French broadband service

by philg

When it comes to Internet service to the home, as with health care, it seems that the U.S. has found a way to do it less efficiently than the French.

In some of the ancient buildings of Paris it is tough to get a good “last mile” wire into apartments and therefore symmetric speeds of roughly 15 Mbits are the limit (I measured this with the Ookla Speedtest app on my phone at a private apartment in a classic building). For newer buildings it is generally possible to get fiber optic service of 50/50 Mbits for roughly $40 per month (compare to $80 in the U.S.?).

One area where life in France takes a painful and inconvenient turn is Internet service for visitors. A Verizon iPhone somehow cannot get onto the LTE/4G networks in France. One pays $10/day on top of the ordinary monthly bill and then is subjected to 3G cellular data. The French apparently don’t trust some portion of their citoyens because it is illegal to run an open WiFi network. Coffee shops, restaurants, and hotels are required to set up a WiFi system such that people register and such that device-URL logs are kept for at least six months. Generally the device is identified in the log by MAC address. A Starbucks near Rue Cler was using Q-Spot by SpotCoffee to collect the required data and the service was throttled to 5 Mbits down and a painful 0.5 Mbits up. Our hotel, the Cler Hotel, used the same service and the result was even more painful: 5 Mbits down and 0.2 to 0.3 Mbits up (not enough for reliable Skype or FaceTime).

[What do people make of the failure of U.S. Verizon iPhones to connect to 4G networks in France? People say that it is due to a difference in the frequencies allocated for LTE in the different countries. However, I thought that all iPhones were now created equal and that it was essentially one worldwide product.]

12 thoughts on “French broadband service”

  1. Internet service at home pricing seems to be all over the map. I pay $65/mo for 300/20 service in Raleigh NC (Time Warner, and I do get the advertised speeds).

    As for Verizon iPhones… I had no problems using mine, when I was still with VZW, in Hong Kong using a local SIM. These days I’ve an iPhone 6 with TMO, and the worldwide roaming has been great (and this summer, they included LTE roaming in Europe, instead of 128 kbps).

    So, both of these topics seem to be YMMV.

  4. It’s a Verizon thing. Perhaps because for so long their phones were incompatible, they never bothered to develop the roaming agreements their competitors have. My T-Mobile roams just fine in LTE on the Bouygues Network at 12Mbps from a cellar with 2 bars in the far reaches of Ile-de-France. T-Mobile does unlimited data over 3G if you get roaming and this year they threw in unlimited LTE for free as a promo.

    15 megabits is nothing to sneeze at. For two years in my previous San Francisco house, allegedly in the center of the tech universe, I got a measly 3/0.5 from AT&T (motto: investing in networks is for suckers). Even now that I am on Comcast, I pay 4x as much as my parents for 250/25 (they have 400/30 + TV).

    The restrictions on anonymous browsing are Orwellian, if understandable given the recent terrorist outrages. Better than in the 90s where any use of encryption required a government license.

  5. “The French apparently don’t trust some portion of their citoyens because it is illegal to run an open WiFi network. Coffee shops, restaurants, and hotels are required to set up a WiFi system such that people register and such that device-URL logs are kept for at least six months. ”

    Just one more aspect of “why we can’t have nice things anymore”. The French are obviously concerned with people (cough Muslims cough) communicating with ISIS and the like. The internet has been a major source of radicalization and terrorist coordination and spying on the internet has been an important tool that the French have used to catch people who have become radicalized. Like taking off your shoes at the airport, innocent people are the ones that have to pay the price and the means chosen are not even effective, but the authorities feel compelled to close various barn doors each time a horse escapes.

  6. $10/day is ridiculous. Much cheaper to get a local prepaid & rechargeable sim card – you probably won’t use $10 worth of data for your entire stay, let alone every day.

    If for some reason you need to keep your Verizon sim active and your phone doesn’t have dual sim capability (most American phones don’t) then bring along a 2nd phone (surely you have an older phone in your drawer) , preferably one (such as a Nexus or a carrier phone that has been rooted or reflashed with an open source rom) on which the hotspot capability has not been crippled by your carrier, so you can keep phone #2 with the local sim in your pocket/backpack and use it as a hotspot for your regular phone (and laptop). Then turn off data on the verizon and connect to the phone #2 hotspot.

    Even if you don’t need your verizon sim, chances are verizon has pre-crippled your phone so that the hotspot won’t work. Again if you have a previous generation (android) phone, you can be free to experiment with rooting, flashing, etc. without fear of blowing up your brand new Galaxy S7.

  8. @ Andreas #2

    Walk into an Orange store with your iPhone & passport and you can get a pre-paid SIM for next to nothing.

    Is that some specifically French thing? I asked about free prepaid SIMs in the Apple Center in Paris, was offered expensive packages from 3 vendors, do not recall the one you mention.

    Perhaps it’s also on offer in all the other countries that Orange (here and there called Vodafone?) are active?

  10. Thank you, Jackie. Truth be told, I wasn’t looking for a local SIM this time, as I’m seldom there for more than a week, and do not use my ordinary “foreign” plan much for other than texts and occasional short call. EU roaming charges are less now, than before, and next year they’re supposed to be gone entirely. A local SIM only makes sense when one is staying in the country for longer periods of time, and/or depends on being reachable and able to respond by voice immediately (since I dislike answering the phone in public spaces, I use texts for that anyway). What I’d like to find most of all is a mobile plan primarily for data traffic, min. 2GB/ month, 5GB optimal? that won’t cost me an arm and a leg, so as not be tied to hotel/etc WiFi – but all plans are centered on yada yada yada plus free Spitinearify or something.

  12. On reading the Wikia PAYG SIM with data page, I realized why I stayed away from buying local cards when traveling: these plans/ combos are so complex to overview (esp. in to me-virgin foreign setting), with such steep comparison learning curves, that I instinctively #fuggedaboutit, and continue with my ordinary card. The aggro is more than the surcharge. As EU roaming charges will be leveled out wholly in 2017 (possibly in June), perhaps we’ll see a EU-niversal kind of card everywhere, with only differently sized/ priced data volumes to distinguish them…

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