My experience with Broadband in France

rom1

I moved to France a short while ago. I am know living in an old building in the city center of Nice. This post is just to give you an idea of what is available in terms of Broadband internet accross the Channel.

I opened a France Telecom phone line and few weeks later applied for internet broadband with the operator Free.

I got my modem, or shall I say set-top-box (property of the operator) after a week and got it working minutes after. The package looks like this:
- There was *no* connection fee
- I have around 9Mb/s downlink (depending on the line up to 20Mb/s).
- I use the ethernet connection but USB is also available and all cables are supplied. I just had to plug-in the cable and was online...
- There is *no* cap.
- There are more than 80 TV channels available through the modem peritel out and it works flawlessly. A remote control is supplied.
- I have a new phone line (VoIP obvisously!) which provides me a with a new phone number which is independent from the national operator one, with unlimited free phone calls to French landlines. I can be called for the price of a local call at this number
- Cancellation fees: EUR96 minus EUR3 per month i.e. EUR0 after three years.
- And all this for... EUR29.99 per month.

(see http://www.freebox.fr)

OfflerCrocGod

rom1 wrote:

- I have around 9Mb/s downlink (depending on the line up to 20Mb/s).
...
- There is *no* cap.
- There are more than 80 TV channels available through the modem peritel out and it works flawlessly. A remote control is supplied.
- I have a new phone line (VoIP obvisously!) which provides me a with a new phone number which is independent from the national operator one, with unlimited free phone calls to French landlines. I can be called for the price of a local call at this number
- Cancellation fees: EUR96 minus EUR3 per month i.e. EUR0 after three years.
- And all this for... EUR29.99 per month.

Mother of Sweet JESUS :eek: :eek: That is simply amazing! How can there be no cap? What's upload like?

right lads, off to france!

AdMMM

That is nice!

rom1

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

What's upload like?

Currently, TV on:

(download)
File size 2,39 Mo
Duration 6.979s
2,74 Mbit/s (351,02 ko/s)

(upload)
File size 306,21 ko
Durée 10s
244,9 kbit/s (30,61 ko/s)

netwhizkid

Stop making me jealous, man this country sucks, every thing here is hyper expensive, it never stops raining, and i can't get broadband where i live. Oh but i am looking forward to using my vote for the first time ever to throw out those fianna failure + regressive undemocrat traitors from the dail.

thats it i'm off to france,

Regards netwhizkid

jm2k

AFAIK the max from a freebox line is 20Mb down / 1Mb up! ...theres a few other operators like Neuf and Cegetel which have similar offerings. If you dont want the TV and phone service, you can get 20Mb access for €14.90pm from Cegetel. These offers are mainly thanks to unbundling, anyone at comreg listening?

BrianD

... and a large population.

OfflerCrocGod

BrianD wrote:

... and a large population.

and competition.

netwhizkid

Originally Posted by OfflerCrocGod
and competition.

Its competition that has the Irish Telecoms market f*cked up, were too much of a small country for it to work, anyone remember the eighties when the Irish Government invested millions into automating the exchanges and creating a direct dial service through Telecom Eireann, If Telecom still had their monopoly we have one hundred % broadband coverage and it would be cheaper, don't give me that competition works b*ll****, as it dosent, it might save a few stinges a few cents a min on their calls to "auntie" in america, their is very little, if any difference between national & local call rates between the other blood suckers and Eircom, Eircom are being blackguarded highly, They had plans in the mid nineties to roll out the "newly emerging" adsl and cable tv to compete with sky, Line rental was to be cut to IR£10 per two monthly bill, it now cost nearly €50 because of "the wonders of competition" . Eircom can't maintain their vast network on just line rental, its like the railways in britain they privatised the running of the trains it now costs network rail the uk rail maintance company dependant on government subsidys nearly £20billion sterling a year and not a brown copper income from the services. Thsi government are the greatest shower of well lets let that up to your imagination, a strike in the Uk is to be held calling for the Re-nationalisation of the countries railways.

Competition dosen't work and never will, all it does is make a few rats like Mick o leary super rich at the expense of consumers and more importantly the service.

