In France, up to now, we were very in advance with domestic Internet connections: many ISPs were providing very fast connection (up to 20 Mbps) with plenty of free services (phone-over-IP allowing unlimited free calls, TV access, wireless "boxes" with routing capabilities…) for a cheap price (30€/month in average). Unfortunately, the quality and usefulness of the actual internet connection is getting worse and worse now…

Many users complained about big problems with their ISP: Free. The new fashion for some French ISPs is to restrain the bandwidth for some internet services including newsgroups, bittorrent and other P2P sharing networks. Ok, let’s face it: most of these services are used in a illegal way, for the sake of sharing copyrighted content for free. Hence, we have to admit it’s a huge highway for domestic piracy. But unfortunately, these networks are also used for legal activities. Some websites (including Jamendo and ratiatum) use Bittorrent or eDonkey to distribute files, in order to avoid investing in expensive file servers. Free’s limitations prevent us from using these services now.

Last but not least, not only the peer-to-peer transit is restrained but also instant messaging services like MSN/Live Messenger, Google Talk and others!!! Sometimes it becomes unusable: some messages "disappear", making the conversation very awkward and misunderstandable, this is very very frustrating!!! And for this case, I see no reason at all!

The ironic thing is that, while they save bandwidth with such restrictions, they’re installing fiber cable in order to allow bandwidth up to 60Mbps! What’s the point if we can’t download anymore??

Interresting readings (in French):