Temporary or prolonged outages, network saturation, damage to equipment and malicious acts…recurrent breakdowns poison the lives of subscribers to both fixed Internet and mobile telephony. More than 800,000 incidents were recorded last year, according to the ZoneADSL site. This comparator of telecom offers offers its users – 6 million claimed in 2022 – to report any disturbance on their territory.
On the basis of this declaration, ZoneADSL indicates, with map support and in real time, the location of the breakdown, its nature and the telecom operator concerned. The history for the year 2022 shows that eight out of ten reports relate to landlines. The antennas taking over from each other in the event of failure of one of them, the mobile networks show more resilience.
As far as fixed lines are concerned, a greater number of breakdowns are reported on fiber optic networks than on ADSL copper networks, without any real lessons being drawn. A tipping point has occurred, and fiber subscribers are now more numerous. According to the latest edition of the Digital Barometer, they show themselves a priori satisfied with the quality of their connection.
Up to three times more incidents for Free and SFR subscribers
If we zoom in on the operators this time, some players accumulate breakdowns by a factor of 1 to 3. 36% of reports thus concern Free, and 34% SFR, against 11% Orange. By collecting 18% of breakdowns, Bouygues is positioned on the right side of the ranking. Free was already the dunce cap of the last 5Gmark barometer dedicated to the quality of service of the four national operators.
Free is also the operator that suffered the biggest outage of 2022, without being the cause. During the night of April 26 to 27, several major fiber optic cables were cut, causing breakdowns or network slowdowns in Grenoble, Besançon, Reims, Strasbourg or Ile-de-France. Free customers were particularly affected by these malicious acts and those of SFR to a lesser extent.
The other two major outages concern Bouygues Telecom and Orange. The first suffered an internal network problem on April 14, 2022, while the second experienced email malfunctions (inability to send and receive emails from the user area) on January 15, 2022.
Beyond these national bugs, which are rather rare, breakdowns are mostly local. In this game, all subscribers are not on an equal footing, with some fiber networks concentrating incidents, as Arcep, the regulatory authority for the telecoms sector, recently indicated.
The North, the most affected department
According to the classification established by ZoneADSL, the North is the department which records the greatest number of reports (37,305), ahead of the Rhône (35,678), the Bouches-du-Rhône (34,463), Paris (27,391) and Yvelines (24,983). Or a long straight line from the North to the South of France.
If we now cross these geolocated data with the names of the operators concerned, we obtain a map of France of breakdowns. It can, for example, be advised to the inhabitants of Calvados not to retain Bouygues Telecom. Free and SFR are to be avoided in a much larger number of departments.
The ZoneADSL site was created in 2004, and its outage detection tool implemented in the course of 2021. Arcep also offers a dedicated site to report any network problems. Provided, of course, that you have internet access.
