We live in the southern Landes, an area which is undergoing full blown expansion. Masses of money is being poured into developing the infrastructure by the Conseil général and as part of this, fibre optic broadband is (supposedly) being brought to every household in the area.
We now have a massive sign only a few hundred yards from our house telling us that we live in an area ‘haut debit’ - are we connected? Are we heck! Our download speeds get worse by the day and it is nigh on impossible to get any sensible information on when we might possibly be connected. I find it baffling that France is so far behind in terms of high speed internet access. But maybe we are an anomaly? Are you happy with your internet speed?[poll public=true]
With Orange in Dept 16 and thought I was getting decent speeds at 16mps but was told whilst in the Orange shop upgrading a mobile that we were eligible for VDSL at no cost. Took 3 days but now we get 56mps and our neighbour reports 80mps over copper wires.
Apparently ADSL can be upgraded to VDSL if you are less than 1km from a local exchange (ours is in the old school in the village) and they are experimenting with the technology.
Meanwhile 4G mobile coverage is currently 11mps and with RED (a new SFR company) offering 30gb monthly for $10 is an option for those struggling.
We live in a village in the Vendee and our broadband speed is 600kps, painfully slow, which means that although in theory we are entitled to French TV, in reality we just can’t get it. On top of that we have practically no phone signal - we frequently have to walk out into the street to get one bar up. It drives me nuts!
Most of the villages around me are reliant on Orange ADSL, the best speed I have seen are about 12 Mb/s but regularly see people with 2Mb/s and occasionally less than 1 Mb/s. A local business group I belong to are looking at setting up their own network based on µWave links as FT/SFR etc are all saying fibre will never happen. Because of the topography I don’t think I’ll be able to benefit though.
Neighbours get about 500mbs. We use a satellite system (Europasat.) Supposed to be 20mbs, sometimes is, but can drop to 2 or 3 mbs. Seems there are different beams from the satellite and we are close to the edge of the beam our system is locked onto. We’re trying to get the provider to move us to the stronger and more reliable beam that overlaps the beam we’re on. Should then get >20mbs reliably.
The satellite system is good overall, but not cheap and we are capped (currently 25 gb a month.)
We are told that fibre and high speed broadband will be coming to our area (86), but we’re not holding our breath.
Mine in 86 is crap at … Download Speed HELP 1.62 Mbps (203 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed HELP 0.63 Mbps (78.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency HELP 125 ms
Jitter HELP 1 ms
In the 01 mountains we have fibre-optic to the server room and nearly 100Mbs most of the time (via Numericable). This was installed a few years ago but doesn’t always work. We also have a long Cat5 cable on a reel ready to plug in to our neighbour’s Orange ADSL which never cuts out! Getting it fixed when it goes wrong involves convincing the call handler that yes, we have rebooted everything, that we have no internet, no TV and no phone, and the lack of illuminated LEDs on the fibre junction box means that we have no fibre signal. More used to standard “reboot and it will work” procedures they are reluctant to accept my diagnosis, but I’ve been fixing fibre-optic connections for ten years longer than they have, and I have been right every time so far! Fibre Optic to mountain villages like ours is an ongoing project run by Ain, but was rolled out only to houses on the main roads, with most of my neighbours not eligible for connection. This is what internet speeds should be like, only wish the London flat enjoyed similar performance with Sky fibre, but our UK signal comes via too long a copper wire to be truly “fibre” past the main road at the bottom of the hill. I also have better mobile signals in France than in the outer limits of Croydon, although I have no idea (even after studying the bills) what tariff my French SFR mobile is on or what calls and data would cost me, relying instead on a UK Three SIM contract with free calls and unlimited internet connection in both countries.
No chance of fibre optic here but I believe ours is about as good as it gets via a phone line. These have been our results for donkeys years with Free, no real problems - it’s adequate but not outstanding.
Here in Var we have terrible broadband speeds despite being within the sound of the autoroute and the TGV. The solution has been to a buy decent modern smartphone (the Huawei P9 Lite works well) and use Free on their €19 a month package and simply run the computer internet link through that by using the phone as a dongle. We get excellent 4G speeds and the Free package gives you 60 gig a month. We are promised Orange fibre-optic next year but in the meantime this will do very well.
Here in 15, Cantal, depending on time of day, day of week, and test site, download speed varies 6-12 Mbps. Upload is 0.6-0.8 Mbps. Our local exchange is just just 200m away, but not up to date: not even equipped for TV over ADSL.
On the mobile side, 3G is not available with all operators, and 4G is just something we read about.
We are over 6 kms from telephone exchange and have 2Mbps download over telephone. We are 6.6 kms from a 4GB (LTE) telephone mast with clear line of sight from our roof. I bought a Free Sim card with 50GB cost 19.99€ (15.99€ if you have a Freebox for your landline). I bought a Huawei B593-22 router from Amazon UK (more expensive on Amazon FR). I bought 2 Poynting LPDA-A0020-V2 antennae. Fixed the antennae on the TV aerial support mast attached to the chimney. Have very good download circa 94Mbps and upload 43Mbps
You can plug a telephone into the back of the wireless router and use that as your home phone.
Too much @James ! However being right at the far corner of the village we get a fraction of the speed of all the other residents. Am pretty clueless when it comes to technology, so although frustrated by the lack of speed, am frankly relieved that I can get some internet contact and am nervous of rocking the boat. Would love to change providers (from Orange broadband and Sosh mobile, which incidentally is the lack of signal I was referring to) but I expect it would be the same whoever I used. If anyone knows differently and could suggest something foolproof that a dummy like me could organise, I’d be forever grateful!
Sorry about late reply, we left for a month in UK from the 20th.
