When I switched from Free to Orange, my speed doubled.
we changed from Alice, and previously club Internet who both maxed out at around 2mbs, to OVH. The speed we now get is 5.3mbs, on the same FT infrastructure, but using ADSL2+. Worth a try I feel.
Gosh Tony, thanks for that. We had a direct hit via the phone line here in December and it blew the box on the telephone poles, and our sockets... and exploded my phone next to me. I did not hear the thunderstorm coming at all. It just hit! I had to pluck pieces of the phone from the ceiling. Was sooooo lucky not to get hit myself, or worse.
I am already in a habit of unplugging everything which is a royal pain, to say the least. And not really always feasible when going for a day out. (freezers, fridges) etc. He have surge protectors but nothing will protect you from a blast like that....
I guess, the solution is NOT to need the internet too much :), have a generator and plenty of candles, torches and wellies :)
Hi Robert, satellite is not good as I would need to be able to use Skype conference calling and with the latency it would be like pulling teeth! And I know the joys of having power interruptions. They are very frequent in my current neck of the woods. Trees keep falling on the power lines... The joys!
STILL not wanting to live in a town though.
Thank you!
hmmmm similar to the BT situation here then. Thank you!
at least there are some good ones around (bottles that is!). Thank you!
‘Rural France’ is a bit of a generalisation as it depends where you are, and most of France is rural anyway. I am in South West ‘rural France’ in a small hamlet (Lot) and get 1MB download and around 0.2MB upload (with SFR) - exchange is about 3km away. I moved from a nearby town 30km away (Dordogne), still in ‘rural France’ which gave 12MB download. I believe speeds in another Lot town 12km from me are much better.
I have SFR Internet and Internet phone with free calls in France and most of the World to landlines for 30,99€ per month. But there are plenty of deals around from Orange and Free for example.
Whilst my Internet speed is not wonderful I have no problem streaming Netflix or BBC/ITV or French TV using iPad apps/laptop and/or Apple TV.
Downloading big files is not fast but tolerable and otherwise Internet and email is OK.
The only thing you can do is check with estate agents or property sellers when you are looking.
By the by: I would recommend in due course you take a look at Unlocator.com which for about 50€ per year gives you DNS numbers (the site explains) which hides your location from restricted national TV services if you want to use UK TV services on line or Netflix’s UK or USA library when you come to France. This is not a VPN service so you lose no bandwidth.
You may find satellite reception of UK TV non-available or patchy as you go South of a line drawn West to East from Bordeaux, but I now do not use my satellite as I can get UK and French services via the Internet with my meagre bandwidth.
I am planning a move to that nearby town and will not bother with satellite.
Bonne chance with your property search and move.
Thanks Tony, that is very useful information indeed!
Sarah, I agree the speeds vary greatly within a small areas. At our Vet (North Dordogne) I get 12mbps, I am 800 metres away and get 8.6 mbps. Steve refers a site where you plug in your telephone number and it gives you potential speeds. When I use that site it indicates 12mbps, but I know I only actually get 8.6, using this link, as it tests it in real time www.speedtest.net/. The site is called Ookla.
So before we bought our house, we took our tablet to each house, and used the Ookla app to test the speed, that is of course if the house was occupied and had a internet connection.
Sarah wrote: " Just give them a road and town and for me, their information has always been spot on."
That's sadly not always the case; you do also need to give them the house number, for example. My friend who is 7 km from the telephone exchange has like I said less than 1 meg, whereas his neighbours only ½ mile away have about 4 meg. Others in the same road have nothing at all, while others have a half decent speed.
Of course, distance from telephone exchange is only one factor; what really matters is how far you are from the nearest splitter cabinet — that "last mile" in copper. The placement of these cabinets can be fairly arbitrary, according to where the fibre optic backbone passes. We're lucky here, as we are close to the motorway, and the fibre backbone is laid along that; so all our villages just off the motorway have a good fibre connection, meaning that the service for a narrow strip down the motorway corridor is disproptionately good!
Change of speed with operator
It might be coincidental, but 2 meg is the first price break for speeds with Orange (or was) — so it is conceivable that your speed was only being restricted by the option you had chosen — and that's why it got better when you changed operators to another option.
This isn't quite as daft as it sounds: when I had a slow line, Orange advised me to go for the cheaper subscription, as it wasn't worth paying for extra bandwiidth I couldn't actually get; BUT when they upgraded the line, they never suggested I might want to upgrade my subscription to go with, and I might never have found out if out of idel curiosity one day I hadn't checked my line again using degroup test, and discovered I had for some time been eligible for a higher bandwidth!
Once you have broadband, it's also worth running an actual speed test; I don't find mine varies very much, but did one day notice it was slower than usual — sure enough, it had dropped by well over 50%! A quick call to Orange and they got a technician out, and sure enough, there was a line fault just up the road.
We live in Orne and previously in a rural converted farmhouse with a couple of neighbours and about 3km from a small town and 12 KM from a relatively larger town (but not city) we had only 2MB and bad at that. Then we moved and we are now without neighbours, surrounded by farmland and although close to a small town again it is much smaller and we are still 12 KM from that other larger town but we get an excellent and very reliable 17MB from Orange! And all ADSL. I have a friend who lives in a similar setting, though 28Km from me and they live in an area a little bit more hilly and she barely gets a reliable landline and no internet at all. She tried it and gave up after not wanting to pay for getting nothing at all! Satellite will be her only option.
