I recently upgraded to fibre internet in my rural French home, expecting a huge speed boost. My ISP advertises speeds of up to 1Gbps; but I rarely get over 100Mbps, and sometimes it drops even lower during peak hours.
Iâve tested my connection using different speed test sites; tried a wired Ethernet connection, and even restarted my router multiple timesâyet the issue persists.
Could this be due to network congestion, ISP throttling, or infrastructure limitations? Iâve read that in some rural areas, fibre connections might still rely on older copper lines (FTTC instead of FTTH), which could slow things down.
Is there a way to check whether my connection is full fibre (FTTH) or a mixed setup (FTTC)? Also, do French ISPs have hidden âfair usage policiesâ that limit speeds during certain hours?
Has anyone else in rural France experienced this issue?
What troubleshooting steps have helped improve your speeds? Any advice / ISP recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
Itâs frustrating not to get the advertised speeds, but 100Mbs is still pretty good! I am on 70Mbps here in Sud-Angleterre (via fibre-to-the-cabinet and then copper for the last 150m) and I can stream 4K TV no problem.
If you have multiple users wanting to do that all at once then perhaps you might need more âoomphâ.
I donât know if itâs possible to find out what route your connection takes - maybe someone else here will know. If the speed drops in peak hours (mine doesnât) then it may be that your connection being shared with too many other households is the reason.
100Mbps is slightly suspicious as it is the same as the older 100 base-T Ethernet standard.
Make sure all your Ethernet connections and equipment are at least 1Gbps capable and you donât have any faulty cables (or the cheap cables sometimes included with equipment that only have two pairs connected not all four) as that can cause 1Gbps Ethernet to run at the slower speed rather than not work at all.
Optical networks do suffer contention in the âlocal loopâ and in the backhaul but youâd expect to get full speed at least some of the time if that were the problem
Good point - make sure you have Cat6 network cable. I think via the interface for the Livebox (If with Orange) I think the incoming speed at the router is shown.
It might be useful to set out how the system is setup and who the provider is. Are you connecting by WiFi and, if so, what are the distances and house construction. When you tried a cable, was it directly into the router?
Who provides your internet?
Do they supply the router?
Where does the internet supply enter your house?
Does the external cable supplying the internet plug straight into your router (or into an adapter panel near the point of entry)?
How do your computer and other devices connect to the router?
How far is the router from the television? (This matters whether your TV is connected to the network or not)
Answers to these questions may explain the problem.
Thank you for starting this thread @nemoyen and for all the contributors so far. Our village has just gone fibre - and itâs fibre to the house too - and several of us have noticed only marginal differences if that. I shall check the items so far suggested
EDIT: Just checked the Livebox - I didnât realise you could test the speeds from there. 2 Gbit down 750Mbit up
Going from ADSL to fibre was night and day for us, and the ADSL wasnât particularly slow. The problem is often between the router and the end device so, if that was difficult before then it probably still will be after the installation of fibre.
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OK, very funny @nemoyen - we normally throw users off for link abuse (tagging on a marketing link to the end of a more legitimate looking one in a way which is difficult to spot and with the intent improve search engine rankings). You even had the cheek to complain that your post had been filtered.
Your IP geolocates to India so I find it slightly difficult to think you are genuinely struggling with fibre problems in rural France.
Iâm not going to take down the thread as the discussion it engenders might be useful for others but consider this an official warning not to abuse the site.
Iâve removed the offending link - Iâll leave any other actions to @cat
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Yes, and yes. We get these issues regularly - strangely enough since all of the neighbours upstream of the distribution box from us took out fibre broadband subscriptions. Our contract says 1Gbps down and 800 Mbps up, we are actually somewhere just under 100 Mbps, which is OK for most things, but well off the promised mark.
If you are certain the problem is not with your own equipment or setup you should complain.
For GPON the downstream bandwidth on the final fibre link is 2.4Gbit/s which is contended (i.e shared between users) but if you are constantly capped at around 100Mbps something is wrong somewhere.
I confess even Iâve got caught out with 1G Ethernet running at 100Mbps because a pin wasnât connecting properly.
Iâm getting 800mb download and upload because my computer is in the same room as our livebox and plugged straight into the back of it. OH next door (the other side of a 50cm thick old stone wall) wasnât getting anything like that either with wifi or with a home network plug. I seem to remember it was only about 60-100mb. In the end we drilled a hole in the wall and fed a cat6 network cable through from his computer into the back of the livebox. He now gets the same download and upload speed as I do.
You canât really test the optical network yourself.
The aim would be to remove as much equipment as possible which is in the path - chez moi in the UK I can plug my laptop via an Ethernet cable straight into the ONT (the box that terminates the fibre) and get a network address with DHCP - so I can run a speed test there and it eliminates pretty much anything inside my network (I could still pick up a dodgy Ethernet cable, for example). I prefer iperf3 to the graphical speed test apps but they are OK if you are on Windows.
If you have a Livebox it acts as both ONT and router so there is more âin the wayâ but an Ethernet dable direct to it should be good enough.
Iâll have to play around with the setup. Even testing via Orangeâs own app showed that it was only providing just shy of 100 Mbps down and nearly the same up.
Unlike your set up, we have a ONT unit on the wall and that feeds into the Livebox (Livebox 5) via a thin, separate, glass fibre cable with corresponding connectors. If we want a Livebox 6 or 7, we would have to change our subscription to a much more expensive one.
How strange? Over the years weâve had times when our livebox has packed in - eg thunderstorms - and OH has gone to the shop and had the box replaced, always with the latest Our subscription has never changed because we have a more up to date livebox.
Was that when running the test on the Livebox itself?
Iâve no longer got access to a Livebox but I seem to recall that within the app you can run a test from your phone (useful for testing the wi-fi network) but also one thatâs just testing the speed from the Livebox tu the internet.
