HAS In the age of “all Internet”, it seems almost impossible to live without it. Claire-Marie and Jean-Luc Bertin are forced to do so. For two months, the couple, who left Bordeaux in 2017 for the calm of the village of Léogeats, have been completely cut off from the Internet and telephone. This cut coincides, according to them, with the end of the Cameillac road works as part of the fiber deployment.
“During the work, there were outages lasting a few minutes or at worst a few hours, but since September 5, we have had nothing,” says Claire-Marie Bertin. However, everything returned to normal among their neighbors.
Double punishment
This is not the first time the family has found themselves in this situation, but it has never lasted this long. At the start of confinement in March 2020, they had spent several weeks without internet or telephone because the cables had been torn out by a truck. Same thing in 2022.
“We are condemned to wait, we are the turkeys of the joke”
Added to this breakdown is an unstable mobile network. “Mobile calls are fine, but 4G is very uncertain, you never know how long you will have a connection. When ADSL worked, we didn't care, but now we're in a lot of trouble…” So when the family needs to use the Internet, they wait patiently or go to a place where 4G works, in the town for example, 2 kilometers from the house. Not very practical.
“It’s debilitating on a daily basis,” breathes the mother. Especially since her husband, a carpenter, needs the Internet for orders – he has fallen behind with his suppliers because of longer product searches -, customer contact, administration. And their fourth son, in Terminale, cannot consult the textbook online or do certain homework whenever he wants. Another impact: the family has a connected boiler. Without Internet she can no longer regulate the heating or hot water.
Annoyance
Claire-Marie Bertin no longer counts the number of calls made to SFR, their operator. A first technician came to change the box, to no avail. For SFR, the problem would come from the line, therefore from Orange – the infrastructure operator which builds, maintains and operates the network – the commercial operator can only make requests for interventions.
On October 10, an Orange technician replaced the telephone jack and the cable connecting the line to the house. Still nothing. As of November 6, no new intervention is scheduled. “If we don't call, SFR doesn't keep us informed of the progress of the file, it's annoying. We are condemned to wait, we are the turkeys of the joke. »
Contacted by “Sud Ouest”, Orange affirms that the “connection of the box was back on track” after the intervention of the technician, relying on the latter’s report, but that it “was able to jump again since”, and assures that it has “received no other requests for intervention”. For its part, SFR indicates that “the request was passed on to the technical services, specifying the urgent nature given the period of unavailability” and that customers will receive feedback “as soon as possible”.
