The Orne département of Normandy is a beautiful place. We love the gentle pace of life. But it has ambitions to be more than an agricultural backwater. And among the business initiatives supported by the Conseil Général and other bodies is a push to make it a home for teleworkers (télétravailleurs).

It seems like the perfect place. The department’s low population density and distance from … well, pretty much anywhere, mean that property prices are fairly low. Here, you can have the space and tranquillity you need to work productively at home while enjoying a high quality of life and a beautiful environment.

There’s a problem, though. The Internet.

Like many rural areas in many countries, broadband coverage is patchy to say the least. Some time back, the French Government made a commitment to provide 100% broadband access across the country, but it soon became apparent that ADSL wasn’t going to be up to the task.

Enter wimax. This is a radio-based technology, not dissimilar to wi-fi. By dispensing with the need for cable connections, it provides broadband connections to anyone within line-of-sight of a transmitter.

Now for the bad news - the way it has been implemented. Technically, Wimax is capable of speeds of up to 40Mb/s. But WiBox (nee Altitude Telecom) - the firm that has an effective monopoly on wimax services in the Orne - offers just a measly 1Mb/s. Still, we took it. What else were we going to do? ADSL didn’t reach our house and there were no viable VSAT offerings available to us at the time. The WiBox service is expensive, at 39 euros a month (with no TV or VoIP telephony thrown in). But we signed up anyway.

We’re regretting that decision now.

We’ve just come back from holiday to find our Internet connection is down. That discovery was made on a Saturday. But there was no-one we could call until Monday morning. Since then, we’ve made call after call. Many times we’ve been promised that someone would call back. No-one ever has. Our calls are inevitably greeted with what I can only characterise as complete disinterest.

As of today, we’ve been without an Internet connection for 12 days, and still WiBox doesn’t seem the least bit interested in resolving the problem. When Trish rang today (for the eighth time) she was told that the problem had been escalated to the second-tier tech support. These are the people who we were told (four times) would call us back and never have. Trish asked if she could speak to them. “Non,” was the firm answer. Trish asked why not. “C’est comme ça,” was the smug response.

Trish called later, explaining once again that we need a technician to contact us. At this point - after we’ve been asking for this for nearly two weeks - we were told that we could indeed have a technician - providing we upgrade to a professional account! Apparently, ordinary customers aren’t worthy of support.

Earlier this year, Altitude Telecom changed its name to WiBox at the same time it was taken over by Luxinet. Since then, Normandy-based support staff have either not had their contracts renewed or have been moved up to level 2 support. The hotline support is managed by Luxinet’s Lyon-based staff who clearly don’t give a stuff about customers in Normandy.

I’m no novice with this technology. I’m a technology journalist and edit two technical journals relating to computer security. I know my way around a network. I can tell that this is no "switch it off and back on again" problem.

This service disruption has been a nightmare. We’ve had to turn away business. We’ve had to pay for (expensive) alternative and highly inconvenient methods of connecting to the Internet (some of which you can read about here). We’ve been able to do some work, thanks to mobile broadband, but the 3G coverage is also patchy and unreliable. Today, we’ve had an Internet connection, via the mi-fi, for maybe a third of the time. It’s badly affecting our ability to work.

Yet WiBox’s response is a gallic shrug and an apparent total disregard for paying customers.

We are looking at alternatives. Orange now provides a reasonably priced VSAT service, but so far I’ve been unable to get any information on uplink speeds or if there are data caps (we send and receive a lot of data). My hopes aren’t high.

If the Orne really is to become a great environment for teleworkers, it needs better support from its telecoms infrastructure. A wimax service with speeds better than a pathetic 1Mb/s would be a start. And a wimax service provider that actually cares about and supports its customers would be a good idea, too. Better 3G+ coverage would also help, as would ADSL connections pushed further out into the countryside.

The Internet is the central nervous system of business. Without better connections, teleworking in the Orne is always going to be a trial and the department will never be more than a business backwater.

UPDATE (02/12/2010): Having rechecked WiBox's website, they now seem to claim that the service is 'up to' 2Mb/s. But our connection never achieved anything more than 900Kb/s - when it was working. The company offers an alleged 4Mb/s service - for an extra 20 euros a month. A somewhat limited VoIP service costs yet more. 

UPDATE (18/12/2010): Nearly a full month now and still no connection. Just under two weeks ago, we finally got some help. A guy who runs a teleworking group in the Orne and a member of the Conseil General (county council) both contacted WiBox on our behalf and kicked ass. (I won't name them in case they don't want to be named, but we're very grateful for their assistance.) That afternoon we finally got the call from an engineer that we'd been asking for and had been promised several times before. Having run through some tests, he concluded what I'd been saying all along - that it was a hardware fault. He raised a new ticket and said an 'installer' would call. (It seems WiBox doesn't have its own engineers.) After more chasing, the installer finally called 10 days later. He's promised to come on Monday - which will be the one-month anniversary of the service going down. We'll see...

