Hi all hoping to find some advice and guidance on the best internet provider from personal experience in France.
I am hopefully taking ownership of my home in a rural location to the South of Limoges France at the end of May.
I have checked and I can have fiber to the house so happy with that.
At present I have been looking at various sites that compare packages and then looked at the company sites, so I wanted to check here what the actual service and experience people are getting.
My options are:
Orange
Free
Bouygues
SFR
SOSH
All offer good speeds but the prices vary a lot.
Orange seem to offer a great deal with 2 months free then 25 euros per month then 45 euros per month after 6 months, but most packages offer TV as well which I dont really need
Bouygues seem to offer a good speed and good price with no increase after a fixed period.
The others I have no experience of except SFR who my mobile switches over to when I am in France and I never have a problem with that service.
Some website I look at say you have to have a landline to get internet but I was hoping not to have a phone line as I never use them and use my mobile for everything I need.
So anyone who has anything they can share to help me pick a good provider would be appreciated,
Although Orange is not the cheapest, one advantage of Orange is that the infrastructure and your connection / box etc all are part of the same enterprise. We know of friends who have struggled to get repairs done / faults fixed when it’s two providers, because they can both blame each other.
So we stick with Orange.
In our village we can’t access all providers, so check that.
We were Orange, and then moved to SOSH which is cheaper. But SOSH customer service is just a website, which is fine until something goes wrong. So we moved back to Orange.
We started out with Wanadoo by Orange, they kept putting their prices up and up so changed to SFR and was happy with them for several years until they did the same thing as they pleased so changed to FREE andhave beenwith them for over eight years now on a fixed monthly charge and they have never increased it.When the house was finished and fibre installed, they dealt with Orange the owners and SFR for us to get it all sorted at no charge. When I needed a new control box for the TV set, they sent one and it arrived express post within three days and free!
Not always. Ours is not, and there are a growing number of rural areas that Orange refuse to service with fibre so municipalities have to do it themselves.
RED, the budget arm of SFR are currently offering 1 Gb symmetric fibre for €19.99 per month with no increase after a fixed period and a monthly contract. It also includes a telephone line. As for the telephone, if you have a fibre connection, you don’t have a physical copper telephone line at all and the telephone function is done by the fibre box , it’s an IP phone line.
Edit: I’ve been with RED for six years and never had an issue. The box was fried one time by lightening but was replaced promptly.
SOSH, as previously stated, are Orange’s cheaper online only service.
Cannot fault them really, easy to contact (online only, which is good if your French is not the best, copy and paste from translator) and always quick when needed. If your box breaks down they send a replacement which arrives the next day.
We have had Orange ever since landing here starting with our first landline and then internet. Never had a problem that couldn’t be fixed and always turned up on time. Not had any experience with the others apart from SFR with some sort of cheap phone deal but which was difficult to get out of.
Thank you all for the quick replies and sharing your experiences with me.
I have checked an all the ones I mentioned are available at the property so I am lucky in that part.
I will check through the packages on offer and see which will be best for me. The prices are cheaper than in the UK so no matter which I go with it will be cheaper and I hope better than Virgin Media
Then test mobile signal strength (assuming this is in what you want) yourself at the location, manually selecting one by one each French network your UK roaming phone can see.
For sure there will be differences in signal strength. Check upload speed is not significantly lower than download speed - at some times network sending to you (download) is really fast but any submit you do on website (upload) doesn’t get picked up by the network as fast or is very slow in doing.
Do these tests ideally on a Monday to Thursday at peak office (city) hours eg 10-11.30am - in case networks are taking capacity out of rural and favouring cities then. Also check Saturday afternoons or whenever neighbours might download films or videos (after long experience, that’s the time here) that could suck up locslly available network capacity if restricted.
Just what I’d test now having had to switch networks often over the years when they stopped performing. Above is based on mobile but same tests probably apply for broadband.
Thank you I did test my mobile phone and I was getting a good signal on 4 available providers that I recognised so mobile phone is good.
I am back over in a few weeks to check some final things at the house and look at a few others in the area so I will knock on a few of my neighbors doors I know one family is from the UK and most of the others talk a little English as my French is not that good yet
The price is great, and I haven’t had too many issues with the connection. I also ditched the landline and just use my mobile, so you should be good there.
We’ve stuck with Orange mainly because they have a local store and one can do F2F stuff if there’s a big problem.
Recently a car caught fire in the next village and took out the fibre for the whole commune for several weeks. Fortunately we were able to pop into the local Orange shop and borrow a temporary wi-fi box that kept us connected.
I use the internet extensively to WFH so we have Orange for that, in case I ever need to speak to a person face to face. But our mobile phones are both with Sosh. Have had very few problems in 5 years.
