Infuriating service from Free.fr

Comment by James Kearney 22 hours agoDelete Comment


I have a question about Internet line speed. Having worked for a telephone company and in International télécommunications, I know that the line speed can be attenuated by the wire resistance from the Central Office to the house. My CO is 7 km away. I am a Free.fr Freebox user. Their ads say we can have 20 mb of line speed but at best we get 6 mb. Complaints to Free get tripe and excuses that the line speed is within "norms for the line". I wanted a solution and got excuses. Is there anything I can do to improve the line speed? I'm tempted to go back to SRF who owns the lines on the idea they might be able to give us better performance. I also suspect that Free is using bandwith splitting to steal some of that 20 mb they promised. Any ideas welcome.


Go here and obtain the technical minutiae for your local relay. It will also tell you how much attenuation you have on your line and the diameter of the copper wire segments leading from the relay to your house. Basically, at 7km from the relay, you'd be pretty lucky to get anything better than 2-3Mb bitrate. I live in a village only 3km from the local relay, but have 42db signal loss over 6/10 mm and 4/10 mm cables. There is no way that FranceTelecom are going to replace the cables anytime soon, and the more subscribers that come on line closer to the relay, the worse the situation gets. Providers are only obliged to supply a bandrate within the constraints of the physical installation. The site link I've indicated also gives you the operational ranges for each type of broadband offer, and you will notice that they can vary quite significantly.