Twenty billion francs at the time, i.e., more than three billion euros in today’s money: that was the initial bill for a project that most French people have forgotten, yet designed as the showcase of France under Mitterrand. On November 3, 1982, the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Louis Mexandeau, had the Cable Plan approved in the Council of Ministers. The ambition? To catch up in only a few years on a lag that had built up since the 1970s, when North America and the Benelux were already cabling their cities. The issue was that France did not want a simple coaxial cable like the others. It wanted fiber optics, everywhere, right away.
Key takeaways
- A colossal project launched in 1982 to wire 52 French towns with fiber optics through an ambitious star-shaped network
- Costs exploded up to 25 billion francs, turning technological utopia into a budgetary nightmare
- The government secretly pivots to the cheaper coaxial cable, implicitly acknowledging the political failure of the plan
A Technological Utopia Named “Star Network”
The idea took root in Biarritz, where, following a local pilot, the Directorate General of Telecommunications decided to launch the Cable Plan to cover the national territory and give a crucial edge to the development of a fiber-optic telecommunications network. The technical choice was not insignificant: rather than a traditional tree-like topology, French engineers opted for a star network, a remarkable feat for the era. The proponents of the Cable Plan chose an ambitious path of fiber-optic networks with a star topology, designed to carry interactive applications for which, at the time, there were no suitable receiving terminals. They were building the highway before the cars even existed.
The numbers are dizzying in hindsight. The first objective of the Cable Plan was to install 1,400,000 connection points by 1985, an already audacious pace for a country that was starting nearly from scratch. But the vision did not stop there: the government aimed to install six million optical outlets within ten years, for a complete transformation of social communication and a rewriting of democracy. Beyond that, the Plan envisioned wiring ten years across 52 of France’s major cities, with the goal of placing 10 million connection points, all for an estimated cost of 20 billion francs at the time. The emblem of this ambition remained the scene shot from the Élysée in May 1984: François Mitterrand conversing by videophone with Louis Mexandeau, then in Biarritz, a pioneer city equipped with fiber all the way to the subscriber. A political communications image as carefully staged as the technology it extolled, which, in truth, was still in its infancy.
The Wall of Costs: When the Project Overshot the Plan
On paper, everything appeared coherent. In the field, the bulldozers quickly told a different story. The technocratic ambition of the project translated into very high costs, amplified by only a rough grasp of building fiber networks: in many cases, to meet deadlines and avoid overshooting the original budget envelope, the originally all-fiber networks became mixed fiber/coaxial networks. A fiber-to-the-home connection could, according to some estimates, cost tens of thousands of francs per connected household—an amount utterly out of step with a television subscription.
Official evaluations confirmed the scale of the overruns. For the fifty sites ultimately chosen, ten were to be equipped with all-optical technology and forty with mixed technology, for a total investment of 25 billion francs and for 5.6 million households, i.e., an average of 4,500 francs per connectable household. Once the networks were actually in service, the bill per actual subscriber rose further: calculated on the basis of a 50% penetration rate—far from being achieved in the newly cabled cities—the costs ranged between 4,000 and 7,000 francs in the lower bracket, and between 11,000 and 16,000 francs in the higher bracket. Local authorities, expected to co-finance or shoulder part of the venture, understandably balked at such sums for a service that the general public ultimately viewed as secondary to the arrival of free terrestrial channels.
1986: The Great Shift Toward Coaxial Cable
The technical pivot is almost due to a bar-room anecdote. According to the SAT company archives, which ran the Biarritz project, the idea of a hybrid network emerged during an official trip to Moscow, where a responsible official suggested using the optical transport already mastered to feed distribution centers, then reaching the subscriber with coaxial cable to cut costs at the socket. A far more pragmatic solution, which would become the standard under the name of “OG” technology, as opposed to the all-optical “1G” reserved for a handful of pilot sites.
The legal framework followed the same course. The mounting technical difficulties in laying the Cable Plan networks pushed the government to overhaul the regime governing the construction and operation of cable networks, in the Freedom of Communication Act of September 30, 1986, which transferred the power to choose an operator to the municipalities. The quantified verdict, drawn up a few years later for the Senate, was unequivocal: more than one million connection points had been delivered by France Télécom by the end of 1988, barely meeting the target figure… for 1985 alone. The State would concede, in an official written response, that one million connection points had been installed and that the industry, during this period, had acquired undeniable expertise in fiber optics—a polite admission that the political objective had failed, but that the industry had survived.
The overall verdict remained harsh: compared with North American standards, the distribution of television programs via telecommunication networks proved a costly and humiliating failure in France, a stark contrast to the success of the telephone plan pursued a few years earlier by the same telecommunications engineers. One would have to wait until the 2010s and a completely different plan, this time led by competing private operators, for fiber to the home to re-emerge as a national priority, without going through the coaxial detour.
Sources: francearchives.gouv.fr | histoire.orange.com | senat.fr
