Last week I started the process called “degroupage total”. What this means is that I am getting rid of traditional telecom operator (in this case France Telecom) in favor of a modern Internet operator (called Free) that gives me telephony, TV (free-to-air but also pay-per-view channels and possibility to stream/save up to 8 channels at once) and Internet (I hope to get about 20Mb down and 1Mb up, we'll see) through a single ADSL2 line. This does have a drawback - if your Internet connection goes south, you lose everything at once. Luckily for all of us and thanks to the wonders ;) of mobile telephony, even in this case we are never totally cut off from the world.

During the process there was no disturbance of the service and my Internet connection still works just fine. The phones do not work now but will when I install a special modem box that Free sent me (unsurprisingly called  the Freebox) and attach the phone and the new router to it (my old router was also a modem and I can't use it any more).

I am really looking forward to setting this all up. Not only that my wife gets the chance to watch a lot more (hopefully) interesting TV, but we also get to phone for free locally and toward half a Europe and the USA.