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Re: French ISP upgrades fiber customers to gigabit

Unfortunately fiduciary responsibility has been taken too far.

A fiduciary is a person (or collective group of people) who has the responsibility to safeguard the monetary interests of others that has been entrusted to the fiduciary. So, for example, a "trustee" is a fiduciary.

Fiduciary is mistakenly used as meaning for example "monetary". It is a noun or an adjectival noun as in Fiduciary responsibility (the responsibility of a fiduciary).

The definition of that safeguard is what has become ridiculously twisted around the world.

By a strict definition, it means that, in the case of say a director of a corporation, he is a fiduciary with the role of safeguarding the investment. Strictly it means that the director may do anything reasonable with regard to protecting the original value of the investment. Notice it does NOT include protecting any amount that an investor may have paid ABOVE the face value of the investment. So, say the face value of a stock is $100, and you pay $200 for that stock, the extra hundred dollars is your own responsibility. Note too that there is no promise to increase the value of your stock, since the value of the stock bears little or no relationship to the value of the company! Look at Nortel ... the stocks were actually worth nothing for a long time if the company had been wound up earlier, but were trading in the sky.

All these extra "responsibilities" that have been lumped on directors and company executives are nothing but figments of their imagination under the guise of a fiduciary responsibility.

Companies should NOT be managed on their stock price. They should be managed on the basis of sustainability.

Why we will NEVER have pricing like that in Canada is a function of a few things, the three largest of which are

a) currently no functional separation,
b) an unwillingness of the federal government to enact regulation or foster policy which promotes extensive competition,
c) the legal interpretation of the responsibilities corporate management and boards of directors have to shareholders.

Since officers & directors have a FIDUCIARY duty (as determined by the courts) to maximize shareholder value, it is usual and customary for executives & Boards to view that as 'extract the maximum profit from customers as the market will bear, at all times'. It's this view - that by the way will NEVER get a Director or executive in trouble with a court - which is the source of all the gouging and multiple times per year price increase that we see in Canada.

The corporate governance models in Europe & elsewhere around the world usually have an implied social responsibility or social contract which is generally absent in Canada/USA.

In theory, it is the Board of Directors who are appointed by shareholders which wields the power at companies. Shareholders either vote directly themselves at shareholder meetings, or they grant proxies to the directors to vote their shares and accept all recommendations of the board rather than try to get involved in management, since each shareholder's power, as information available to an individual shareholder is usually deliberately limited. Larger institutional investors also grant the board proxies. The large number of shareholders also makes it hard for them to organize to affect change in corporate policies.

[Aside:] Additionally, a pension fund investor will NEVER accede to lower product prices in a company it invested in as it would adversely affect the stock price (shareholder value and all that) UNLESS corporate management could convincingly demonstrate that lowering of prices would actually improve profitability. In Canada's small market, with its largely saturated internet access marketplace, lowering prices is just a recipe for lower profitability.

Often in large public companies it is upper management and not boards that wield practical power, because boards delegate nearly all of their power to the top executive employees, adopting their recommendations almost without fail. As a practical matter, executives even choose the directors, with shareholders normally following management recommendations and voting for them.

Large companies pay outside directors an annual retainer measured in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands, additional amounts if the director is the chair of a Board committee, a per-meeting-attended fee whether attending in-person or by phone, stock options and often additional retirement benefits.

So you can see that court rulings of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, the golden handcuffs of director compensation often tied to stock performance (which is itself tied to raping customers), and the fact that many boards are mere puppets of executive management (who are also largely compensated based on stock price) leaves little room for any sort of social contract - even though the economics of Moore's Law runs rampant through the telecom industry.

Actually laying fibre in rural and semi rural areas may well be far easier than in urban areas!!! String the fibre on the poles!

Also, you'll find in Europe, they string cables across the outside of urban buildings without much consideration for appearance and urban buildings there are mostly adjoining each other like our city centre cores.

You would be astonished how rural France actually is! The major difference is the urbanization are far higher population density than our urban areas.

Bottom line on average is that distances in Canada make a singificant item on transit, but not last mile delivery.

That argument is crap. No excuse for crappy broadband in high density areas like the GTA, other than incumbent monopolies/duopolies raping customers.

Want add a little things... This i french isp have really bad peering...

I have a feeling some large competitive US multi-nationals feel the Canadian IP transit market is VERY PROFITABLE for them.

I just read that some months ago that Hurricane Electric finished their cross-Canada loop shown on the map here:
»www.he.net/HurricaneElectricNetworkMap.pdf

Probably precisely to cash in on the Canadian market. Cogentco launched Ottawa (in addition to Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto) publicly saying in their Investor Reports that the Canadian market is profitable for them.

In my opinion in Canada it is all about the old school saying of 'maximizing profit margins at ALL COSTS'.

It's not like there is a shortage of IP transit capacity in Canada, in fact in large urban centres like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal there are at least 3-5 large multi-national suppliers bringing in terabits of cross border capacity. Plus the majority of Canadians live within 100km of the US border and the large US cities (e.g. Seattle, Chicago and New York City) are relatively CLOSER to these Canadian cities than the US south.

Technology in terms of capacity can solve literally anything (the latest DWDM systems do 100Gbps per wavelength over 8.8Tbps per fibre pair).

It's all about business and revenue/profit margin, period.

It's not a surprise on modernised networks the carriers can offer unlimited bandwidth.

The only real cost is the construction cost of FTTH to the end user. I guess in France the operator seems to bear this cost.

Canada may be wide and vast but take a look where our urban centers are which are with in 100km of the US Canada border and build out from the urban cores to the next biggest towns and cities and so on.

Fiber keeps dropping in price I know that for a fact but not sure on the numbers per Km of Fiber cable.

French don't have 7200km from one end of country to another.

Canadian govt should look where we are
because of rogers , bell ....

»news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-576054···oadband/

Its broadband service costs 30 euros a month, or about $41, for areas with unbundled access and 36 euros, or $49, in areas where it's not unbundled.

Canadians can only wish for such a deal!