Information from Rootstock ads:
The French government is heading for 100% total internet coverage in 7 years time. To make the process transparent, it has created the Observatoire France Tres Haut Debit.
This Observatoire offers an interactive map on their website which allows you to see what internet connection is available in your commune as well as what upgrades are planned in the next 12-18 months.
Probably needs to be taken with a pinch of salt!
http://observatoire.francethd.fr/
I live in Tarbes and London. Tarbes I use Free and it is brilliant, in London I use BT which is less brilliant but does the job. BT is so much more expensive than Free in Tarbes. Can not fault French internet and I also have TV.
Thanks Tony et al, will check links out…
So…degrouptest says!
1)
Longeur de ligne 156 mtrs, about right, if its the green box I can see down the road from my front door!
2)
" in theory easily 2.34db"
3)
Debit max ADSL 19.99 mbps
debit max VDSL 97.4
have forgotten what VDSL is. i dont watch tv on computer or tablet, just the occasional news item video or You Tube.
I must admit, its extremely quick going from one website link to next! So seems I’m in luck then!
0.97 download. 0.43 upload. Absolutely pitiful!! Our 16 year old autistic grandson whose social life is on the internet refuses to come for holidays with the family because of it!! Heartbreaking !!!
Seems correct for us. We get a solid 40meg connection using vdsl
Given we live in an isolated farmhouse, which has ADSL care of our local viticulteur who sued France Telecom, we show up as a single blob on the map with precisely the right colour code.
So whilst I cannot speak for anyone else, our bit of the map is 100%
Peter S
It says zero wimax in my area, yet I've had wimax for years, and generally (now) it's fast and quite reliable.
There are dozens of speed tests available, plenty of free ones. Rather than say X, Y or Z is best, I would recommend using a number of them and making samples one after the other, say three speed tests, then if they match you know, otherwise work out an average if there are not enormous discrepancies but if there are big differences do it again. I have been down as low as 1.31Mb/sec a few weeks ago, when I spoke to Orange they told me that was impossible, so I explained I had made four speed tests, told them which ones and then left it an hour then tried two again. That speed was reasonable. So then the 'technician' said that he had just been looking at the plan of the area and saw that we are on an old copper line. I said that three new phone lines have been added over the last year and a bit with a fourth soon and asked what difference that might make. He did a big 'Ahhhh!' and said that we probably need our line updated. However he saw nothing to indicate it was going to be soon. I told him that the departmental plan of two years ago left our 'corner' of this commune that was low down the list anyway, was outside of the then 12 years projection. His answer was to contact the people responsible in the department rather than Orange.
At present I have around 3Mb/sec on average, some friends who also live in the sticks but happen to be spitting distance from where fibre optic lines were laid for the sakes of several businesses in the area, they were upgraded and have something like 12Mb/sec. We pay the same of course.
Paul Smith that tells me that OVH will give me 17 Mbps download as opposed to 2 Mbps Orange which is actually what I get (but they claim 20)- I will investigate further after all our guests have gone home and our daughter is back at school!
We live in the Ariege, and for a long while we had a download speed of around 1.8-2 megs MAX with club internet, then Alice / Free. Our neighbours had similar speeds with Free and Orange. Few improvements here are to be found on the Observatory.
I switched to OVH a couple of years ago and I now have a speed of 5.5 megs.
This is with ADSL2+. www.OVH.net for eligibility. They are no better or worse than others from the customer service point of view, and we've had a couple of outages lasting a day or so at the most, but when Orange slowed down my OVH access one weekend to the same speeds as we had previously, a call to OVH got it sorted on the Monday. No frills, but with free calls to French & US mobiles, and most international landlines, and 30 euros a month, and the possibility of two landline numbers.
I have been checking in with the http://www.degrouptest.com/ website every so often for the last 6 years or so & registered with them to inform me of any changes here, in Saint Laurent de Cerdans. Nothing has changed. If we get degroupage here the subscription will become cheaper.
you can do a speed test here http://www.speedtest.net and it will tell you what your speeds are. The VPN is more likely to be your e-mail or an application you use to watch UK programmes from France.
Don't forget, though, that the granularity of this data will be too coarse (at commune level) to be much help predicting the real speed of your actual installation, which irrespective of commune, almost certainly depends on that famous 'last mile' of copper cable between you and the telephone exchange. A friend of mine lives about 2 km from a fibre-optic splitter box, yet suffers appalling speed because (for historical reasons) his phone line connection takes a different and much longer route to a telephone exchange 7 km away!
Ah but Martin — that just means you're only PAYING for that speed! Higher speed might possibly be available.
You would do well to use the www;degrouptest.com website to find out (from your fixed line number and postal address) what theoretical speed you OUGHT to be able to have; it may well be that your line has been improved, and by changing your subscription to one with a higher speed, you could benefit from the little bit extra that IS available.
There are several speed tests available, Orange even has their own special utility, but I nomrally use the one on the degrouptest website, which is very useful for comparison purposes, and generally seems to give fairly repeatable results.
http://www.degrouptest.com/test-debit.php
The site also allows you to do an assessment of (roughly) what speed you ought to get, based on your landline phone number and address. Sadly, speeds vary wildly due to the 'last mile' of copper cable; the major factor is always going to be how far you are from the telephone exchange (originally) or the local splitter box (more recently).
I might not have any left by then Brian 
don’t know what I’m getting currently Mbits here and don’t know how to find out - it’s Orange of course! and the dreaded Safari on iPad. on general settings it says VPN NOT CONNECTED, I assumed the VPN was Orange, or is it me as the user on a secure (I hope) wifi via Livebox?
Yet another disparity with reality. I won't hold my breath.
thanks for Link Neil, from what I can mKe out, in 12-18 months our commune will have 82.3% coverage at 8-30 Mbits. the nearest town will have 100% 30-100Mbits, or does have, forgot to look at that bit!
So is mine.
Observatoire France Très Haut Débit claim we have 3-8 Mb/sec whilst my ISP says >
Raccordée actuellement en offre : IP/ADSL 2432 Kbits ( =2.4Mb/sec )
Our speed is well short of what it is meant to be!