Fibre has arrived at our hamlet!

[Ian]

We've been in this house in France for 23 months and always knew that it was a risk regarding broadband speed in such a remote, rural, area. We live in a hamlet - about the size of a small village but there are no shops, or a church, etc. (though we do have a chateau ) The nearest villages are 5km north and south of us. The nearest town with a supermarket its 8km but the town we usually do our weekly shop at, Lusignan, has a decent sized supermarket and that's 15km from us. We're also right on the edge of the hamlet, down a short dead-end lane.

But - amazingly - fibre distribution boxes appeared on the telegraph poles, including one outside our house, at the end of last year and Orange have just confirmed they are now taking orders for installations this month According to their info, the basic service i 500 megabits - BOTH ways, no more asymmetrical bandwidth. I think you can go to 2Gb but 500 is more than enough for us. If I read the marketing right, the cost is only €24/month for the first year, though it's a 12 month contract, which is good.

To be fair, our current arrangement using a 4G mobile connection via a big dual antenna on the roof works well enough, though actual speeds (around 30-90 megabits down and 12-25 megabits up) can vary from day to day. I'm expecting fibre to be rock solid.

Very excited!

[wornish]

Only in my dreams and that's in Cheshire.

[OM USer]

Hurrah. Good luck.

[Tram]

Just yesterday they installed the fibre node on the pole we are fed from.
Not rushing to sign up for FTTP, decent enough speed for our purposes from the existing FTTC.
Seems a long while ago that I was involved in some of the decision making in the rollout of ADSL.Major advancement delivering Broadband over copper and even in some cases aluminium.

[Box Brownie]

We have FTTC which I am happy with and surmise FTTP would be very expensive especially with the connection costs.

However the reason I post is last week there was an Openreach guy two days in a row doing something in one on the pavement chamber outside our house (our connection has its own chamber that is connected to that other chamber). NB distant between those two is approx 30 feet.

What the second guy also did was mark up the pavement across the close in front of one of our nearby neighbours. I added 2+2 and made 4...…..that this activity might be in preparation of their getting an FTTP connection.

If the supposition is correct, I wonder do they run fibre to the chamber capable of more than a single connection i.e. does what they are doing remove/reduce connection costs for other FTTP applications ???

[BDennis]

Hooray!

We only just upgraded from ADSL to FTTC last year so it is still coming the last bit via copper. It made a huge difference to uploading to Flickr and YouTube though. Hopefully we will get fibre at some point but in a rural location we're at the mercy of BT Openreach unless another provider steps in. This is probably sufficient for our needs though..until I want to start backing up RAW files to the cloud maybe...



Bill

[Ian]

I remember my late parents in law - I upgraded them from ADSL to FTTC and from 250K bytes/second they (from memory) enjoyed about 5 megabits - not a lot (they were still quite far from the cabinet) but the speed improvement made Web browsing tolerable at last. Before that they were pretty much restricted to email.

[MJ224]

My fibre connection should be arriving on Monday. A direct line I gather, and the landline will go south too....:-)

[Ian]

My fibre connection should be arriving on Monday. A direct line I gather, and the landline will go south too....:-)

Great! 👍What speeds are you expecting?

Ian

[MJ224]

Just been installed. 147 down and 32 up.....

[Ian]

With what we have here at the moment via 4G and the roof antennas, we get by and it's much better than it was a year ago (finding the best direction to point he antennas was a headache and even when we found a strong signal, some mornings we'd wake up and find that the speed had reduced to a crawl again because the 4G router had locked onto a different base station on the tower (you can see this in the status display via 'Cell_ID') and sometimes we were connected to an entirely different tower! To fix this we had to reboot the router and hoped it would find the optimum connection. I have to say that it's quite a bit more stable now.

We watch our TV almost entirely over the Internet now. There is an old satellite dish so we have access to Freesat type channels but the picture quality is much better over the Internet and we can't reliably get HD (let alone 4K!) over the satellite. Indeed, we can have the main TV playing 4K and HDR movies on demand in the living room and our second TV playing FHD in the kitchen, without problems.

