No photos today. Just me and Phillipe our neighbour on site pulling through fibre rods in preparation for the visit next week of free.com to install the fibre optique cables.

It has been a long and painful saga to get the installation right and even now it does not fully comply with the specifications of Orange who are the equivalent (under contract to France Telecom on behalf of the government) to the UK’s BT. The problems are due to the engineer that was paid to come for a site visit and discuss the requirements with me failing to do so. He simply turned up outside in December 2022, did his survey and disappeared.

To make matters worse, the report he apparently sent me in January 2023 never arrived (or was deleted as spam) so I had no idea that my proposals were not acceptable. With no further notification from them I installed the gaine for the optic cable.

In June 2023, I discovered that they needed two gaines (subsequently agreed to reduce to one as the second was for the copper phone line which is now discontinued in France). In addition, there was supposed to be an inspection chamber at every change in direction (of which there are 4 in the garden)!

After a lot of argy bargy, my installation was approved and my bill reduced by 50% in March 2024.

However, the lack of inspection chambers gave rise to the possibility that installation contractor may refuse to pull the cable so I wanted to insert the fibre rods in advance to make their life as easy as possible. In the end we just managed with two that came together at about the halfway point.

Fingers crossed it will be OK for them.