Random Ramblings

From IEEE Spectrum: due to deregulation in the French telephone market, many new companies are starting to offer very cheap voice+internet packages ... free.fr offers 15Mbps with 112 digital TV channels and unlimited voice-over-IP phone calls for around $36 per month. In the US, you can get 10-15Mbps with 170 digital TV channels and unlimited phone calls for around $100 per month.

An interesting comparison in the article: the French version of the FCC has 7 members with 3 graduates of Ecole Polytechnique (equivalent to MIT), and a fourth who taught at Ecole; other gov't telecomm officials include a president of a engineering college, an "engineer in chief" of a telecomm company, another "general engineer" in telecomm, and a doctor of mathematics and economics. By comparison, the US' FCC has four members: two are lawyers and two are historians.

The article also notes that the French company, Alcatel, recently "merged" with Lucent (former Bell Labs) -- but everyone now assumes Alcatel will be the dominant partner. This effectively means that the French now control the venerable Bell Labs, what used to be one of the world's premier research organizations.

It's just kinda sad.