The trials of a teletravailleur in the Orne

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...