Eircom are constantly getting bad press it's not their fault you must remeber their a private company not state owned thanks to traitor o rourke, they actually needn't rollout any broadband if they didn't want to. And with comreg planning to split them in two forget it, in twenty years time their will be no telphone network here unless Eircom are Re-nationalised.

Regards netwhizkid

aare

As a rural dial up user who may contemplate many more years of dialling I have been thinking of this.

Just WHAT ARE the technical problems preventing Eircom from offering this kind of facility?

For one thing, on average, our telephone lines, particularly in rural areas, are far newer than the lines in Nice...

I wonder what would happen if the Telecoms were forced to provide and subsidise satellite and fixed wireless offerings (which may be available, but are hardly affordable, particularly installation) to the same rate as ADSL in areas where they cannot yet provide ADSL?

I wonder how much more quickly ADSL coverage would start to rack up? Just what does converting an exchange involve, physically?

What does it actually cost?

Is a government subsidy to achieve this totally out of the question? Before we fall behind the rest of the world entirely...cos yeah, the Celtic Tiger often has to Dial in on speeds that rarely, if ever exceed 40kbps...and that CANNOT impress.

At least there should be a national unlimited flat rate for anyone who cannot get broadband. To go on charging far more for dial in (if you go over the hours, as many who use the internet for work and education do) than for ADSL in areas where ADSL is not available is just unfair.

I'm asking these question because I do not know the answers.

AARRRGH

aare wrote:

Just WHAT ARE the technical problems preventing Eircom from offering this kind of facility?

It's not a technical problem. It's economics. Eircom are not communists, they're capitalists.

As a previous poster said, if Eircom were still a state company you would have broadband by now. Unfortunately for you, Eircom are now answerable to their shareholders, and the shareholders certainly do not want to lose money by being kind and considerate to people who do not live in high population areas.

SkepticOne

There are several reasons why Ireland is behind other countries.

1. Legal protection of the Telecom Eireann monopoly until 1998; other EU countries introduced competition much earlier with the exception of Greece which opened up its market in 2000 and consequently even worse than Ireland for broadband provision and uptake.

2. Allowing Telecom Eireann (along with RTE) to purchase Cablelink (the largest cable television company) in the early 90s thereby preventing investment in the cable network and potential competition in telecoms. We suffer the result of this lack of cable competition to this day.

3. The removal of the flat-rate local call charge. In the early 90's you could stay on the line for a local call for as long as you liked. This would have made the internet far more popular than it is today as people would have had to watch the clock as they read web pages. Instead the government greedy for revenue introduced per-minute charging on local calls just as online services were begining to become popular in other countries.

4. Due to late privatisation, Ireland did not benefit from the tech-boom of the late nineties where companies were crawling over eachother to provide services.

5. ComReg.

6. The attitude among many people that Eircom should provide broadband for everyone. Paradoxically, this works against them actually getting broadband.

7. A government that talks big but does not act.

8. The belief that significant competition exists whereas many companies are simply rebadging Eircom services and the monopoly remains intact.

None of these reasons alone are sufficient to account for Ireland's problems but together they add up to a big problem.

Davidth88

aare wrote:

As a rural dial up user who may contemplate many more years of dialling I have been thinking of this.

Just WHAT ARE the technical problems preventing Eircom from offering this kind of facility?





I wonder how much more quickly ADSL coverage would start to rack up? Just what does converting an exchange involve, physically?

What does it actually cost?

.

As a person involved in rolling out xDSL throughout Europe and Africa I can answer sone of the technical questions

What is involved... bascially you have to add in 2 extra pieces of equipment , a DSLAM and a splitter . The splitter splits off the POTS ( telephone ) off and this then connects to the conventional exchange. The DSLAM is the beast that actually allows you to use the extra bandwidth on the line for data. This then connects to the internet via ethernet or in older cases via ATM.

There are technical constraints , you mention you are a rural user , this could mean you are more than 5km from you exchange in which case the traditional ADSL just wouldn't work . Also the line has to be of a reasonable quality , if you are using a piece of copper put there in the 60's you could be in trouble .

There are small DSLAMs available that a telco could put in a green box at the end of the road , but that would mean supplying power to these boxes etc not a small job.

There is an advance in ADSL standards now , I have seen download speeds of 48Mb available on the latest ( not yet fully ratified ) standard ADSL2++

I hope this answers more questions than it raises