It’s quite lonely now France Telecom has moved out!

Not sure if we have mentioned before but Den’s profession is computers, databases web design etc, so you can imagine a good internet connection is vital for him to be able to work. If you are interested in that stuff you can view his website here

When we took up the rental on our apartment it was strongly requested that we had a good ADSL connection. Our immobilier was marvellous and arranged our phone to be connected ahead of our arrival a Wanadoo livebox was delivered and was ready and waiting for our arrival.

With the unpacking and New Year and the two day trip to Ikea we had not had chance to get stuck into any serious computer work. When we finally got around to getting the livebox set up and connected we had a problem with the line, it kept disconnecting every few minutes. Dennis was beside him self with frustration, we called the Wanadoo helpline, but could not manage to get ourselves understood with our limited French vocabulary.

We called once again on our trusty friend Graham who came around and telephoned the helpline for us on a number of occasions. All to no avail, we changed the ADSL filters as they had suggested. We then called in to our local France Telecom shop and arranged a home visit by one of their staff. He also called the helpline who suggested we had our line reduced to 2Mb from 8Mb. They also said it was probably our connection at the property as all the tests they had done came back clear.

France Telecom engineers duly arrived the next morning, by this time we had been over a week with an intermittent connection. The engineer said he would test the connections and needed to gain access to our landlady’s property next door where the junction box was located. After much deliberation he decided he needed a man with better equipment than he had!

The next morning three France telecom engineers arrived. After a lot of pacing the drive and phone calls they went off in search of the junction box and swapped and rejoined connections for a while before declaring the problem fixed.



Eureka we thought, we are finally connected. Within a few hours the line had dropped once again. Dennis suspected it was a faulty livebox as he had read many reports of problems with them on the internet. We jumped in the car and thought we must get this problem sorted, we went to another local IT shop and spoke to the chap there who said that he had that very morning experienced problems with his wanadoo connection. We had gone to the shop with the intention of purchasing another Wireless ADSL Router. We decided to give it another go and returned home. Then thought better of it and bought a D-Link DSL-G604T.

We connected this up, it seemed to stay connected, but then we had a series of power cuts, some lasting seconds, others up to 40 minutes. Once the power cuts stopped we were able to stay connected, the best we have achieved is about 3 weeks continuous, however it does occasionally disconnect, but seems to re-connect straight away. So what have we done with the livebox? Well we are paying a monthly fee to have it, we should really return it, but with our limited French language skills it seems easier just to leave it in a cupboard!