Internet Fibre Installation

It is a general truth that, for any complicated system, the more severely it is optimised, the less stable it is in response to perturbation.

Mayenne Fibre is, I believe, a subsidiary of Orange, and, in August of last year, according to their website, a point of access for internet via fibre was available by the road outside our house.   So we bundled into the Orange shop in Laval and after a short while came away with a Livebox suited to fibre internet and phone line, and a promise of a phone call to organise its connection to the fibre network.   Sure enough, a few days later we got a call for a connection in a couple of weeks' time, and could we please be sure to be at home then?   

The day arrived, and with a small amount of difficulty, the installers had the first leg of the 2-leg connection to the house installed in the conduit under the ground.   Problem.   Connecting it to the access point in the street revealed that there was in fact no internet signal to be had there.  So the installers took out the fibre they had already installed and went away.   Then started a 10-month delay that ended yesterday.

In between times, you would not believe the cock-ups that occurred.   The first problem (December? January?) that we noticed was that our ADSL stopped working.  When we contacted Orange they told us that someone had nicked a couple of kilometers of copper cable, and that they would fix it.   They did.   A couple of weeks later it stopped working again, and I am guessing that Orange decided that they had lost enough copper, and told us that they were not going to fix it again.   They gave us an airbox that provides a 4G wireless internet connection (but no RJ45 sockets).   I was able to get our home network configured to give us all the functionality we had before except the local file server that needs an RJ45 connection.   Our archive of photos, music files etc was offline from then until yesterday.

Somewhere along the line our voice phone also stopped working.   When we complained about this we were told that our number didn't exist, which on further investigation, was because, in response to our complaint about non-functioning ADSL, someone had simply disconnected it.    So we have spent the last several months with the landline not working and all calls diverted to Anita's mobile phone.   This isn't a totally bad thing, since we discovered that with the Orange phone app we can block the spam calls we had been getting several times a day.°

And yesterday the internet via fibre arrived.  The livebox is quite a nice bit of tech, the little touch screen seems to be high-contrast e-paper (as in Kindle readers) and the installation was a doddle.   The wifi seems powerful and I have dispensed with the mesh system I had. (I'm keeping it just in case.)  The concept of security is based on physical access to the livebox - if someone breaks into your house, change the password and verify all of your internet security because the password can be displayed via simple button push so a housebreaker can get into your network easy as pie.

Livebox, file server and phone in perfect harmony.   I haven't worked out how to change the SSID of the WiFi yet, though.

° Orange have made the smart move of crowdsourcing their anti-spam service.  If you get an incoming call, you can signal it as spam (or not) and the aggregate of these signals is sent to future recipients of calls from that number.  So if an icoming call flags up as spam you can just reject it (and also block the number if you like)