Can Free really boost your speed with its Freebox Delta ADSL/4G?Freebox Revolution and mini 4K: an update doubles their upload speed to 400 Mbit/sSubscribe to the News Newsletter for freeFirst shock announcement of the Freebox Delta at last week's press conference, a 10 Gbit/s technology.We suspected it for several months, Free has taken the plunge and thus becomes the first consumer ISP to offer such a high connection speed in France.The problem is that the blur has cleverly been maintained around this innovation.We give you the keys to find out what these 10 Gbit/s are really worth.Free has opted for the 10G-EPON standard.It dates from 2009 and is very little used in Europe.Most ISPs are working on more recent technologies such as NG-PON 2, adopted in 2013 or XGS-PON defined in 2017. SFR* has thus chosen XGS-PON to carry out its tests in its laboratories and in the field since several months.“EPON is the cousin of GPON.It is mainly found in Asia”, indicated Eric Gangloff, director of studies at Télécom SudParis.“Its interest essentially lies, in my opinion, in the lower cost of the ONU (Optical Network Unit) boxes installed at the customers' premises,” he adds.In addition to the fact that customer boxes cost less with this standard, remember that Free had started in 2015 to deploy asymmetric 10G-EPON equipment (10Gbit/s - 1Gbit/s) in its NROs (optical connection nodes).He was therefore not going to start all over again when the XGS-PON came out.But the risk is that its technology will become obsolete when the other French ISPs decide to in turn release commercial 10 Gbit/s offers based on symmetrical XGS-PON.He will then not be able to compete in terms of upstream speed, unless he changes his equipment and therefore agrees to devote a certain cost to it."We decided to bring something revolutionary: 10 Gbit/s technology", declared Xavier Niel during the launch press conference.At no time does it clearly promise a speed of 10 Gbit/s, contenting itself with announcing a “10 Gbit/s technology”, that is to say capable of reaching 10 Gbit/s in theoretical speed.What Free sells in its general conditions of sale is 8 Gbit/s downlink and 400 Mbit/s uplink.When Xavier Niel announces that his subscribers will be able to download a file 10 times faster than with 1 Gbit/s, it is therefore false.You have to understand 8 times more... at best.Because the 8 Gbit/s are theoretical as always in the commercial offer of an ISP.This figure is not guaranteed and corresponds to the maximum reached by an optical fiber, shared most of the time between 32 or 64 customers.Furthermore, very few terminals are currently compatible with 8 Gbit/s.And the Freebox Server only has one 10 Gbit/s Ethernet port.The user will therefore be forced to connect most of his equipment to Wi-Fi, the standard of which is 802.11ac 4400. In the end, the total speed of Wi-Fi in a home could amount, in pure theory, to 4.4 Gbit/s, to be shared between all the devices in the house.Free's proposal is not a first in Europe.The ISP Salt, which belongs to Xavier Niel, launched a commercial offer at 10 Gbit/s symmetrical with XGS-PON last March.Free will reply that Switzerland is a small market compared to France but with its 800,000 fiber optic subscribers and 10 million eligible in our country, we cannot say either that the Freebox Delta 8 Gbit/s will concern a mass of users.In addition, the operator Netalis has already been offering a 10 Gbit/s download and 1 Gbit/s upload offer in France since last October for 99 euros per month (excl. VAT) for businesses.It uses both GPON and XGS-PON with the possibility of switching to symmetrical 10 Gbit/s if necessary on the desired day.For the moment, it is focusing on the Greater Besançon conurbation and will roll out to other towns in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in early 2019, before expanding elsewhere."We respond to a need of VSEs and small SMEs who are transforming digitally and now want to exploit all the possibilities of IT and/or hosted telephony by removing the constraints of speed and latency", explains Nicolas Guillaume, founder and Chairman of Netalis.At the top of the uses, he thinks of the cloud and hosted services.If he is more skeptical about the interest of such an offer today for the general public, he still welcomes the initiative of Free.“It's the access technology on a shared fiber medium for the next ten years.In this sense, the arrival of 10 Gbit/s residential FttH on a national scale with a major player is very good news for us and for the market,” he concluded.The speeds that the Freebox Delta will be able to provide will not reach the heights that the ISP suggested at its launch.But it's a real bet on the future that should spread and encourage other mainstream operators to also get started for the greater benefit of users.*01net.com is published by a subsidiary of NextRadioTV, itself 100% owned by SFR Médias.