As I write this post, I am looking out of the window and watching sub-contractors working for France Telecom laying underground fiber optic cables in our part of rural France in the Department of the LOT Area 46.
At last, we are moving into the 21st century and is there a chance that we can say goodbye to the expense of satellite broadband and move back to the real world.
That is what we said a year and a half ago, still waiting !
Usually they run the fibre optic to a hub, then connect all the local lines to the fibre optic hub, you don’t necessarily get fibre optic, what you get is faster broadband or the possibility of broadband where previously the speed was far too slow. From my experience it can take up to a year to get the cables run and connected up to the hub before you can get ADSL. Ours is slower than the satellite broadband we previously had, but its 20€ a month cheaper and unlimited.
Our broadband is getting slower as people use it to download films.
We complain to our Mayor but he does not seem interested
Perhaps a petition is called for.
In our area they are running fibre to the home. I think that this applies throughout Brittany and I had assumed that they would use FTTH in other parts of France as well. Was yours provided by Orange or a different Telco?
Orange, but I think you will find in most cases its as I stated, fibre optic feed to a hub in the village, then ADSL via standard phone line after that. Usually all the info is available on the Ariase site as to whether fibre or ADSL will be available at your address.
We got a shiny new noeud de raccordement just after we bought (2015). ADSL, VDSL and fibre were all options but I’m very happy most of the time with the VDSL speeds (50-70 down and 6-10 up; depends a bit on the weather as it is overhead cables, occasionaly slow-downs at peak times when the Orange infrastructure can’t cope but generally OK).
Not too shabby for a village of a hundred houses (officially its 450 but that includes all the outlying settlements) in rural Brittany.
Just got back from the Mayor’s office and was told it will probably be end of 2018 before we are connected to the new cables so you were spot on there Trevor, they could not say if they will run Fibre optic to our houses or not, but 150 metres of copper wire has got to be a lot better than 2 kilometers of it.
The reason for the delay was that they are planning to totally re-wire the telephone exchange in our local town of which will not happen until the summer of next year.
But definitely a step in the right direction for Rural France.
The put in an NDR then link all the copper phone lines to it, whether you get fibre optic or not depends on whether you are on the main fibre optic run along a main road or a very short spur off it, but then still depends on how far you are from the NDR. We are five kms from the NDR and run at around 6mbs up and 2mbs down. Not exactly superfast broadband but fast enough to stream stuff like Netflix or run a Kodi box.