Patrick26

Hi Everyone,

Hoping to find some urgent help on here please. We spent all last week looking at French properties and found a wonderful house which we have had an accepted offer on. However we run our business from home and having been assured that there is broadband we have been told by France telecom today that there is no broadband to the house or to the village. Our only option is to have the internet via a satellite package. We need a good broadband connection. Can anyone tell me if this system has worked well for them and how slow/fast has it been?Many thanks. Patrick

EuroTrash

If you happen to be in Brittany there is a very knowledgeable Brit who has a been installing satellite systems for absolutely ages, he's called Barty and if you google something like Barty satellite Brittany I'm sure you'll find him. Even if you're not in Brittany he'd probably be happy to answer your questions.
Hopefully other posters with personal experience will be along soon, but I detect a note of panic in your post...
Hope you get the answers you want, welcome to the forum and best of luck with setting up your business here and all the rest of the move.

graham.miln

I am sorry to hear your village does not yet get broadband. You may want to double check using La couverture ADSL en France

The Ariase site provides a list of all the French telecom exchanges and what services they support. It can be useful in confirming the information provided by Orange, aka France Telecom.

Once you know the technical name of your exchange, more information is available at https://www.free-reseau.fr/

Hopefully others will be along soon with satellite specific experience.

grannybunz

We have virtually no broadband/ or mobile telephone signal so, 18months ago installed a satellite system through a very reliable local company. We get a reasonable service, except if there is heavy rain.

However we only have so mush use permonth and to buy extra is very expensive. as we found out when a Windows update decided to install itself without warning and used up most of that month's allowance

Chris'nJulie

If it's available in your area, and from your location, try wimax, as supplied, in my case, by Ozone. Not particularly cheap, but it works, is fast, and unlimited. I also have Nordnet satellite, as a back-up. Together, they are an expensive way to get on the internet. but here, there's no other choice.

Chatter Static

Personally if I were you I would retract the offer on the house you have 7 days to retract from receiving the paperwork in the post. You can then revaluate villages based on what kind of broadband infrastructure they have. Wimax service for areas that have no wired broadband are limited plenty of rural places have reasonable broadband and fibre is being rolled out to a fair few. We are in the arse end on no where and have 20Mb haut debit and Fibre is coming to us next year.


You can shift here 1 km and go from no broadband to reasonably fast connection so all is not lost.....

Chris'nJulie

We were told that broadband was coming next year - in 2006.

Having got wimax, and the original problems ironed out, and also satellite, I removed the land-line link completely three years ago, and saved the rental.

EuroTrash

Broadband was a deal breaker for me. I also work from home and I wouldn't have bought anywhere where I couldn't have broadband.

Chatter Static

Me too..... being a Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent engineer.

petitefrancaise

I'd pull out of the deal.

Peter219

Hi
We inherited satellite broadband when we brought here in Lot et Garonne. Generally, download speed varies between slow and so slow as to be unusable. A phase of fast upload time 2 weeks ago took us by surprise, uploaded all my wife’s pictures, used all our monthly 40 gb allowance and so cut us off from internet until Nov 1st.
We are trying territoire sans fil, aka skydsl, next week. I understand this is some sort of radio service....uses a 20 cm dish...
We are rural and cannot get broadband on the phone line.
Be very careful if your business is internet dependent.
Peter

Chris'nJulie

Tried SkyDSL in the early days - it was, of course, expensive, and a hybrid system, then - dial-up upload, satellite download. Probably an entirely different system, now.

What you describe sounds like wimax - long-distance wifi (about 20 Km range, from the transmitter). Small antenna and receiver combined in one external box, from off which you can hang your own home wifi network.

I regularly get 5 Mbs down, and just about half a meg up. It suffices, until suddenly it's not there. Typically French customer service...

Of course, there are now 4G boxes available, if you have 4G transmission nearby... (check on your mobile).

grannybunz

Check on your mobile. What mobile? There is absoluetly no signal here. My family didn't believe us until they checked with their mobiles last time they were here,

dairymaid

We recently spent about 3 months in France in 4 different locations. I work online and my experience was that outside of bigger towns internet is either non-existent or abysmal. I even tried one of those dongles that you rent for weeks/days etc....also nigh on useless.

I´m so glad that we had that experience as the lack of reliable internet was one of the factors that helped us to decide to not move to France!

Tweedpipe

Since the 10th Oct, numerous companies in Seine-Maritime, Normandy have been faced with huge logistical difficulties due to problems with an important tel & internet provider. As a result they've had to temporarily suspend all activity and have staff stand -down. Link HERE
Extremely harmful when ones activity depends on the tel or internet.