Not necessarily. We are 100m ish from the cabinet and the people we bought off 5 years ago had about 4,5 Mbps which isn’t even ADSL1 (max 8 Mbps I think). I signed up for VDSL2 and instantly got 75 Mbps. There’s a website somewhere that tells you which properties are connected and what max speeds they get. Half of our village showed 4 to 5 Mbps about a year ago and we’ve obviously had much faster for at least 5 years. I’ll try to find it, but I’m on holiday in Southern Croatia at the mo so can’t promise.
Edit: Found it quickly, it’s arcep.fr . However it shows what a property is capable of, not what it gets. Currently our village is all 1Gbps et plus. Before, there were different speeds in different parts of the village.
We are quite literally at the end of the line - the last house with a connection to the cabinet in the village at the bottom of the hill which is 2.5 miles away. Other houses here are connected (phone not internet) to a cabinet in the village the opposite direction which is 2.1 miles away.
We are in the process of selling our house so I think we’re just going to have ride this out for now.
At 2.5 miles, your going to struggle to get much. We had an M.S in Deux Sevres that was about 4 miles from the cabinet and we could get absolutely nothing.
Ah, I see where you are coming from - yes this can happen, indeed did for me both in the UK and in France, but it is because your line got shorter!
When originally deployed ADSL was exchange based. VDSL needs much shorter lines - it only provides an increase in speed up to about 600m and really stops working on lines much linger than 1km (many more bins are allocated to upstream so on long lines the high frequency attenuation is too high for any of the downstream bins to work).
So VDSL was deployed to street cabinets relatively close to the consumer premises (that’s why it is also termed fibre to the cabinet - FTTC).
I was thinking about the situation where the termination point is the same for both ADSL and VDSL - which it is going to tend to be with recent installations.
But, sure, if you’ve have ADSL for years and VDSL has become available since you signed up for ADSL it would be worth upgrading.
This was our situation - Orange actually told the previous owner of our house that it wasn’t worth evening installing ADSL as the distance from the nearest cabinet meant they’d get 50kbps tops.
Fixed by a WIMAX (think low power microwave link) connection to the nearest water tower giving 15mbps/3mbps on a good day. The downsides were €41/m and the supplier being a small outfit and outages over the weekend often weren’t resolved until Monday morning.
Fibre arrived recently (5 years later than advertised) and we now have 800mbps/300mbps for the same monthly fee and are saving €25 by not paying Orange for a landline.
Regardless of speed if you stay with Orange, move to their SOSH service, same thing much cheaper
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Even 3.5 Mb/s is terrible.
I’m using a HomeFi router on 3 and, on a good day, I get around 200 Mb/s download.
Just checked now, and it’s showing 145.6 Mb/s download, and 48.9 Mb/s upload. Latency is around 7 ms.
Is 3 available where you are?
We have a small digital exchange (NRA if French) in our village, and it was definitely there when we bought the house. It isn’t very grand but much bigger than a roadside cabinet. It’s degroupage and supports ADSL and VDSL. There is also now a smaller structure next to it that is for fibre support. You can find your nearest on the NRA map on Ariase. Looking at the map, there are two neighbouring communes that don’t have an NRA according to the map, so ours may support them as well, but it’s difficult to tell.
As it’s close to the house, this suggests the previous owners should have got a higher speed.
As I said - the original ADSL equipment would have been back in the exchange - much further away.
Anyone ordering DSL today would connect to the cabinet even if, for some reason, they only wanted ADSL.
No, it was local. Ariase says that NRA had ADSL and VDSL DSLAMs in it. It seems as though all the small exchanges in various villages here were the same, from a few I looked at. Nearest town is 15km away which has a proper exchange building.
It will do now (I don’t think DSLAM is the current term - it sort-of went out when VDSL came in and they are called MSANs these days - Multi Service Access Node).
Does Ariase show historic data as well, that would surprise me.
15km is really too far even for a POTS line so I suspect the line ran to somewhere closer in practice and moved to the current NRA when you ordered VDSL.
Either that or there really was a problem with the line which was fixed when you upgraded.
If you are getting 3.5Mbps out of ADSL1, you might go up a bit if you switch to ADSL2 (there were some improvements in coding, error correction and frame overhead which made better use of the same bandwidth as ADSL1 and extended the reach on longer lines by up to 0.5km).
Moving to ADSL2+ (up to 24Mbps) might get you a bit more but not much. The extra d/l speed going from ADSL2 to ADSL2+ was as a result of doubling the spectrum use to 2MHz - as with satellite reception poor lines lose the higher frequency bins first so there’s no difference in practice between ADSL2 not using a bin at, say, 1.5MHz because it isn’t designed to and ADSL2+ not using the same bin because the attenuation is too high.
VDSL expands the spectrum even more to 17MHz or even 30MHz for VDSL2 (I’ll bet the telephone engineers in the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s never thought their lines would be used at frequencies higher than short wave radio).
However the signal above 2MHz drops off rapidly with distance - VDSL is better than ADSL2+ out to 600m or so, VDSL2 outperforms ADSL2+ up to about 1km from the exchange at least in theory.
That said I should be careful about grandmothers and eggs - weren’t you in telecoms 
The thing is, we live in quite a sparsely populated area, and you graph would show about 3.5 Km ish for 4.5 Mbps. There really isn’t anything of any size other than small hamlets within that area. There isn’t even another NRA that close. The closest is about 4 Km, another at 5 Km and another at about 8 Km and they’re all small villages apart from the 8 Km one which is a bigger village. I think that what was done when degroupage ADSL was installed here was deliberate and the only real way that it could be done, that is locally with backhaul via cable or later fibre. It was probably done by the local authorities just like the excellent FTTH infrastructure was here. When you have lots of small communities spread out that much in a mountainous area there really is no other way.
Yes, I was in telecoms but switched just as the very first ADSL stuff was being developed.
Edit: It could have been done via microwave link I suppose but I’ve never seen any round here. That doesn’t mean they aren’t cleverly hidden.
Edit2: the sparse population is why all our fibre infrastructure was paid for from local government and EU grant. Orange et al were not interested as it just wasn’t financially sensible for them to connect us up. So, they have to rent the lines from a company set up and owned by local government.
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I suggest you move to Star Link or 5G on Free and use yr fone as a modem. Free offers 350 gigs for €20 per month, without contract, and it’s usually better than anything Orange ADSL provides.