MB/sec on a good day and we feel lucky.

But is all rather laughable compared with the services on offer in French cities. Instead of sticking with antiquated copper and aluminium lines, France Telecom’s Orange and others are laying down fibre optic cables and offer a 100MB/sec, 51 TV channels and unlimited phone calls for €45 a month (about £30). Their theoretical maximum is a staggering 2.5GB/sec downstream, 1.2GB/sec upstream.

OK for them but not us
At around £10 billion, new cabling is viewed as too expensive for the UK but in France they ignore such trivialities and simply lay the fibre optics down existing pipelines. Even their ordinary telephone lines offer up to 28MB/sec and for about €14 per month (£10) you can get 18MB/sec plus free TV, video-conferencing and phone calls.

It’s not just France where data speed is measured in tens of megabits per second. Deutsche Telekom are laying fibre optic cables in Germany and plans to use VDSL (Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line) for the last few metres to supply 50MB/sec services. Sweden too has nearly 30% of it’s subscribers on fibre optic. Meanwhile for us here in the UK, BT’s CEO Paul Reynolds stated he sees no business case for fibre optics, here, at last year’s DigiWorld Summit held, ironically in Montpellier, France. Instead we will be offered a slow roll-out of the up to 24MB/sec ADSL2+ and an even slower move to an all-IP single platform with gigabit ethernet to the box in the street.

It’s all enough to drive me to drink, the huge tax on which alone would pay for fibre optics to the desktop.