One year of Free fiber: my take
Overall, I’ve been pretty satisfied with fiber from Free, a French ISP, this year. Stable speeds, decent latency, no surprises on the hardware side. For “mainstream” FTTH, it was pretty good… until the end of the period, when outages piled up and left me a bit disappointed. June clearly weighed heavily in the balance and tarnished an otherwise quiet year.
The numbers that matter
Monitoring started on July 9 with HetrixTools: cumulative uptime of 52w 20h 46min, cumulative downtime of 9h 50min, 37 incidents, for an observed availability of 99.8877%.
Without the more turbulent month of June, we’d have been flirting with a very clean “three nines” for a residential line.
HetrixTools overview
HetrixTools is an online monitoring service that gives precise data on the availability and performance of a connection or service.
It’s free for up to 15 monitors, which is more than enough to keep an eye on several services without paying anything. Uptime is calculated over the chosen period, so you get a real observed SLA (99.8877% in my case) rather than a mere impression. Monitoring happens from several geographic locations, with alerts sent as soon as an incident is detected. The monthly history makes it easy to spot problem periods, like that more turbulent June, and to compare months against each other. And you can export reports to archive, do a review, or discuss with technical support, backed by verifiable data.
What I’m taking away (and what’s next)
- Fiber with Free: a positive experience over the year, with a less glorious end of period.
- The big outages concentrated in June hurt the stats more than the micro-outages.
- I’m keeping HetrixTools active to be notified immediately in case of an outage and to track things over time.
In the end, Free holds up well for home FTTH. I’ll keep monitoring, and if June repeats itself, I’ll dig deeper into diagnostics (ONT, router, NRO, carrier incidents), always backed by numbers.