When I arrived in Paris 5 years ago, rather sadly one of the things I was most excited about was getting broadband internet! In Britain ADSL still didn't exist, and the best you could do was a double ISDN line which would sputter out 256k at best (about 5 times faster than a dial-up modem). France Telecom were offering 500k ADSL for about 60 euros a month, which shockingly I was quite happy to pay for.

Since then, things have moved at an amazing pace! The speeds jumped, from 500k to 1MB, to 2Mb and last year to 20Mb, while the prices dropped and dropped, so now I'm paying 15 euros/month for 40 times the speed of that original line (all a bit fake though really, since I've *never* seen 20Mb/s speeds, but it still is very very fast). Meanwhile back in the UK, ADSL made an appearance, but has still not risen above 2Mb, while the prices are still 60 euros/month!

Around Christmas time, the biggest jump of all happened. VoIP here became a household reality,and not just Skype style internet telephony, but regular landline phone type VoIP - the type that even your slightly confused gran can cope with. Even more significantly they're offering not only free phone calls in France, but free international calls! For expats like me, that's pretty cool, but for a business, this must be a major saving.

Strangely there doesn't seem to be much talk about it, but surely *everyone* will switch over to these services. Certainly for our apartments it should prove popular with the visitors - we'll just have to persuade the owners to switch over (which they probably will, since the line rental is cheaper than FT anyway).

Actually I haven't switched yet though - Neuf have given me such a horrendous run-around when FT accidentally snipped my phone lines (leaving me offline for a month!) that I'm not too keen to find out how much downtime will happen once I do.