Improving internet speed

At the moment, but it will have fibre added & eventually, the copper will be removed.

Depending on local circumstances your fibre may not arrive from the same location as your current copper wire.

You fibre connection will be FTTH (Fibre To The Home), so no length/speed issues.

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You might find that things are not quite the same, even if it is “the same ole cable” to the house.

When we bought our house I was aware xDSL speeds were terrible (and only 3G as an alternative and not even a strong signal at that) - the phone line ran about 5km to the exchange so speeds would have been 1-3Mb/s at best, possibly less.

When fibre was brought to the village about three months later it *also* brought a new VDSL node (also capable of ADSL) which meant that as far as xDSL was concerned the length of the phone line fell from ~5km to ~300m

I’m pretty sure there was also the offer of “full fibre” at the same time but I’m guessing that there was limited capacity and it has all been taken up as the only offering now is ADSL or VDSL.

You might be in a similar situation - that bringing fibre closer means an uplift to ADSL performance even if you are still on a copper “last mile”.

Its not like in the UK, where fibre can mean fibre to the cabinet (FTTC), If you are told that you are eligible for fibre, then that is always fibre to the home (FTTH) in France. There are no speed reductions for distance with copper.

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The UK telecos got into a terrible muddle with naming - they wanted to get the word “fibre” in with the VDSL offering (AKA FTTC - VDSL only reaches 5-600m from the cabinet, so you need to put equipment close to the end user).

The problem was then - what do you call FTTP to indicate that it is different - hence contortions like “full fibre”.

I think you mean

“There are no speed reductions for distance as with with copper.”

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Yup. Fingers not working again :slightly_smiling_face:

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In my case, they ran fibre cables overhead across the existing twisted pair copper cable poles, all the way from the main road out of the village to the hamlet, and then from a pole-mounted distributor head in the hamlet 300m to the house, using EDF pylons as the support (which is where the telephone lines were already in place). We are literally at the end of the line. We were told by the subcontractors responsible for the installation that they were already being contracted by Orange to start removing the POTS infrastructure.

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We’re not full-time in our house for another year but I had heard tales of rural fibre cabinets getting to full capacity pretty quickly so jumped at it as soon as it became available.
300Mbps for €20 with Sosh for the first year so good enough for me.

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Thanks for the nudge signed up this morning, installation in November when we’re next over so perfect (I hope).

The TV decoder malarkey that comes with a lot of these fibre offers, is this some kind of French Freeview plus subscription channels?

Yeah, pretty much. In the case of my Orange box it also allows me to use services like Netflix too. However, it’s painfully slow to use and crashes quite frequently. Hence, I almost never use it.

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The Freebox one works quite well as it’s basically an Android TV box. You can install loads of apps, other than TV, so it’s quite useful.

Be careful - “Android TV” things have a terrible reputation for being loaded with malware.

I would hope that Free would have sufficient configuration control to avoid that. <Thinks🤔>
Hmm, as you were.

After a fashion. The ISPs jumped on the chance to provide TNT rebroadcasting via the internet, initially at no cost to them. There was a bit of a hue and cry from the privately owned TV channels, most notably those of the TF1 group, as these channels had to pay for content out of their own pocket without state subsidy (paid for by advertising, later also introduced into state owned TV). An agreement was finally reached to allow the ISPs to also rebroadcast these privately owned channels over the internet, with various PPV/subscription options (UHD, Sport, etc)/
https://www.senat.fr/questions/base/2019/qSEQ190409802.html