Thank you for your advice, Peggy. I rang the french speaking Orange customer service last week and found them very helpful. The speed has improved a bit since then and hasn’t been so bad that I couldn’t open email or websites.
The house was only built 7 to 8 years ago so none of the wiring can be very old but I will try new ADSL filters.
I use a password for the WIFI and my neighbours certainly have their own livebox so that isn’t the problem.
If it gets very bad again I will try your English speaking customer service number while it is at its worst. The real test will be when everyone is back from the vacance scolaire
[quote=“Sally_Bakowski, post:21, topic:14901”]
I use a password for the WIFI and my neighbours certainly have their own livebox so that isn’t the problem.
[/quote]It’s worth checking that you don’t have the open Orange wi-fi service enabled. This allows other Orange subscribers to use a separate wi-fi network produced by your Livebox, called “orange” (small O) if they also have it enabled on their home account. Your neighbours might even be using it unwittingly if your signal is stronger in some parts of their house. Obviously the additional network uses the same bandwidth that you have on your connection hence the potential to reduce available capacity, especially if lots of streaming services are in use (YouTube, NetFlix, Spotify etc.).
I had a slow Orange connection, particularly at certain times of day, so I called the tech department who said that nothing could be done to increase the speed.
I thought Orange were using my livebox to run a public hotspot, but the technician on the line was quite insistent that this was not so.
I subsequently rang again and asked another technician if it was purely coincidental then that when I unplugged my livebox not only did my home network disappear but also the Orange hotspot - and when I plugged it back in again, eh voila - both returned!! The second technician was quite sniffy with me and implied I was being selfish and anti-social not wanting to share my connection.
He finally admitted that in the admin dashboard of the Livebox it is possible to switch this off - but I couldn’t do it from there.
I eventually - with great perseverance, found the settings buried in my online Orange account - and succeeded in stopping the piggy-backing off my router …resulting in a better connection and great satisfaction!
Just to clarify - all the main French operator routers - Orange, SFR, Bouygues etc send out a public wifi signal so that any of their subscribers have the facility to connect to any available box - pretty useful really.
BT do exactly the same in the UK in fact their public signal is a ‘FON’ one - the same as SFR in France - so…BT customers in the UK can freely connect to any SFR Fon wifi hotspot in France and vice versa - great for gite guests.
Of course, as @Sand_Hepworth has pointed out - you can easily disable this ‘sharing’ facility via your router dashboard - normally http://192.168.1.1 from any PC connected to your router. Although - why should you be able to share hotspots if you don’t share your own…just saying…
I now have 50 Gb a month for €9.99 and added multi sim so I am supplying both apartments with 4g for €12.99 with Bouyges
I apologise if I came across as ignoring any ones advice but I have no French and I had a lot of problems getting a account in my name as I am not resident but as I said I was only making suggestions - I was not the one seeking solutions👍
