Broadband in France

[pgh13]

I'm tempted to get connected at our place in France so I could spend more time there 'working.' All the various offerings seem to be prIced at around €30 pm, which seems a lot when I'm only thinking of maybe 8 - 10 weeks over there. I see SFR offer an ADSL only at €14.90 but then you need a working phone line rental on their router which looks suspiciously like it's heading towards the 30 figure again. Mobile broadband looks tempting but I'm not sure how good coverage is where I am and I'm wary of costs. Any of the French contingent care to share experiences? Thanks

 

[PaulR]

One factor that influences cost and speed is whether your exchange is "dégroupé" or not. Dégroupage is the equivalent of LLU (local loop unbundling) in the UK. What this means is that the company you take your ADSL from also provides the phone service over their own equipment at the exchange and you no longer pay line rental to BT (or France Télécom).

This makes the overall package cheaper and also faster as you can then use ADSL2+. In my French gaff I'm about 4Km from the exchange and when we used to use dial-up the best I used to get was 40kbps. The phone quality was pretty awful too at times. When I finally decided to go for ADSL I priced up a separate ADSL and standard phone from FT and it was only about a euro or so more to get both as a package from the same supplier (Neuf Telecom in my case, which is now SFR).

I currently pay 34.90€ a month and this would go down to 29.90€ when (if!) my exchange ever goes dégroupé. If I had gone down the route of a seprate ADSL service that would have been 19.90€ a month on top of my line rental to FT. The big advantage as far I am concerned is unlimited phone calls to UK landlines.

As I said I'm with SFR _http://adsl.sfr.fr/toutes-nos-offres/?sfrintid=hpadsl_offres but there many other companies offering ADSL. There are minor differences in the number of countries covered and phone lines. For instance with SFR I plug my standard phone into the modem and my calls are sent voip. I think that Alice gives you a second phone number but it's a chargeable number to telephone.

As far as 3G goes, I don't have any experience at all I'm afraid.

 

[sonnetpete]

Just to confirm what Paul has said. I've lived over here full time for nearly nine years. I have had broadband from Orange for the last two or three years and the price and deal is broadly similar to Paul's experience. I live almost 5Km from my exchange which is not 'degroupee' yet, or likely to be anytime soon. My download speed is roughly 1Mb and whilst that seems slow compared to the UK, it's fast for here!!

You could always look at _http://www.degrouptest.com/ and check out the offers available by inputting your French telephone number.

I too have no experience of 3G. A company got as far as installing some antennas on the water tower about 4 or 5 Km away, but was taken over half way through and they never completed the project. Not sure I could pick up a signal here anyway, mobile coverage is patchy insofar as I can get three different networks depending on where in the house I stand, with varying levels of signal strength, though if I walk halfway up the drive (50 metres) I can get a pretty good signal! Not really practical with a laptop though!!

 

[Low Profile]

It might be worth looking into Wimax.

 

[Channel Hopper]

Fitting a mobile mast and repeater on your chateau may be the answer.

 

[PaulR]

A slight clarification on dégroupage. There is full and partial. Full is cheaper. Partial is dearer because, although you only pay one bill for everything, your ISP pays FT rental for the line. It's only full dégroupage that permits ADSL2+.