Free.fr

[Nigel]

I dont know if anyone can help me

 

We have Free.fr for phone nad internet. Each evening as it gets dark my internet connection goes down and stays down till the next morning. Can't seem to get any sense out of Free.fr.....any ideas what the problem may be and how I can solve it

 

Ta

[Gemini_man]

what does your Freebox show when you lose the internet connection?

[Nigel]

It is described by Free.fr as un chenillard lent ou lent/rapide....it the stage just after 8888....does that make sense

[Tarn1]

Is it a new connection or have you had it for a while?

We have found that for some reason our connection with Free.fr improves with age. Sounds stupid I know. For example, when we first signed up the connection was appaling. Up and down like a yo-yo. After spending a lot of money complaining to Free (who blamed France Telecom (who blamed free.fr...)) the connection gradually got better. It than became fairly stable. Then we went on holiday for a week, unplugged everything, then reconnected it when we returned. Again, the connection was appaling. Complaints etc. again. The same thing happened the next time we went on holiday.

I'm coming to the conclusion (based upon no evidence whatsoever apart from our experience) that Free has a system to recignise your IP address. When you first sign up they give you a terrible connection, sit back and wait for you to waste money paying them to call them. Then after a while they move you up the ladder onto a slightly more stable connection, then further up and so on until you get a good connection Then when you go on holiday and unplug it for a week you go back to the bottom rung again. A kind of Snakes and Ladders game if you like.

Every now and again we lose the link still, but we keep it plugged in as much as we possible can now.

Sounds bonkers, but this is Free.fr we are talking about!

I hope this helps?!

Tom

[lacote0_0]

Having had regular crashes for some time, we eventually lost phone and internet completely in September. My nephew, who is in the computer business, but still finds Free infuriating to deal with, eventually got through and persuaded them to repair the fault.

This they did by reducing the speed of the connection. It took them 4 weeks to do so, but since then we have had no problem.

[AnOther]

I wonder what your connection speed is supposed to be ?

If the problem is at night then it's possible that your line is being affected by interference from MW radio signals.

Tarn1

I don't know if French ISP's use ADSL-Max but if they do and you are on it there could be an explanation for what you're experiencing and it could be mostly down to your turning your router off frequently.

Basically ADSL-Max expects to be permanantly ON and constantly monitors your connection. If it sees disconnections or intermittency (i.e. you switch off or even reboot your router) it assumes there is a fault and will reduce the attainable line speed to try and achieve stability. Obviously it has no way of knowing that the far end equipment has been turned off so can ramp your connection right down to minimum. Once it has been so reduced it needs to see a good connection for at least a few days before it will ramp you back up again.

Sound like your problem ?

You can more about it HERE

And yes, it is bonkers to suggest that any ISP would play the tricks you suggest just to make money out of you on phone calls.

 

[Chancer]

Blimey Ernie my brain hurts now!

I am with Free.fr and have no problems (yet), when you speak about turning off the router causing problems do you mean the freebox or the internet connection?

The freebox is connected all the time for the phone and telly but I do log off from the internet and put the computer in sleep moe to save energy, is this likely to cause the above problem?

[AnOther]

There is absolutely no need to disconnect from a broadband service, quite a lot of people who were brought up on dialup seem to have trouble coming to terms with that, but even if you do disconnect so long as the router stays on and the ADSL connection is maintained it's perfectly OK to do so.

As I said I don't know if any ISP's in France even use ADSL-Max.

[Tarn1]

I don't think we are on ADSL Max. The reason being that after the MONTHS of initial trouble we had with no, or poor connection (which cost us about 100 euros in phone calls (for which we were re-imbursed just one months rental - ha!)) they lowered our broadband speed to make it 'stable' (I use the term loosely). I don't know the actual speed now but it is better than dial-up.

"And yes, it is bonkers to suggest that any ISP would play the tricks you suggest just to make money out of you on phone calls." Oh, how I wish I could believe that!

Tom

[AnOther]

What does DEGROUPTEST say about your line ?

[Tarn1]

It says up to 2048kbps. No ADSL Max, No TV, no degroupage...

pretty rubbish really!

Tom

[groslard]

I have had excellent service from free.

I have a good speed (around  6,36 Mbit/s for download) free phone calls to over 70 countries fixed phones (for me UK, Sweden, Canada and Romania are frequent destinations) plus loads of TV stations.

I had to choose the appropriate package size in 'reglage du ping(fastpath), and I re-initialize the freebox from time to time as recommended but apart from that I have had no problems in 3 years.

[AnOther]

I doubt those on 512kb or worse, condemned to dialup, would agree with you there !

I haven't looked for equivalent statistics for France yet but according THIS site the average speed in UK is a lowly 2396kbps and I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar over here.

Yes 24mb is available in the big towns and cities but given the disparate nature of rural France the distances mean that outside of those speeds can drop dramatically.

Think your self lucky [:D]

Out of interest what is your line length and attenuation.

 

 

[AnOther]

Having found this graph I feel I should moderate my comment about my expectations of speeds in France.

[IMG]http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p123/biskitboyo/broadbandspeedchart.jpg[/IMG]

I have to say I was initially rather surprised but thinking more about it it's very likely that the average is skewed by the nature of French demographics whereby a large percentage of the population live relatively close to the big towns and cities and will therefore be better served than the rural areas. These France's major conurbations benefit from extensive availability of very high speed connectivity, 24mb +, which will naturally massively elevate the average, so perhaps my comment isn't so far out after all, at least in respect of non urban areas.

UK's place, 20th out of 30, is a national embarassment and disgrace, especially when taking into consideration the totally opposite situation where population density is far higher and more evenly spread and where relatively few will be more than say 5 miles from a village or town.

[chirpy]

WASHING LINE 4METRES AND SITTING IN SWIVEL CHAIR!!

 

Sorry EnieY could'nt help that but like a lot of other's we wouldlike to know what these meam please-mine is 4243+ metres  according to test but could find no reference to attenuation.

happy xmas [8-)]

p.s. my son lives within 10 miles of cambridge and only got broadband a year ago while here I am in a hamlet in the middle of a hilly area 40km south of Limoges and receiving haute debit.

[AnOther]

It's alright, I'm quite used to abuse [:P]

In basic terms there are 2 critical factors which determine your speed, the length of your line and the attenuation, or losses measured in dB.

The line length is obviously going to be a fixed number and unless FT install a new exchange or repeater somewhere nearer, is unlikely to change.

The line losses are directly related to length but with the added factor of cable quality. If for instance you were on a cable which was installed many years ago you could have many dB's more loss than if it were a new run because the quality of the cable they would use today is far superior to that which they used years ago.

If you got your line length from degrouptest it should have told you your attenuation, or Affaiblissment, as well and at a rough guess I'd say it was likely to be around the low 40's

Also, next to the length, there is a + sign and if you click on that gives you a score, 6/10, in my case, which I think is an indication of the quality of the line relative to it's length but I'm not certain that's what it means so someone might correct me on that.

Also, on the results page next to Code Commutateur Local, there is a link "Fiche detaillee" and if you click on that it takes you to another page where you can see some statistics and graphs pertaining to your exchange.

As for UK availability, frankly neither BT nor anybody else gives a stuff for those stuck in the wilderness and until it makes 100% financial sense to upgrade the lines it won't happen.

The other thing is that in many rural areas BT ran out of lines many years ago so for new subscribers they installed things called DACS boxes which effectively make 2 lines out of 1, but only for telephony and dialup. For someone on one of these, even if they could see their exchange from the bedroom window they still wouldn't be able to get broadband and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it [:-))]