Basic Phone Service

[Richard]

We are in the process of buying a 2nd home in France and will need a basic phone service, with a broadband connection.

What's the best, and cheapest, way to do it?

 

Thanks all.

[tenniswitch]

[quote user="Richard"]

We are in the process of buying a 2nd home in France and will need a basic phone service, with a broadband connection.

What's the best, and cheapest, way to do it?

 

Thanks all.

[/quote]

I imagine that you'll get a lot of different opinions as to which is best and cheapest.  We have the ligne fixe abonnement maison secondaire and ADSL via France Telecom and find that to be satisfactory and convenient.

[Pickles]

If you are in an area that has a cable service (have a look at www.numericable.fr) then you could get a broadband internet service for 19.90€/month. You can then sign up to a VOIP provider (eg orbtalk or voipon or one of the many Finarea/Betamax voip services - voipcheap.com etc) and have a pretty low-cost setup.

There are drawbacks - eg  you don't have access to the emergency serices via the normal French numbers, and if you have no power then you have no phone service, but you could just use a UK mobile phone as backup. With cable services, you usually can't stop and start your subscription.

If you are not in a cabled area then you have to go for a fixed line + adsl service as suggested above.

Regards

Pickles