Monday, May 28, 2007

To those who read this blog and live in France:

Darin and I are in the process of switching DSL companies. Club Internet must be having a good ol' time trying to fix our DSL line. It's coming up on a month for us sans DSL. I was wondering what companies you all use and if you're happy with them and do their plans include free calls to the USA. Please let me know your thoughts as our shopping has commenced.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Emily :)

I am a canadian living in France and my husband and I use the Freebox with Free. We can call without spending one centime more than our 30 euros a month fee to anywhere in the US or Canada but also to many places in the world like Australia, Italy and more.

We are very satisfied with the service and we recommend it. Good luck !

Ksam said...

I've thought about switching several times, and my number one choice would be Neuf. But in the end, we've always decided to stay with Wanadoo (now Orange, I guess) because, even though they're more expensive, they are also the most reliable. We use a regular modem (not the livebox), and I can count the number of times our internet hasn't worked on one hand in the fours years we've been with them, whereas my friends who are with other operators have frequent outages (the downside being that when the internet is out, so is the phone, and you have no way to contact them besides calling with a cell and paying 32 cents/min). Whereas with FT, your phone will always work, and there are actual agences that you can stop by if you don't want to call.

Plus France Telecom is the one that owns the lines, meaning they move a lot faster to fix things for their own customers than they do for other ISP's clients. They don't offer free calls to the US yet, but I think it'll be coming soon, within the next few months or so.

But I need a reliable internet connection for work, so it's worth it for me to pay a little more. I guess I might feel differently if that wasn't the case.

islandgirl4ever2 said...

Hi Emily....

We use Free which comes with tv, internet and free phone calls to the US and some other countries as well.. It is pretty good, with the exception of a few couptures every now and again...

---Leea

christine said...

I think Sam did a post on this a month or so ago and lots of people gave their opinions which was really helpful for anyone wanting to switch. We're with FT and haven't switched because a) they're at least reliable & are fast for any repairs and b) we'll be leaving soon anyway so we figured why bother.

Sara said...

We use France Telecom/Wanadoo/whatever it is called, like Sam because it is most reliable.
We had Neuf for a while when we first came, and my impression of them and the other cheap companies is that as long as nothing goes wrong and you dont want to do anything (like say move) they are great and the prices rock, but as soon as something breaks, or you want to move, or whatever, it sucks as they are sooo slow, their customer phone service is horrible, we ended up going without internet for like 2 months, all the while Neuf was sending us bills, we finally switched to France Telecom and went through months and months of Neuf sending more and more bills, each of which we had to reply to with a registered letter that we were not going to pay as they were not providing us internet and we had canceled.

France telecom actually had a TV commercial a while back that consisted of one guy saying to another "so you came back?" with a knowing look passing between the two of them. I'm sure that commercial made a lot of sense to a lot of people here!

Sara said...

oh, and like i said earlier, we use the 0811 310 310 number to call the US (and skype sometimes), the 08 number is billed at the price of a local call, i think the last two months we used it for like 8 hours of calls (we use it for calling the US and Austria) and it cost something like 9 euros for the 8 hours, which is quite good.

Unknown said...

Hi Emily, we used Free in Paris and never had any problems. It was great - really fast Inet connection and free calls to several countries including the USA, Canada, UK and Australia!

Anonymous said...

Hello, I agree with those who use France telecom. It's not perfect but previous experience with neuf was much worse!
No free phonecalls but we use lesminutes (budgetelecom) and you only need pay 1centime a minute almost anywhere.
Good luck withyour decision.

Emily said...

Thanks for the input everyone. We've decided to switch over to FT. Hopefully, all that will be taken care of on Friday. Fingers crossed.

Sarah said...

FT do free calls to the US and other places now too, for a monthly charge of 49.99Eur including the ADSL line through the Livebox.

I'm back with FT after struggling with Cegetel and Neuf. They're all a bunch of thieves, and you'll go insane if you have to deal with their after sales service. FT are somewhat better in that department.