48 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
48 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "State of Internet bandwidth in Belgium"
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date: 2020-07-31T18:00:00+02:00
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---
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I was born and raised in a little city next to Paris in **France**. In early 2000s, the unlimited "high-speed" Internet
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access revolutionized communications. No need to monopolize the phone line with a 56Kbps modem anymore. Since then, the
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bandwidth has always increased. We have seen the ADSL, ADSL2 and fiber technologies. We had something called "Triple
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play" offers where unlimited phone calls, TV and Internet were packed together. There were three major companies on the
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market: [France Telecom/Orange](https://www.orange.fr), [Bouygues](https://www.bouyguestelecom.fr/) and
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[Neuf/Cegetel/SFR](https://www.sfr.fr/) (depending on the year). Then [Free](https://www.free.fr) jumped into that
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alliance and broke prices with revolutionary offers. From this time, all French ISP have "low prices" – between 30 and
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50€/month – for "high-speed" – hundreds of Mbps for both down and up – thanks to the fiber deployment.
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Then I moved to **Belgium** for personal reasons. My parents-in-law have chosen
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[Belgacom/Proximus](https://www.proximus.be/en/personal/?) and they were happy with it so I followed their choice. This
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ISP has deployed the VDSL technology which can be "fast". My first apartment was very close to the DSLAM[^1] so my
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bandwidth was good enough, 50Mbps/15Mbps. The price was sensitively higher for Internet and TV only, 50€/month. If we
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wanted to have a phone line, we would have added 20€ to the monthly bill and pay each phone call! You can get unlimited
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phone calls for [1.19€/month](https://www.ovhtelecom.fr/telephonie/voip/decouverte.xml) only using VoIP which is the
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same technology our ISP use. There is a limit to the monthly Internet volume we can consume. It was something like
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600GB/month when I subscribed, to 3TB now.
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When I moved to my current house, I knew the bandwidth will drop. Proximus had failed to organize my move on time. You
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can do it yourself on the website but if you go to a shop to reschedule the appointment, they can't do anything because
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it has been scheduled online. I canceled the first rendez-vous online and they created a new one with an additional
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two-week delay, one month after the move. I subscribed to [Voo](https://www.voo.be/en), the *fastest Internet of
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Belgium* like they say in their [commercials](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKv6LtaXIf4). Same price, better speed,
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120Mbps/10Mbps... for a week. Then I had three months of packet loss, 20% on average. It was unusable. The following two
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months were stable with a bandwidth drop, 70Mbps/10Mbps. Then packet loss again, 80% on average this time! Horrible. I
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re-subscribed to Proximus again, with 20Mbps/6Mbps bandwidth, but it is stable since the change. All of that for
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60€/month.
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I called Proximus to be notified when the fiber will come to my street to finally catch up with our neighbors' speeds,
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kind of. They have no plan to install it. No date. Nothing. In the meantime, my father and my grand-parents have the
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**gigabit** fiber installed at home for a lower price than mine. And even if Proximus deploy it, [upload bandwidth is
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limited to 100Mbps](https://www.proximus.be/en/id_cr_fiber/personal/orphans/fiber-to-your-home.html) where it can be
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[200Mbps](https://www.sfr.fr/offre-internet/fibre-optique) or even [600](https://www.free.fr/freebox/freebox-delta)
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[Mbps](https://boutique.orange.fr/internet/offres-fibre/livebox-up) in France. As of today, the maximum bandwidth I
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could get at home is the 400Mbps/20Mbps promised by Voo, with the stability we know.
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Belgian ISP, Proximus and Voo, when will you stop to steal from our pockets and start to generalize very high-speed
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Internet bandwidth to the small country of ours? We are in 2020s, not in 2000s.
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[^1]: [Digital subscriber line access
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multiplexer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subscriber_line_access_multiplexer), the closer you are, the faster
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your bandwidth is.
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