…even if it’s obviously not the news I was hoping for! I’m now at least prepared for disappointment, when they try and install fibre on Thursday.
Does anyone know what practical options might an installer consider (if any) if there are no nearby electricity or telegraph poles, and the whereabouts of phone wires in/out of the property are not at all obvious? (We only have mobiles, and we’ve never had to think about phone cables into the house, although there are phone points throughout, so it must be theoretically connected somehow…)
I would imagine that one of these tubes (gaine) will be for your telephone line. You say later that there are sockets in the house, so you will probably have a DTI socket somewhere in the house where an incoming line is terminated (there are many types but most have DTI either written on them or moulded into the plastic). If you can find it (it’s often where your electric tableau is) you should find the cable coming into the house. If you find this, show it to the installer and show him where the cables come out the other side. If everything can be got to your house from the fibre distribution point through pipes then it’s usually a doddle to install, they have machines to blow the fibre down tubes.
This is a fairly good article although it’s very old. Ignore all the stuff before the section ’ Est-ce que j’ai quelque chose à préparer avant l’arriver de la fibre optique ?’ as it’s outdated. This makes it clear that it’s best if you find out where your existing copper phone cabling goes out of the house, that you need to think about where it’s best for the fibre socket to be and that it will need a power socket.
Installed only 3 working days after my online request. The entire process took only 2 1/4 hours (for a house with no previous fibre connection, in the countryside). Thanks to the 2017 article that @hairbear kindly posted, we were able to identify - in advance - the location of the phone cables coming into the property (we’ve never used, or even seen the landline) and via a gaine, into the house itself. Although the gaine containing the phone wires was full of earth, the installer was unfazed, with lots of ‘pas de soucis’ etc. Most impressed.
20€ pm with SFR RED.
Thank you to all who provided suggestions and advice.
I’m sure fibre purists will be horrified, but our speeds (50mbps) although very slow by fibre standards, are (literally) 100x faster than what we’ve had for the past 4 years, using only 4G mobile signal. We honestly don’t need anything fast. It’s satisfying enough just to have a reliable, value for money service (€20pm) which suits us fine. We get dozens of TV channels thrown in which we’ll almost certainly never watch, and unlimited free calling to fixed numbers in the UK, which might be useful in future. I’m happy…
€20 is purely for the fibre with SFR Red. Since we don’t need to rely exclusively on 4G going forward, we will immediately swap our two existing 200Go Réglo deals for much lower data allowances, ie 50Go at €4.80pm, ie just under €10 pm in total for two.
That is very slow for fibre, or is that a typo ? The RED offer is 1000/1000 mbps for €19.99. If you’re really only getting 50 mbps then maybe you have a WiFi issue or something. Is that speed via phone, tablet, laptop, PC ? Could you connect using an ethernet cable instead and measure again ?
Great suggestion. We tried with our laptops, as opposed to mobiles, and got a very different answer. Around 300mbps for the laptops, 50 for the phones.
We unfortunately don’t have any ethernet cables (having lost them in the move to France). I gather that as the phones are 5 year old models, the WiFi modems are probably what may be behind the (relatively!) slow speeds they’re registering, as opposed to the newer laptops. Still far from the 1000mbps but fine for us…
Thanks so much for your help.
We very quickly went from using our home network to plugging our computers directly into the back of the livebox - our speeds are normlly around the 800 mark.
It may be that they’re using the 2.4GHz WiFi signal rather than the 5GHz. I’d imagine that a 5 year old phone should have 5GHz capacity but they don’t always manage the connection well.
If you go into the WiFi settings and click on the network name then it should tell you which frequency you’re using. Mine looks like this.
I suspect we’re fine with our modest speeds for now, not frequently having guests with multiple devices, nor gamers! Compared to many, we are very light users, only regular WhatsApp calls, research on the internet, uploading a few photos etc.
Thank you. Yes, having followed your helpful suggestion, I can see the mobiles are indeed using 2.4GHz… They’re due for replacement in the next year or so, and we’ll look out for this functionality next time round.
Interestingly I have set the router in our cottage to pick up 2.4 rather than 5 on the advice that 2.4 goes through thick walls better - we have very thick walls!
