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Hello, we are moving to the Gard in a year or so and I am trying to put together a budget for internet and telephone costs. Would anyone be able to give me a rough estimate of the costs for internet service and mobile phone. I realise this may be a very broad request and can vary depending on your exact location but something in the approximate range would be useful.

Thank you very much!
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I pay 29,99 for adsl (broadband) and VOIP with free.fr, no TV, and I top my mobile up with 10€ four or five times a year with leclerc/reglomobile).

You can probably get cheaper still.

But, the first thing to check is what's available at the house you decide to buy. In some areas your choice of internet provider might be limited. Some rural areas don't even have adsl at all and if you have to get satellite internet it will obviously cost more. Likewise, not every mobile network covers all areas.

Saying that I spent 6 months in Gard and coverage seemed pretty good where I was (Sommières).
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As Eurotrash but my mobile use is less so I use the mobile phone contract that comes for no cost with the Freebox.

 

Budget between €30 and €40 per month, you will be able to get the first year for a lot less when there is an offer on.

 

Whether your line is dégroupée will affect how much you pay so that is one of the first things to determine, you can use the net to find the answer. 

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We pay 29.99€ per month with Sosh (Internet arm of Orange) which includes Internet, all phone calls within France and over 100 other countries throughout the world, calls to mobiles in France plus a Sosh simcard with 2 hours per month of mobile calls within France and 50Mo of data - all easily upgradeable.

Sue

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Orange SOSH is cheap because it's a cut down service with support limited to eChat and an online forum, no human contact.

Unless you have first hand knowledge or experience of the quality and reliability of the phone line and internet connection at the property (assuming there is a line at all) then for the first year at least I would always suggest signing up with Orange proper including line rental. That's going to cost maybe €65/mth (can't recall what the line rental is) but if there are any problems with the line or the service then they are the ones best placed to fix them. AFAIK they are also the only ISP who operate a dedicated English speaking helpline which can be invaluable it your language skills are still under development.

Clearly the first weeks and months after moving to France are likely be pretty hectic and the very last thing you'll need is to be hampered with a dodgy phone line and/or internet connection, you can always switch after that first year if you want to.

If there is a phone line at the property, and you know the number, then you can check what may be available here, note it's only indicative as line lengths and resultant losses (which basically govern internet performance) are derived from a decades old Orange database which is notorious for being out of date and defective and all ISP's and similar test sites get their info from it.

 

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I use Orange and have never felt the need to spend almost €20 a month on line rental when I can use the seamless VOIP for ‘free’ phone calls within a France and around the world. I have a Bouygues mobile phone contract which has unlimited phone calls within France so if my Internet was not working I could use that. In fact the only time my Internet connection was down I contacted Orange via my smartphone App to report the problem. They provided me with a 4G box to use until the problem was fixed. The 4G was great.
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All very well if you have decent mobile coverage, never a given in rural France !

Also it's likely that in the first instance anyway newcomers will be hanging onto a UK mobile phone which not only could cost a fortune (help line waiting times are rarely short!) but also ISP's will refuse to call you back on, it's French or nothing.

Even if you get a French mobile number on day one it will be almost certainly be PAYG (no credit history = no contract) so you could very quickly run out of credit trying to get help.

Hey it's up to you though, I'm just trying to point out the possible downsides of choosing by cost alone.

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Should maybe add that I use my mobile for data both in France and in the UK. I do also have a mifi with a dedicated data sim that I use when I'm working away from home for longish periods, but when I'm travelling or just away for a few days and not working, I use my phone to check emails and find info from the web. Most of the top ups is used on data rather than phone calls or SMSs. Otherwise I would probably do as Chancer does and use the "Free" sim.
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AnOther wrote : Clearly the first weeks and months after moving to France are likely be

pretty hectic and the very last thing you'll need is to be hampered with

a dodgy phone line and/or internet connection
, you can always switch

after that first year if you want to.

***********

AnO makes a valid point ... Internet cover can vary widely over a very short distance.

We live in a tourist area where you would expect Internet connections to be great but they are only marginal. We manage with + or - 6 Mbps download though this can dive at any time especially when there are lots of visitors about. Our mobile coverage can be very variable too even though 'they' say it is being upgraded almost constantly and we can see a mast less than 1 km away.

Asking your nearest neighbour used to be a reasonable signal of what you could expect but even that can be dodgy. Our neighbour is but a few metres away at their closest point and I can, at a pinch, use their wifi, but they consistently get 2.5/3Mbps, or less, download speed and they are with Orange.

Sue

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I use Orange and have 40GB a month contract with 2 sim cards, one for the phone and the other to use in a MiFi device or similar. Both SIMs use the same mobile number. The allowance can be used anywhere in Europe and all at 4G (if you can get it) with speeds around the 80MB on 4G and around 8MB on H+. All this for a sum of €31.99.

We did have a landline but we are over 8kms from the exchange so internet speeds via that were around 512kbs and with line rental cost about €28
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Budget for anything between 30-40 euros for internet. Mobile on top can cost anything from 2 euros for a useless plan to 15-20 euros for a plan where you can actually use the phone.

