Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 00:53:08 +0100 From: Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: French Internet "strike" (Was: A White Snowy Christmas in Sunnyvale) Message-ID: <19981221005308.A7312@keltia.freenix.fr> In-Reply-To: <4.1.19981220155747.046ceac0@mail.lariat.org>; from Brett Glass on Sun, Dec 20, 1998 at 03:59:33PM -0700 References: <4.1.19981220152518.00ac53d0@genesis.ispace.com> <Your <4.1.19981220151248.00ac5c60@genesis.ispace.com> <199812202020.MAA46296@rah.star-gate.com> <4.1.19981220152518.00ac53d0@genesis.ispace.com> <19981220235019.A6362@keltia.freenix.fr> <4.1.19981220155747.046ceac0@mail.lariat.org>
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According to Brett Glass: > Didn't French Internet users "strike" this week over outrageous > charges for modem calls? What was the outcome? It was not a very large strike and it was mainly targeted at one ISP in particular, Wanadoo which has been build by France Telecom (FT). FT has been a monopoly for many years when it was a state-owned firm and kept on having the same policy of high price even after being privatised. Did you know that a 64 Kbps line is 500 US$ a month ? One of the problem is that the strike was aimed to get a fixed rate (like 200/300F a month) when dialing an ISP #. Problem is that it doesn't help people that don't use ISP (like me) and that it doesn't help firms at all (because Leased Lines prices are still high). I don't think the strike had ay impact whatsoever (OK, some newspapers talked about it) and I don't see things moving here. Cable modem for instance was announced in '95 (!) and only now being installed after many blocking attempts from FT. Even then, they have a meager quota of 125 MB/mo for outgoing traffic (counting everything including DNS traffic!), and that make having servers nearly impossible. They only want to make people users/consumers, not part of the Internet. That's the weight of the Minitel we're bearing :-( -- Ollivier ROBERT -=- FreeBSD: The Power to Serve! -=- roberto@keltia.freenix.fr FreeBSD keltia.freenix.fr 3.0-CURRENT #2: Sun Nov 8 01:22:20 CET 1998 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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