L'Internet de Merde

Grr, grrr, grrrr!

If you are not presently living in France, but intend to do so, a friendly piece of advice: when choosing an Internet Service Provider do not choose Orange (who really should be called Lemon).

This organisation, part of France Telecom, the national PTT, is useless.

I do not live in one of the "middles of nowhere" of which there are so many in France; I live in Evian les Bains a small, but well-known town, famous of course for its mineral water. There is absolutely no excuse for the appalling service I receive here.

This evening I used the excellent Myspeed Internet speed testing service to test the service - when the page eventually loaded that is. Myspeed gives download and upload speeds to and from a variety of locations across the world. The so-called "ADSL" (= broadband) service this evening offered 395kb/s - steam age in other words, whilst Myspeed was unable to measure the upload speed!

Pathetic.

They couldn't organise a pipi in a pissoir! It has taken half an hour to prepare this article...

Grr, grr, grr.

Until the next time

Internet Connection - How Good?

Have you checked your Internet connection lately?

There are quite a number of free services that will tell you how fast your connection is. The best one I have found is MySpeed. MySpeed offers in addition to telling you the speed of your connection, a choice of locations around the world - which provides some interesting results - but more importantly it gives you a quality of service percentage - this is very revealing in my case.

My ISP is Free.fr. I pay €30 per month for what in France is called an ADSL (i.e. broadband) service and I get an Internet phone line with which I can make free calls around the world to landlines. Just now, I ran a MySpeed test with Paris as the location. MySpeed reported a nice download speed of 1.9Mbps. The upload speed, which is always pretty poor, was 142Kbps, actually about the highest I have ever seen! Typical, obviously they knew I was about to write this article... Quality of Service was given as 79%. Quality of Service in this context relates to the breaks in transmission - the speeds are actually averages, fine when downloading data, but useless when trying to listen to an online radio broadcast or for VOIP conversations like Skype. This is why the QoS figure is more important than the actual average speed.

With the dismal service I receive from Free, I have seen QoS figures as low as 15% which is an absolute disgrace, and frequently when listening to radio broadcasts, the sound cuts out.

Now compare this rubbish with a newly announced Japanese service reported in Slashdot.

A Japanese company has announced a new service for domestic subscribers - 1Gbps - send and receive. The service includes a telephone line and will cost the equivalent of $56.60 per month - say £30 or €38.

I'd pay that I think, just to get the service I am already paying for!

Until the next time