I would be interested to hear members' on a good and economic phone for friends who have a maison secondaire. At the moment they are very unhappy with Orange/France Telecom who are charging them 45€ every month, and then taking at least 8 working days to reconnect each time they come to France, even though they give them fair warning.
My experience is with SFR (hopeless) and then I jumped out of the frying pan into the fire by signing up for Sat2Way. Frequent outages and poor comms seem to be their watchwords.
My friends will make about 4 trips per annum and they must have a broadband connection.
Any recommendations please.
just get a free.fr mobile phone card ...it can be shared via wifi with speeds on 3g or 6mbs and on 4g 20mbps ....you can then either use the wifi direct or get what is called a wifi bridge that will pick up the signal and share it conventionally through a router and RJ45 cable
Job done !
Peter,
My bone of contention with SFR was that when the line went down, the company would blame France Telecom. Each time I pointed out that it was SFR that was France Telecom's customer, not me! We have something called "LINEGUARD" which is installed so that users can see if the speed is dropping. It uses a system of LEDs - 3 green, an orange and a red. As you cannot save work automatically when you use EditManager (for security reasons), I always save copy the moment the system is showing one green. With "LINEGUARD" you can keep a log of all breaks, the speed and various other data.
The first time that I had an Intervention, I was told by SFR to go to the local shop which is a 60 km round trip. There I would leave a 60€ and be loaned a dongle. The day before I went to the SFR shop I rang the technical people and asked them when they thought that they might get around to sorting things out. This was after two weeks.
On arrival at the shop I asked for my loan dongle only to be told that the Intervention had been cleared! As such I was forced to buy a Dongle for somewhat more than 60€. I was less than pleased, even more so when I arrived back and installed the dongle. It did not work! Following my complaint, I was told by SFR that there was a compatibility issue with XP Professional. I won't go into what followed but suffice to say I was forced to use some of my "worst" French.
Following this the first of my 6 replacement "Neufboxes" arrived with its return packaging. I told SFR that if it wanted its old Chinese rubbish back, it could send a courier for it as I failed to see why I should have to waste my time and money taking it in to La Poste. By the time I had accumulated 6 boxes and still had not received my money back for the dongle, I had had enough. To be fair, SFR did cough up for all the mobile calls to its office and the other calls made; this totaled some 400€. Before switching to TooWay, I asked them to repay me the money for the useless dongle (SFR sent a letter some two months after I had bought it stating that there were technical problems...!), all my expenses and compensation for loss of use. I heard nothing back, so then told SFR that it had been in breach of contract for quite sometime and that I was terminating the contract. Typically I continued to receive bills and then after 6 months the debt collectors moved in. I did my usual thing of stating that each time I received a communication, I would reply and charge 25€. I combined this with a letter stating that they were harassing me and also sent them certified printout copies plus a technical report based on 12 months' recorded figures from "LINEGUARD". I claimed 9 months refund of connection fees and a further 5.000€ for damages and compensation.
Shortly after I heard from SFR and really cannot say any more than that. As I stated earlier, until the French government puts a Telecoms regulator (with lots of sharp teeth) in place, the companies will continue to ride rough shod over their customers.
Meanwhile Peter thank you very much for the information about B&YOU. My friend will follow it up as it does sound like a good deal.
Antony - I'm afraid that I have to disagree strongly about SFR in general. It's a very large outfit, and will have quite a number of local issues as a result, but my experience with them over a number of years, and a number of users, has been generally very good. I have occasionally encountered problems, but have also hit on a number of 'workrounds' to issues such as failed router boxes. This has been especially useful as I support several friends who are SFR clients. I moved to SFR in the first place (from Orange/France Telecom) because of the poor service I was getting from Orange.
What should be mentioned is that I'd generally go with Orange for an installation in a very rural location unless you can get an 'unbundled' (dégroupée) connection. That's because Orange, in practice, manages all connections that are not unbundled, so you can end up with the two sides pointing fingers at one another if you use say, Free or SFR, on a connection for which Orange have the overall control.
If there is already a telephone line at the property, it's easy to find out whether the connection can be unbundled. Go to the Ariase site and enter the line details in the Test Internet section. That will hopefully show you some of the Internet possibilities for the line. Clicking on the Infos ADSL/VDSL2 link will give you details of the the phone line & the exchange point (NRA) to which it's connected. Under Réseaux alternatifs (dégroupage) it will show if there are any alternative operators with a presence in that NRA.