When we bought our first French car, it still carried Paris plates. Out here in the rural wilds of the Orne, the number '75' in the registration drew stares of disapproval and scorn. Even the British are better liked than Parisians. We made sure to get the plates changed to a local registration - as is demanded by law - as fast as we could.

Every french département is numbered, mostly in alphabetic order so that neighbouring regions generally have wildly different numbers. Kids generally learn this numbering system by playing registration spotting games while on trips - which also has the benefit of keeping them amused during long journeys.

When the idea of doing away with local registrations was first mooted, to conform to EU regulations, most french people simply dismissed it as unlikely. Just a few months ago, when we bought our most recent car, the garage owner scoffed at the very idea of change.

But now it seems it is really about to happen. Parisians will not longer have reason to feel superior. We country yokels will have no occasion for inverted snobbery. Another strain of french snootiness will disappear forever. I can't imagine anyone will really miss it.

Most of our six cats hunt. Mini, our six month-old kitten is a savage killer and is busily decimating the vole, shrew and mouse populations of Normandy. When we came back from a week's holiday recently, there were six corpses in the living room and kitchen. According to the friends who were looking after the place, there were none the day before.

They're not all dead, though. Often Mini brings one in as a toy and plays with it until it breaks. Then she gets another.

When we hear that pathetic, high-pitched squeaking, or the chittering of a shrew, we do our best to rescue the poor critter. I'm not sure why, but it seems the right thing to do.

And so, the other night I found myself racing around the living room trying to corner a tiny mouse in which Mini had already lost all interest (she'd gone for a snack). I finally managed to grab it - not an easy feat given that I was wearing gardening gloves and it was one of the smallest mice I'd ever seen. Nevertheless, its heart was beating hard enough for me to feel it through the thick leather.

I stepped outside into total darkness. It was around 9pm, overcast and drizzling. Normally I would have walked across the courtyard and set the poor blighter free in the shrubbery, but I couldn't see where I was stepping and, with the gloves on, couldn't pluck my LED torch from my pocket. I reached down, close to the ground, opened my hand and ... felt the tiny animal run up my arm.

I was wearing a fisherman's jumper with crew neck (that's relevant - you'll see). It was hard to track the mouse's movement through the thick, loosely-knit wool, but I knew it had reached my shoulder. I didn't want to go back into the lighted living room because that would have been to deliver the mouse to a savage fate. Instead, I opened the door a crack and called for Trish, saying "bring a torch".

She did. In the meantime, though, I hadn't felt any movement. Trish searched me and declared me mouse-free. The brave little chap must have jumped, we thought, though a nagging doubt remained.

We watched an hour's TV, with me lying on the sofa as usual. Then we retired to the office where we blogged and surfed for perhaps another hour. Then back to the living room to prepare for bed - dog out, lights off, dog in, door locked. Anything else? It was while I stood going through the nightly checklist that I became aware of a new noise, a kind of rapid, high-pitched panting, very close and just behind me. I reached back over my left shoulder and explored my jumper. Sure enough, just below the neckline was a small bump.

"Trish," I called, "I don't think that mouse has gone."

She arrived, liberated the wee timorous beastie from my jumper and finally set it free. That was one lucky mouse - for now.

One of the things that sold us this house was its age. Our fantasy was to live in a castle — ideally, St Mawes in Cornwall. We didn't quite achieve that, but our house was built around 1500, using massive granite blocks in many places, so that parts of it have the feel of an ancient fortress. Indeed, local legend has it that the building was used as the village stronghold in times of trouble.

The massive size of many of the granite blocks, particularly around the doors and windows, suggest that the original owner of the house was wealthy. This is supported by the amount of carving — again, around and over the doors and windows — and the size of the fireplace, which is about 2.5m wide and nearly a metre deep.

In fact, we've sort of met the original proprietor. On each side of the main fireplace is a carved head — one of our favourite features of the house. At least, the carving on the left is of a head. We thought the carving on the right was unfinished — there are no facial features and the corbel above it is also cruder than that above the head on the other side. Then a local historian put us right.

The head on the left of the fireplace is that of the 'seigneur', the master of the house, which is why his corbel gets the more ornate treatment. Once there would have been a phallus beneath the head, but this has typically been removed in a later, more prudish time. The carving on the right commemorates the lady of the house — not by portraying her face but by representing a lower, more intimate part of her anatomy (see second picture, left).

We've always known that there were two more carved heads in the house. They are in the bedroom, again either side of a fireplace (though most of the rest of the fireplace, including corbels and chimney, is now long gone). But, in the eleven years we've owned the property, we'd only glimpsed these carvings. That's because they were behind a massive bed with built-in wardrobes that came with the house.

Yesterday, we dismantled the bed, prior to selling it and got our first good look at the two characters who've been sharing our home for more than a decade.

The head on the right, complete with beard (see first picture, top of page) is the best original feature in the house. And his phallus seems to be intact! We presume that the face on the left (bottom pic) is the mistress of the house. It's actually a face this time, so it's hard to tell, especially with the nose missing. I suggested to Trish that we can tell it's a female because her mouth is open. This wasn't well received.