Telephone ideas

[Kate]

Received by email

Our apartment in Port Vendres has a physical telephone line that we have
not yet activated. To date, we use an Orange mobile for calls within
France and visit Internet Points to access the Net. As we now plan to be
more in PV and less here in Norway, we are considering changing to fixed
telephone and Internet. We will be in the apartment around 3 months a year.

What's the prevailing technology - such as ADSL for the Internet on a
France Telecom line? Or is it now called Orange?
Who might be a reliable vendor? (When last in PV,
we saw that Fut'Tech at Place Castellane apparently had closed down, but
that may have been temporary.)

Thanks for any info you can supply

[blackduff]

I use Orange and I'm happy. For people who come and go, there's a special system which will shut off your ADSL when you're not here. I'm not sure how much this costs but many others in the PO are using this system.

Blackduff

[Santiago]

Kate seems to be getting an awful number of emails asking for advice at the mo. Perhaps she should set up a "Cash for Questions" service

[Kate]

Average of 50 per day! I answer the ones I can and throw the rest open to the knowledge base!

[John & Elaine]

We recently changed to Free and are very impressed. It costs less than half our previous French Telelcom/Orange solution, the broadband used to drop out all the time and is perfect now and faster, I can never get Elaine off the phone and it's not costing us anything and we have 500 channels of TV and radio we didn't have before. Still nothing to watch but at least you can call someone or surf to your hearts content for less than 30 Euros a month!!

www.free.fr will get you started.

John

[John & Elaine]

Blackduff, we were told by FT/Orange that if you have a 'ligne residence secondaire' you can use the internet a few times a year to connect/disconnect the phone line but the ADSL did not have the same facility. Thus you had to stay connected and in consequence had to pay for it, whereas the phone was not charged when disconnected.

[mmbrady]

Thanks, Kate, for posting the query for me (MM Brady, timewise per year principally in Norway and secondarily in the PO). And thanks to all who responded. ADSL (abbreviation for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, a carrier service piggybacked on a "twisted pair" telephone line) seems the de facto standard. Switching it and/or an telephone line off/on (at a charge for each switching) is a commonplace service offering in most countries with digital phone systems. Orange apparently has met the competition from Free.fr by offering several competitive packages at slightly less than EUR 30/month. The Ligne Résidence Secondaire is cheaper, EUR 16/month, but available only to those who have an Abonnement Principal (not specified but clearly restricted to FranceTelecom/Orange). Perhaps my question should be rephrased to "does anyone know of a telephone and ADSL service (no TV) at markedly less than EUR 30/month". From the replies to date and from Internet prowling, the answer apparently is "no".

[John & Elaine]

Free is available without TV for less

John

[mmbrady]

Thanks for the hint. But as I read the Free website info, the telephone is IP via the peripheral "Freebox" and needs an existing subscriber line to function. If you have a line, fine; if you don't, it may be a case of penny wise and pound foolish. Or have I missed something?

[John & Elaine]

The line rental with Free is included in the subscription. You do not need a France telecom line - or any other for that matter.

John

[mmbrady]

John,
Understand, but not completely. Some sort of line is needed for a fixed installation, and as an incumbent first operator, FranceTelecom owns almost all the subscriber lines in the country. How, then, does Free connect? Fibreoptics? Wireless?
Michael

[Santiago]

What John means is that Free provide the line rental for free. You do not need to pay a separate FT line rental. I'm not sure what happens if you have no physical line connection at the moment.

[mmbrady]

Now I'm confused. Some company owns and maintains the physical line to a subscriber's home or place of business and accordingly charges for its use. This is most clear in the deregulated electricity market. I have yet to sample the result of the deregulation effective 1 July 2007 in France. But elsewhere in Europe it is increasingly common to pay one company for use for use of its mains wires to your dwelling and the same or another company, freely chosen on the competitive market, for the electrical energy carried by those wires. Likewise in the deregulated telecoms market, two costs are associated with services over wire lines, the cost of the using a line from the telephone exchange to your home, in telecoms lingo, "the last mile" that usually is owned by the incumbent "first operator", and the cost of services provided over that line by the same "first operator" or a competing "second operator". Clearly, "there's no free lunch": somehow you must pay for line use.

[blackduff]

Adding to this subject, the area where the line is needed has to be determined whether it's "degroupage" or "non-degroupage". I can never determine if I live in a degroupage or non-degroupage. The difference is when you must use the FT line.

Free can give service in both degroupage and non-degroupage. The difference will be whether a FT line is involved.

Most people seem to start with a FT line (with the tel. number) and then drop this off to the Free lines.

My information will not provide the final answer but this degroupage and/or non-degroupage is important. I'm not sure which version lives in my village but I have to use a FT line.

Blackduff

[mmbrady]

Thanks for the clarification, Blackduff,

Indeed, ”dégroupage” is a mysterious term for most people, most noticeably native French; using it as a searchword in www.google.fr brings up more than three million hits. The equivalent term in English is “unbundling”, which is equally mysterious for most English speakers.

Technically, the explanation is simple: “bundling” means the action of the verb “bundle” in various senses. “Unbundling” is the undoing of a bundle. Historically, as telephone services evolved, the physical twisted-pairs of wires that connected subscribers in an geographically delimited area to the local telephone exchange serving it. The individual subscriber lines, known as the “local loops”, were bundled together in a cable that connected to a rack of switches that performed the task of routing calls to/from those subscribers. That technical aspect has changed little. Though telephone exchanges now are electronic and not arrays of mechanical switches, cables connecting to subscribers still comprise bundles of individual local loops.

Business aspects complicate the picture. Clearly, the traditional telephone services providers - public sector (Europe) and private sector (North America) monopolies – were little interested in allowing others to use their bundles of local loops. Then came deregulation by legislation enacted from the 1970s on, in stages in various countries; in France from 1 January 2001 on. From the technical point of view, deregulation entailed unbundling that required the former monopolies owning the bundles to permit others to have access to them. Physically, the access by other operators is supplied in the “unbundling room” (“salle de dégroupage” in French). Access to unbundling could be complete (all the numbers at an exchange) or partial and may apply to all services or just some services (such as the exclusion of ADSL in some unbundling offers). As telecommunications is big business, unsurprisingly, corporate cunning and legal battles followed. Hence the fog of terms reflecting a mix of courtroom legalese and technical description.

For further info, see the French Wikipedia entry on Dégroupage at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-d%C3%A9roup%C3%A9s

Michael