Incidentally, I've recently moved to Numericable for my own line, but that's because Numericable now offer fibre connections here whereas SFR don't. (SFR has also just been bought by Numericable, but that's a different issue.) It's interesting that the new superfast fibre connection doesn't feel much faster on day-to-day use than the 6 Mbps we had from SFR. Tests show that it is much faster & a few seconds are saved on downloads, but overall it hasn't been a revolutionary upgrade.
This deal from B&You seems to have everything: ADSL, Free phone calls to French mobiles and to landlines in France & 100 other countries, Wifi roaming in France & line rental included all for €16 per month, with no long-term commitment. Seems too good to be true? Probably not, but you might have to be (or know someone who's) relatively competent in French and in Computerspeak to get it working. You also have to buy your box, but that's currently just €1. (For safety, I'd buy a second one!)
Edited: You might find that they tell you that your line is ineligible, but offer you a more expensive deal that's still good value.
Thank you Michael! I would recommend that you contact John Sidwell at TooWay France. His phone number is: 05.55.78.72.98. I would recommend doing business with him and the UK people rather than Sat2Way France that would appear to be a "one man and his dog" type of operation.
You should be able to get a package including phone system (initial outlay) that would provide you with free phone calls worldwide and ultra fast broadband. I believe John now offers a TV connection as well.
Steer clear of SFR whatever you do. I would not, however, say that TooWay are crooks by any means; indeed TelSat would not allow it. Sat2Way about whom I would agree with you, if you are referring to them as TooWay France, is a typically useless French company. John Sidwell is as straight as a die and works with TooWay (now called Europasat) and knows his business inside out.
That said, the same rule of thumb applies to satellite broadband as it does to terrestrial. I have two satellite dishes, on for personal use and the other for business. The second system is a media one which is very fast but I am not allowed to use it for personal stuff due to very high costs. The company has several satellites and never enters a bandwidth overload situation.
What a really good reply Anthony, i must remember that for future dinner parties, we also live at the end of the branch line and have to time our visits to the home of the WWW., if we both have quite a bit of work to do then we regularly get up at 5am to give us a any chance of getting a reasonable connection.
You mention going over to Tooway how are you finding this option, i was thinking of taking that route myself but was put of by comments on www.cable.co.uk on there guide to the service in france, it comes across that Tooway.fr are bigger crooks than the telecoms mafia that sell's landline broadband.
I don't think anything will change until we get a government that has the "balls' to take these companies on.
SFR had the usual "greed" problem. I don't know if you are aware of how the internet works but it's rather like a lcocomotive that can pull a number of carriages at a given speed when full of passengers. SFR had (and still seems to have) the habit of mounting aggressive marketing campaigns, signing up lots of new customers and then having to add another carriage or two (full). Normally this would require a more powerful locomotive to pull the extra carriages at the same speed.
However it very much depends where you are on the line. If close to the end, you find that when you try to board the train, it's full. In our case it was on Wednesdays when the schools were closed, after 5.30 when all the kids were home and at the weekends. Complaints to SFR always resulted in the same thing - go to our local shop and "borrow" a clef internet (dongle) leaving a 60€ deposit. Meanwhile you'd wait for another Neufbox to arrive. In three years we had 9 visits by the SFR contracted engineers who said that there was no problem and 3 times by France telecom (Orange) who said the same thing but told us that SFR were "overloading". After 3 years we had 6 Neufboxes and a connection rate of 49.7% . I have a program installed that monitors speed, disconnections and line cuts.
The last straw was when we had no connection for more than three weeks. It was then that we installed the Tooway Satellite system. Meanwhile SFR tried to make us pay for three months connection but when I informed the company that I would like them to take me to Court so that I could put in a counter claim, all went quiet, probably because I sent them a copy of the monitoring program's results for 6 months. I eventually packed up all their rubbish and sent it back to them.
Hopefully following their being taken over, things will improve but I doubt it. There is no strong Telecoms Regulator in France as in the UK and the companies are allowed to get away with murder!
24.99€ € per month?! That can't include landline rental from Orange as well, surely?
Good luck!