Broadband Providers and Issues

Hi everyone,

I have been round to several houses recently (I’m a house sitter) and a few have been having problems with the wifi and phone, and it seems complicated to resolve. One family were without phone or internet for months, one person got a new livebox and still had problems, another has had totally unexplained problems with normally reliable Wifi.
Anyone experienced this or found a cure? Does anyone have a good reliable wifi and phone and with what provider? Someone suggested the weather might be a factor but it seems more than that.

There was quite a thread on this s short time ago…

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I have Free in Paris & Orange at home no problems with either.

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When we first came here, we were still on dial-up, so speed wasn’t an issue, but with the introduction of broadband everything changed.
We are at the end of a very long telephone line. Can’t find out exactly how long, because apparently the location of telephone exchanges is a state secret in France. But the distance the signal has to travel is of great importance when it comes to transmission speed. This means that streaming won’t work for us and although almost all contracts include free television we are unable to access it. All this is particularly frustrating since cable now passes only about a kilometre away, but it was not considered commercially viable to extend the service to our remote hamlet.
So yes, we do get occasional loss of service and even mobile phone connection is patchy, which is a bit of a concern as one gets older.
Our worst experience was soon after we arrived, when a drunken motorist brought down a telegraph pole and it took about a month to repair it.
More recently our ADSL filter was failing. The Bouygues helpline wasn’t much help, but I discovered that this could happen from the Internet and solved the problem by swapping the filter.
Another thing we notice is that speed drops off during and after heavy rain. As someone pointed out, a lot of telephone wires have been out in all weathers for the best part of a century and Telecom only patches them up rather than replacing the lot. So why would they spend money maintaining obsolete technology?
In conclusion, if reliable internet and telephone contact are important to you, your best bet is to go for a place with a cable connection. But, who knows, technology changes so fast, everything we depend on now could be obsolete in a few years time.

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Some thoughts:
Signing up with a phone company other than FT/Orange can be a problem as each side blames the other when things go wrong and nothing gets fixed. (Friends in that scenario were without a line for 10 weeks and they now are back with Orange).
We only have poor internet - until recently often below 1mb per sec and yes, worse in wet weather. We are however fortunate to be in an area that will have optical fibre in a matter of weeks. The last time the engineer was here he told us our internal wiring was not up to scratch and wouldn’t be great with optical fibre. Just changing the wiring through the house got us to over 3mb.
We are told by friends that we are in an area where there is good 4G reception - this doesn’t mean much to us but the same friends no longer use the internet and do everything via 4G. So yes, the world is changing

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Very helpful replies so far, I am learning a lot. Thank you everyone.

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We use ‘Vivaction’ for our landline phone which recently developed a fault whereby we could neither make nor receive calls. They had it fixed within 6 hours and the engineer telephoned a couple of times to make sure that everything was OK which I thought was pretty good considering that we live in a village rather than a big town.
Our internet is from Orange and is pretty good except between 4pm and 8pm on school days when all the kids come home and start using up the capacity which tends to cause our connection to momentarily fail from time to time.

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Hi Mike - try https://www.degrouptest.com/ to check the length/quality of the line to your phone. All you need is the number and it will tell you distance to exchange and attenuation.

Back on subject, we have found Orange give us the best speed and their English help line have generally been excellent.

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I’ve never understood why anyone would pay to have a fixed line and opt to pay for calls that would be free with VOIP but understood that that service was only available through Orange. Using any other ‘provider’ is just paying a third party a premium to provide an inferior service as it also seems to be proven that Orange who control the infrastructure put their clients first. I do understand that there are people who are happy to pay such a premium when it comes with a British interface.

Thanks for that, Guy.
Not the prettiest website, but does the job.
I got 6290 metres, so I guess that explains everything!

Your friends still use the Internet just access it through a 4G network.

The answer to your question is that, if you want ADSL and telephone, there are cheaper options than Orange - at least for some customers. For us, that is Bouygues. But that means that we lose the fixed line and get bundled VOIP that is free for normal French numbers, but is arguably less dependable than a fixed line.
Many subscribers would dispute your confidence in Orange. If you drive past their high street office here at 9.30 in the morning, you will see a small crowd of people clutching carrier bags and boxes, waiting for the door to open, with the prospect of spending up to an hour inside before they get to the head of the queue.
But the whole thing is a bit of a nightmare. having got your head around the concept of dégroupage, you then have to research all the possible suppliers to find the best value provider for your specific circumstances. Our own Bouygues offer can be found on their website, but is not prominently displayed, they are much more interested in pushing the more expensive deals.
For the retired, searching for bargains can be a full time job, so it’s little wonder that most people prefer to take the easy option and pay whatever it costs.

For us, with Orange, we were lucky to get 4 Mbps.
Now with 4G provided by Bouygues we get…
Selection_003
No brainer for us :grin:

FWIW I’m with Free, 29€ a month. Started off with Alice, moved onto Free after Free had taken over Alice and the bill went down! They’re not perfect, you get the occasional short interruption to adsl, but no real issues in10+ years. I don’t live in a remote area and I don’t need particularly fast speeds - I don’t game, don’t stream much, just uploading and dowloading files, surfing and listening to Nostalgie😀

have you tried ABC Lounge Jazz from the same stable?
Lovely calming music in this frenetic age :slightly_smiling_face:

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No I haven’t, thanks for the tip.
Some days I hate living and working in silence, I need background music to help me focus.

Music is as essential as food and water, I can’t do much without music.
:slightly_smiling_face: :musical_note: :notes: :musical_score:

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What might be considered the best financial deal for phone calls can often depend on which country one is calling, and for how long. Our phone package is one that allows us unlimited calls to the USA (and many other places as well), which is important to us as we have family and friends across the pond.
Keeping the phone and internet arrangements separate does indeed cost more, but there is an increased likelihood that at least one or the other will still work when a fault develops.

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Now, I know this isn’t good, but it is better than some… we can get Internet and Telephone…

longueur de ligne : 2635 mètres
affaiblissement théorique : 31.64dB
état de la ligne : ACTIVE
débit maximum estimé ADSL2 : 10.5 Mb/s

Well, it’s better than the line at home (UK) used to be - 5kms, actual attenuation about 62dB and speed when connected to a maximally tweaked modem about 3Mbps

I jumped at VDSL pretty much the second that it became available (very late in the roll out) so get about 50Mbps currently - not as good as it could be, g.fast is enabled on the cabinet but, sadly, we are not only a long way from the exchange we are also a fair way from the cabinet so too far for g.fast.

En France the ADSL would have been dire but the village was upgraded to VDSL just after we bought so we’re currently getting about 70Mbps down and 11 Mbps up.