Wotsits

Afternoon all,

I hope you can help.

My parents are currently building a house just outside Condom in the south of France and are backwards and forwards to France for 2/3 weeks at a time. My mother needs access to the internet while in France and gets a fast yet expensive (£40/month bolt-on) service from her UK T-Mobile dongle working on the French Orange network. Only problem is that her usage is limited to 250mb per month which is a pittance.

Price in mind, have the French yet launched any pay-as-you-go mobile broadband services? Could anyone provide details? Having looked around, I can't quite figure out what the deal is with the Orange "Coffret Clé 3G+ Internet partout" with my limited grasp of French combined with the poor performance of Google Translate.

http://boutique.orange.fr/ESHOP_mx_o...ee_appel=ORESH

I'd appreciate your input.

Thanks,
Simon

Novocastrian

I use that 3G+ dongle when I'm in France for the months od July&August each year.

It's fast enough and there are no download limits, but it's eye-watering expensive at about 3 euro per hour of connection time.

Ka Ora!

Welcome to the Forum....

£40 sounds a bit expensive, I pay 10 euros a month for 250 Mb per month for my iPad which surprisingly is ample for email checking and odds and sods surfing when im out and about and and any bandwidth not used gets carried over to the next month.

The product you linked to the dongle bit works I have one for my lappie, But you appear to only get one day of unlimited surfing and then it has to be topped/charged up. It can be done from the dongle plugged in even if you have no credit left, It will allow you to connect pay by card and then surf.

cjm

If you go down a French dongle route check you can get 3G coverage in your areas. I'm using 02 in UK at the mo at 1GB month, but only getting EDGE or GPRS, so connection is iffy and makil access slow.

Wotsits

Hi all,

Thanks for your responses so far. I'm looking for something with a little more capacity than 250mb. We had 250mb with Orange UK on a roaming bundle for £40 which lasted a week. Im not entirely sure what my mother was doing with her laptop during that time but I think there was a few Skype text convos, one attempt at a Skype voice convo (less than a minute) me surfing facebook and rather unusually Bebo, a few hours of the laptop just left idling (come to think about it, it may have been downloading all manner of updates during that time) and that's about it. 250mb didn't seem an awful lot!

Any PAYG dongles without such a measly limit and without the 3EUR per day price tag. We're looking for something in between 250mb and unlimited. 1GB would be great but obviously in France and on PAYG.

CLM, 3G connection is surprisingly incredibly good where my parents are - in fact it seems better than mine in the UK... SHOCK HORROR!

Novocastrian

Read my post again. It's 3 euros per hour of connect time.

Wotsits

Ahha! As if to exemplify my point regarding price! Thanks Novocastrian.

Seriously, is there nothing else out there?? Have the French not yet jumped on the mobile broadband bandwagon? Paris for example is a extremely cosmopolitan city & I'm sure other French cities have a similar demand for mobile connectivity. Have French telecomms providers just not bothered yet?!

I'm sensing a gap in the market and business opportunity... Anyone up for taking on Orange?!?!?!

Ka Ora!

The connectivity is there, It costs you only have to look at the origami fortaits on Orange Yes Unlimited but at a horrible price. I would look and see if there is WiMax in the area as a lot of departments have this on some scale now and it is being rolled out in other places. As an alternative to upgrading the copper networks. France's wide open spaces work against it in the digital race, And now you can get two way satellite internet for the same price pretty much as normal broadband.