I’m beginning to feel like a conspiracy theorist. We have a maison secondaire in a small village in north Dordogne. We’ve been with Orange for about 10 years. Loved the ability to suspend the service when we returned to the UK but Orange scrapped that in the interests of improving customer service! We now pay €30 a month all year even when we’re not here. 50% more than I pay for 10x the speed in rural Wiltshire. But I’m a photographer so need the internet connection for the 3 months a year we spend in France.
When we arrive at the house I plug the Orange Livebox in and for about a week I get connection speeds that are vaguely usable. But after a week the connection speed plummets. For example it’s just taken 40 minutes to update seven apps on my phone. Almost no one else in the village has an internet connection so it’s nothing to do with contention ratios. It’s almost as though Orange throttles back the speed after a few days.
Every time we come over I complain to Orange about this. They send out an engineer who fiddles with the line (which for several years was lying in a ditch by the road from the nearest town but is now back on the telegraph poles) who claims to have found the problem before disappearing. Except nothing changes. And then we go through the same process next time we come out.
Is it me or do they really throttle back the speeds?
Are you on ADSL (which I assume frmo your description), VDSL or Fibre?
What connection speed does the Livebox report when things are “good”?
What connection speed does it report when they are “bad”?
It it related at all to the weather?
When recording speeds best to try to snapshot the “information” page (or equivalent on your version of theLivebox - the user interface has slight variations)
If you’re able, and the vast majority are, kick Orange into the long grass and go with someone else. At the same time, save yourself some money. If you go to ariase.com and put you details in (doesn’t work outside France I think) they will tell you who is available at your address. Another tip - if you’ve been with them for ten years, you ay be on an ADSL or VDSL line and Orange won’t have automatically moved you to a faster VDSL2/2+ line. Moving provider will do this. When we bought our house, the previous owners, with Orange got about 4.5 Mbps, when we signed up with another provider, we got 75 Mbps. It pays to switch.
I would have thought that fibre is available for you now.
We live in a hamlet of 5 houses in Dordogne and all around us fibre is now available.
Yes it will cost you slightly more but well worth it.
Looking at the coverage maps it depends how far north of his local town he is (mentioned in a previous post but I won’t repeat it here) but probably not as he’s in a bit of a hole coverage-wise.
He also appears to be in a “no fibre” area as well.
That’s the trouble half the time - it is available “all around” but not actually where I’m at
Thanks everyone. Yes we are in a fibre black hole. The fittings and cable are on the poles approaching the village but stop short. I probably could pay a lot extra to have it connected but we would be the only household to do so - would they want to connect us? Most of our neighbours don’t even have mobile phones yet!
I could use 4G, and quite often give up with the Wi-Fi and use that instead but then I very quickly run out of data on my Tesco Mobile contract.
I was just curious as to whether others had experienced this drop off in speeds (currently download is about 2 Mps) or whether I’m imagining it.
Try to get a French SIM then - which is what I’ll be doing next visit or two having thoroughly fallen out with Orange chez moi. Several available which give 300GB/month for half what you were paying to Orange Forfait mobile 300Go en septembre 2024 - Bonforfait
Pay attention to which network your Tesco SIM picks up by default and use the phone to select and compare speeds between the networks before you pick which one to go with.
Or, if you prefer to stick with a UK SIM try Popit - you can have up to 100GB/month to use when roaming as long as you bring it back to the UK and use it at least once per 6 months. The downside is that they are pricier than most other SIM deals for the same amount of data.
Thanks for the reply. Yes we’re on ADSL. I haven’t checked speeds for a while but on a good day it was about 3.5 Mps. On a bad day about 1 Mps if that. The weather doesn’t seem to affect it even though the line goes through a lot of trees on the way up from the nearest big village. There are frequently branches or fallen trees lying across the line. But today is a hot sunny day with little wind and it’s really slow.
I’ll have a look at that information page on the Livebox next time I do a speed check.
OK, so you should be about 5miles (or 8-9km) 5km from your nœud de raccordement (typically nearest large town or village) - if you are closer the line might be underperforming for some reason (or be aluminium rather than copper).
At thosespeeds you line is clearly the limiting factor - no real point Orange throttling megabit speeds when the backhaul infrastructure from just about anywhere with service will be multi gigabit.
Edit: oops, I got a bit confused between miles and km there - I live about 5km from the ADSL exchange that I used to connect to and got 3.5Mbps generally after a bit of tweaking.
Yes I’ve been thinking about the French SIM option. Mate of mine from New Zealand who has the house opposite us does that when he’s here. He generally stays for 6 months at a time.
Although what I’m going to say doesn’t help you in the short term, at some point in the not too distant future you will get fibre (OK, by 2030). The entire copper telephone network is being scrapped, & dates are set set on a commune by commune basis.
Even people with just a simple telephone will end up on fibre, but rather than a proper router they will have an interface that they can plug a standard 'phone into (but that interface will need local power to work).
At the moment, I’m using Lebara, whose advantage is that you can use all your “UK” data in the EU. They offer unlimited data for £22.50/m. Where we are, they use SFR and it’s a decent service.
I think your best bet is to swap provider when you’ve checked which would be best.
OK, so your probably on just ADSL. Your local exchange will support up to VDSL2+. Change operators. We were in the same situation and increased our speed enormously. Do you know how far you are from the nearest box ? As Billy says, for that speed max you must be a long long way away, or alternatively your just connected to a basic ADSL connection at the termination point.
It won’t be a question of being connected to a “basic ADSL connection at the termination point” because there is no form of ADSL which only offers ~3-4Mbps. In practice all ADSL line cards in use these days will be ADSL2+ capable (up to 24Mbps) and with xDSL you have to be at the upper end of whatever your current technology is capable of to gain benefit from moving to the “next one up” - as this graph shows
If you are only getting 3Mbps you would gain little from moving from ADSL2 to ADSL2+ and would lose by moving to VDSL (in practice although that graph suggests only 3km for that sort of speed I think it is a bit pessimistic about what speed is achievable at what distance).
I carefully went over the T&C of just about every operator in the UK who offers free EU roaming and most cap roaming data at 30GB, the only one that I found which is higher is popit which allows the full plan amount to be used even on the 100GB plan (which is £25/mo).
