Wi-Fi with a French accent: saving rural areas: Rural dwellers in France are finding that the broadband gap is making them uncompetitive with city folk. The solution is fixed point-to-point wireless (which might not all be Wi-Fi, by the way; there's plenty of 2.4 GHz non-802.11 stuff out there). It's part of the ongoing lesson being taught to telecoms worldwide: your least profitable customers can be profitable to smaller companies with lower regulatory overhead than monopoly players. [80211b News]