Once you narrow the area down you can always check with France Telecom (Orange) for coverage and speed. Just give them a road and town and for me, their information has always been spot on.
We are moving to France in July and have arranged sat. broadband and phone as we want to be in a rural area. This is our choice. We come from a rural area in mid wales and broadband here has been terrible - until now when fibre optic is now being installed everywhere. This has certainly not influenced our decision on where to live. We run an international children's charity and depend upon skype to keep in contact (free) with our overseas trustees, so very important to us, hence the satellite decision. It will be a lot cheaper than SKY which is the only service available to us (prior to fibre optic) and costs a lot more than the sat. installation and maintenance will be. One hefty expense however, is the cost of purchasing a satellite phone (Wow?) not sure I understand why this is so costly, at least this is cheaper in France than buying it advance in the UK!!
Must thank the satellite companies for their help, guidance and advice.
We live in a village in Hautes-Pyrenées (65) near a small spa town called Bagnères-de-Bigorre. We are currently getting speeds of around 4.5 mbs. We used to get around 1.5/2.00 from Orange but switched to Free recently and for reasons I don't understand immediately got much better speeds. As far as I know there has been not change to the infrastructure. Even the Orange speed was far better than we got in the UK in rural Norfolk. Also, we get good mobile reception with 3g and in Bagnères there is 4g.
Another important factor is thunderstorms and lightning damage.
Over here, large stretches of the electricity lines and virtually all phone lines are overhead, and severe thunderstorms are frequent in many areas; so lightning strikes are common, and anything connected to your power lines or, worse still, between the power lines and the phone lines is extremely vulnerable to getting zapped.
It's all very well to disconnect everything every time storms are forecast — but out of precaution, you could find yourself having it all unplugged for hours on end; and what happens if a storm blows up while you're out shopping — or even back in the UK? You really do need to develop a very rigorous habit of unplugging everything; I got so fed up with answering machines blowing up, I started to use the voice messaging service offered by France Telecom (now Orange) — at least that way my messages can be recoded even with everything unplugged at my end, and I can even listen to my messages from my mobile or from another country!
So depending on your pattern of movements, the satellite option may offer that extra advantage — of course the receiver box is still vulnerable, but not quite as much so as a landline-connected router (the greatest vulnerability is for equipment that is connected to BOTH the power lines AND the phone lines)
Do be wary though, as I've heard the satellite systems may not perform quite as well as they purport to! In particular, if the reception is anything like my satellite TV reception, it often gets blocked by heavy cloud / snow clouds, etc.
If I were internet dependant I would definitely be going the satellite/generator route. Not just the speed but the frequency of breakdowns. I'm not sure if most of France is as unreliable as where I am in the Charente. We frequently get electrical outages, luckily, not normally for too long. Just a little wind seems to bring ours down. I think EDF are planning to upgrade something soon? I'm hoping this is going to help.
Good luck with your quest....
We are 7km to our nearest village of less than 1000 people and get a good steady 2m from orange/ft. We tried the other providers as they were cheaper but the service was appalling so we moved to orange as they provide the underlying network and all of a sudden we had good connection and a clear telephone line!
Here in North Charente we get around 1.8 Mbs (FT suggest a speed of up to 2 Mbs so we are near the upper limit). However the speed can drop dramatically especially at weekends. It’s not too much of a pain but if you relied on downloading (or uploading) large amounts of data you may be driven to the bottle!
Steve already mentioned Degroup test for checking in advance the likely availability; if you can't get hold of a landline number (even if the line is defunct) for a near neighbour (and this is information I've had great difficulty wheedling out of estate agents!), then a fallback position is to use the readily available number for the mairie of the commune where you are looking — BUT do be warned that due to geographical considerations, this MAY not be terribly valid; at best, it might give you an idea of the max. possible speed you might expect — of course, it depens how far the particular house is from the actual Mairie!
With France Telecom, I had a very poor speed dial-up line, they said we wouldn't get an improvement unless I could get 10 neighbours together to share the cost of a new splitter; but they did eventually get round to installing a new splitter cabinet, which improved the situation a bit.
Where I am now, I am only 500 yds from the Post Office (traditionally, this is where the splitter will be located) and so i currently get around 16 meg!
Wi-fiMAx is available in some areas, often provided by the council; if you do have to resort to satellite, be aware that different départements have different policies, and some of them will give quite generous grants towards the purchase and installation of the receiving kit. Some départements are more progressive than others about pushing FT to install fibre.
It's certainly worth asking advice from your local Mairie, who should be in a position to give you at least some basic info, and possibly put you in touch with the local computer services shop, who may be able to give you more detailed advice. A friend of mine lives 7 km from the main telephone exchange in his nearest (quite big) town, and he can't even get 1 meg! He's doing his nut and regrets having bought the house (but he did so before he even knew what broadband was!); but one of the satellite solutions looks like it will do for his needs, as he does a lot of downloading overnight, when many of them offer unlimited bandwith use.
We were told our internet here would be slow in a village in 24 but we get 22mb/s, so bad. Our house is right next door to the Orange exchange though, so I don't know if that helps?