So a sheer improvement in speed with fibre will be nice, but not critical. Stability and consistency in the speed will be very welcome and also latency. The very best latency I can expect is 19ms and very often it's around 40ms. I'm really hoping that will reduce to a low single figure.

Having a very fast upload speed should also help with server software updates when thousands of files amounting to up to 500MB need to be checked and updated - this normally takes half an hour and the forum has to be closed during that time. I'm not expecting 500 megabits all the way to our server in Lansing, Michigan, but I am hoping that the update time will reduce significantly - even a halving of the time would be great.

And - on the information I have - fibre should be a little cheaper

Ian

[BDennis]

You’ll be living the dream Ian - rural France and stable high speed internet. I would just want a nice crêperie and perhaps a bar nearby 😀

[Melaka]

We are currently FTTC which suits us well enough as the cabinet is only a couple of hundred yards away. There are signs that FTTP will be coming to the village soon but apparently in our road all the lines are laid in trenches, not ducts, so we may be late getting it. BT is talking of removing the landline within a couple of years so something is brewing on that front.

[Box Brownie]

Loss of traditional copper and other changes are simply steps towards "digital voice"!

The concerning thing about that and AFAIK the elephant in the room is in a wide power outage = no dial tone on landline level connection and (likely) mobile towers not available means no method of contacting the likes of emergency services if help required.

All I recall about this was that those who have 'red button' pendant alerts will need to upgrade to newer models and for those (elderly?) who only have an analogue voice landline will be supplied (upon request ~ even they knew they needed to???) a battery powered adaptor! This adaptor though only has approximately a 6 hour lifespan.

The above IIRC has had little public discussion during the increasing spread of "digital voice" preparations

[Phill D]

A couple of months ago our road got fibre upgraded but the cables are still hanging coiled up from the telegraph poles! The guy doing it told me that the providers would be in touch shortly to sell the new speedy service.....nothing yet! Wish they'd hurry up our Internet is rubbish, speeds just about OK but the dropouts are a real pain.

[Phill D]

Thanks but we don't have a BT line.

[Box Brownie]

Can I ask which ISP that you are with?

[Phill D]

We are with Sky broadband but it's the local copper cables that currently limit the speed we can get.

[Ian]

A couple of months ago our road got fibre upgraded but the cables are still hanging coiled up from the telegraph poles! The guy doing it told me that the providers would be in touch shortly to sell the new speedy service.....nothing yet! Wish they'd hurry up our Internet is rubbish, speeds just about OK but the dropouts are a real pain.

When a neighbouring village was having some roadworks done last summer (here in France) it was revealed that the project was not just for some new traffic-calming measures, but also to bury some electricity cables... along with fibre broadband cabling. This got us all excited because that village would be the stepping stone to our hamlet (5km north) so enquiries were made and optimism flattened when the word was that it could take up to two years for the roll-out to reach us. But here we are 7 months later - so don't lose hope!

Ian

[Phill D]

Fingers crossed Ian.

[Melaka]

It's less than a week since my last comment on this topic. As if by magic a team arrived a couple of days later and laid ducting in the road. I understand FTTP will be £17 per month for eighteen months then around £45 - ouch. As we don't do streaming we may opt to keep our current 65-70 download - if we're allowed to.

[Ian]

Seeing as Melaka David has re-awoken this topic, an update from me - We've ordered the 500 megabit (up/down) deal from Orange here in France for €24 (£21) per month for the first 12 months. It's due to be installed in about 3 weeks time We're also moving our French mobiles over to Orange as the special deal with our existing provider has expired. It means we will be paying €37/ month for 500 megabit fibre and two basic mobile sims (very basic - 2 hours of calling, only 100 megabytes of data, though unlimited texts) - you need a French phone number for lots of reasons here. We will be saving about €15 a month on the deal we currently have. So far, BT Mobile hasn't changed our UK mobile plans since Brexit, though many ex-pat users of UK sims have either had penalty tariffs or even had to change networks.

Ian