Just make sure before buying that you will have a good internet connection otherwise you will be chucking money down the drain. In fact in todays internet world, it is the first thing to consider when choosing a location/buying a house because most bureaucratic things today in France are done online. The more rural you go the worse it will be. So you have to weigh up the view vs internet.

Also, do not sign up with SFR.

Lastly, beware of flooding in the Gard. Avoid areas with rivers !!!!

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Budget telecom has an English speaking helpline.If you are worried about setting up etc.and your French is not up to speed. There is no contract term so if you wanted to use them at the beginning while you get settled it may be ideal for you to start with. As has been said it's probably better to get the line direct from Orange in case of any line problems, French telephone lines are notoriously fragile or at least they are in our area. As for Mobiles buy or use a UK smartphone with dual sim, we find Leclerc system is as good as any, once again no term contract so until you get sorted out, will keep you in touch.
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Thank you everyone for your responses. A lot of helpful information here. We recently were in the Luberon and one would think the internet and mobile reception would be good there - however we were rarely able to get on-line and had some very frustrating moments as we were there to look at properties and it was very difficult to do any research or look at properties on-line that the realtors recommended. So indeed this is very important to look into before purchasing particularly if you are thinking of running a business from home. Thank you all again!
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Just chipping in my two cents.

In our village we only get 2G, no 3 or 4 for us.

Wanting to setup an orange account that we can switch off when not needed via eenglish speaking helpline, I was advised to buy my own router to avoid the cost/hassle of returning the orange one via massimo expense each time.

Don't know if that advice is still current or helps OP in any way?

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Just some reminiscing triggered by the comments that internet connection is the most important thing, it wasnt always that way

 

I came here in 2005 after backpacking around the world, no Smartphones then, I travelled without a phone, met one techy Japanese guy with a laptop and a modem but nobody would let him connect, internet cafés were everywhere, you paid by the minute, the poorer the country the more there were, in Bolivia they were in every other shop where there were shops, in Vanuatu it was an 18 hour trek from the tribe I was living with then hitch a lift to use the computer in the bank which being a French/English condominium (pandemonium) governed state was no open on the Monday [:(]

 

I did get a new fangled digital camera for the journey and would take my memory card into a photo shop and they would print my photos and put them on CD as a back up, i would post them back to the UK, I met some Americans that said back home they would upload them to an on-line printer and would recieve them in the post, before leaving on my dial upmodem it would take 30 minutes just to recieve a photo by E-mail so I was amazed, they said they had this wonderfull new thing called ADSL.

 

I kept in contact via E-mail with people and managed my bank accounts on line, drew out money from ATM's. Arriving in the 1st world country of France to a derelict building with no services I was not concerned about no phone/internet initially, after all I had just travelled round the world avoiding advanced countries and managed just fine, there would surely be no problems in France profonde, or so I thought [:(]

 

The main town serves 30K habitants and there was not a single internet café [:(] would the bar where I was spending so much time and money before I could cook let me on their computer for 10 minutes? - I should cocoa! Would the neighbours let me? Fat chance, if they had a computer they would deny it, the Library? not a chance, the village Mairie? The town Mairie? Office de Tourisme? - Sling your hook foreigner! [:(]

 

It certainly showed me that I was going to have to do everything for myself in these parts which has not changed, the Mairie in the town said that there was a cyber-café in the university in Amiens, a 40km journey but I had no choice so I went there to find a scrappy note on the door saying that they were on strike [:(]

 

After a couple of weeks I got the phone connected and a dial up modem for Orange, up to then I had been getting through about €30 on mobicartes which if I didnt use quickly enough the credit was lost, the landline did not have VOIP and my phone bills were €100-150 each time.

 

Yes things have certainly changed, you get everything now for €30 per month and yes the internet now is essential yet people aworking way from home can still wrack up large bills if they dont have mobile phone coverage where they are staying, they have to pay for a phone line, probably non degroupée to be connected and pay the line rental plus an ADSL abonnement all over again as well as paying for the one they have at home.

 

I recently had someone leave an apartment suddenly (could not stand the area and people he was working with) I contacted someone on my waiting list but he was already renting 3km up the road, he viewed and wrote out a cheque immediately, moved in the next day and wrote off the rent he had paid for the next 3 weeks where he had been, now my apartments in my mind are worth 10 times more than the usual dumps around here but when its someones second home for only 4 nights a week they wont usually pay a penny more than they need and neither would I, this guy is payiing me more than he was before for a smaller apartment, OK its far far better but he would have happily stayed where he was but there was no Wi-Fi like I have (12mb/s) and terrible mobile phone reception so nobody could use their phones for the internet.

 

50% more rent to have internet access!!!!!!!

 

I have learned the hard way and would only look for a property that had both ADSL degroupé and a minimum 3G+ cellphone signal through one of the operators.

 

Soon I will have a fibre optique internet connection to add to the offer.

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