We just had a meeting with our neighbours, the local commune representative and the Tarn representative over changing the Cadastral to give us ownership of the old road (they moved the road ten metres to get rid of a dangerous corner created by our barn)
In the process of this we were discussing the recent cables and gain installed outside our house. There seem to be two fibre optic cables strung on poles with loops of cable (possibly for future connection) hung on poles either side of the pole with gain left when building the road going under the new road to our house. Finally before the new road was created a team came along with a large chain saw type digging device installing gain for fibre with access points every 200m. This will be on our property when the paperwork is done (can we charge them for running their cable across our land)
Talking with the people I was told that three different fibre cables were being installed, it seems very odd why three, will we get a choice of fibre providers?
Might be interesting to know what kind of fibre optic service each cable is supposed to be providing.
My understanding is that there are potentially 3 types:
FTTH (fibre to home) - the fibre connection terminates in the home - asymmetrical up/down bandwidths;
FTTE (fibre to enterprise) - same as FTTH but for businesses - it is a mutualised asymmetrical bandwidth connection ;
FTTB (fibre to bureau) - dedicated fibre connection to foot of building, with symmetrical up/down bandwidths.
For example, my office fibre connection is 200 Mb/s symmetrical, more by luck than anything else, as the building was one of the first to receive fibre in the town and was a showcase implementation.
Thanks for that info, as we are on route to a hill top mast, Tv and mobile phone, I wonder if the underground gain is for the fibre to enterprise or bureau.
Just checked that out for the home address - not surprisingly, we have no fibre coverage whatsoever…there is a corridor of fibre-desert stretching across the land between the two nearest villages, and our village is in the middle of that corridor !
As it says in the accompanying text, it is a map of Fibre to the Home (FTTH) (and I assume Fibre to the Building (FTTB)). It does not include Fibre to the Curb (FTTC) where the fibre cable terminates in a street cabinet and continues to the home with the standard copper telephone wire.
They put FTTC into the village here a couple of years ago as a prelude to FTTH expected in 2022/3. There was little actual communication on the implementation. It seems some in the village have not upgraded their internet connection to take advantage of the additional speed available by switching from ADSL to VDSL.
I am about 750m from the cabinet. My speed went from the 2Mb/s I’d had since 2004 to 18Mb/s when I asked my original operator to upgrade. But even that must have been capped as when I checked other operators I found by switching I could get 39Mb/s for about 20€/month.
This is a map of every individual address internet connection in France. Possibly worth checking with addresses around you.
There is also the page to check the best offers for your address
Yes there’s fibre in the town we come under. But no way (ever, I think) will they put fibre here. We are rural but not remote rural.
It’s annoying as the mobile signal seems to be progressively disappearing.
For me connection to the internet is very close to as essential as water and electricity. IMV there should be a public service obligation of a minimum connection being available one way or the other. Having it now done by profit-making enterprises without resistantly-worded public service requirements quite naturally means they will minimise and cherry-pick.
Will be seeing the old Maire this afternoon and will see if he knows the rollout plan for the commune.
We have near neighbours with Orange DSL which peaks at 500kbps on a good day. Makes my WIMAX solution’s 12mbps look almost acceptable for €40/month.
Snap !. We are in exactly the same situation here. We are surrounded on 3 sides by small communes with Fibre to the home within 3Km. On the other side, it’s about 6Km. We are the only desert commune surrounded by an oasis of fibre.
Never mind, we have been promised fibre by next August so not long to go now.
Same here. When I moved into our house 2.5 years ago, we were connected to VDSL2 and I get 75-80mbps as we are less than 150m from the exchange. The previous owners only got about 5mbps and so must have been on ADSL. Our neighbours are still on ADSL and get about 5mbps. I advised them to contact their provider (Orange) to switch to VDSL2. I think Orange wanted them to switch to a different, more expensive package before they would do this and so they didn’t. There is an online map somewhere of properties and the speeds they get. Can’t find it now, but the last time I looked about 8 months ago only about 5% of the village was on VDSL2.
Unfortunately, we are still only on ADSL2 and although the announced range of between 8 and 30 Mbps sounds useful, the reality is that we are consistently below 8 Mbps as we are at the end of the line, 2km from local DSLAM, with a significant signal attenuation. Which kind of sucks, really. I certainly can’t see the historic operator Orange wanting to improve that any time soon, as it would mean changing the diameter of the copper wires all the way to our house. Other hamlets would feel equally left out if they didn’t have their infrastructure upgraded.
We get mostly better speeds from a RED/SFR 4G router, so long term, that may be the way we wish to go, especially since the current subscription offer is “sans engagement”. My main concern with 4G (and 5G when it finally gets rolled out) is that of number of subscribers, the more there are, the less you get, so to speak, and that of signal drop, which occurs quite frequently where we are - one minute you’re cruising at near max theoretical bandwidth, and the next, you’re riding a single gear pushbike uphill with the wind against you…
Ah! OK. I used Ariase when I bought the house to check what was available. I was shocked then to see that although VDSL2 was available at the exchange, only the Mairie was actually connected. Even now, 2.5 years later, there are only 4 other properties connected to VDSL2 including myself. The rest are on ADSL with Ariase reporting 3-8 or less than 3 mbps. It’s as though nobody tells people what’s available. Such a waste of an upgrade of the exchange.
We should be getting FTTH next year, and it wouldn’t suprise me if nobody takes advantage of that, as its never to my knowledge been mentioned by the Mairie and there’s nothing on thier website, which on pretty much every other topic is excelent.
From what I can see VDSL is only useful within 1.5km of the exchange the signal then drops off rapidly after that. So no use to me as I am outside the village by about 3km. Looks as though we will have to wait for fibre. Our ADSL is up and down from a normal 8 Mb/s down to less than 1Mb/s when it was low for a week we complained to Orange who told us it was due to new servers being installed for the fibre and the gave us 200Gb of data on out mobile for two months.
I know of a few area’s where the standard of fiber cable installation has been poor, maybe because of the distances involved in France, that folks have binned fiber and went with 4/5g because the speeds were still very poor.
I really can’t see commercially how it can make sense to bring cable to anywhere there isn’t a cluster of houses or businesses of a certain number. The distance from the exchange matters a lot.
But if we agree that this makes sense, then mobile signals of sufficient strength and bandwidth ( as subscribers as they are added must share the available bandwidth) must be legally mandated to be provided and maintained. Sending mobile signals through the air to rural locations must surely be less costly than digging holes and running cable? One or the other must be provided at a minimum.