If telephone operators boast of offering 98% of the national territory mobile phone and internet coverage, the situation is different in Comminges. White areas are confined to the Comminges territory.
No signal, that's what the Comingos often see on their mobile phones, and for good reason: nearly 5% of the territory is poorly covered by the telephone network and mobile internet, or even in white areas.
According to data from Arcep (the regulatory authority for electronic communications, publications and press distribution, editor's note), access to the telephone or the Internet on your smartphone seems very uneven from one village to another, and sometimes even from one street to another. In fact, these areas not covered by telephone antennas are few in number, scattered and often very dispersed, if not deserted.
pockets of white areas
In the Arcep map on this subject, we see “pockets” that the telephone network cannot reach. They are often found in the mountains, and can be seen for the first time in the peaks of the Pyrenees, where there is no population all year round. This is particularly the case in Barros, on the road from Soest towards the port of Pales. The absence of the network is also visible in a large mountainous part of the municipality of Meles, near the Spanish border.
What's even more surprising is that these white zones also appear in the most densely populated, yet rural, plains. For example, between Aspret-Sarrat and Encausse-les-Thermes, your phone will likely indicate a complete absence of network. Same thing between Le Fréchet and Marignac-Laspeyres.
In Saint-Godenois – despite being covered by 5G internet – some villages have difficulty receiving a phone signal, such as São-i-Pomarede or Saint-Ignan. These small isolated enclaves prevent the commune from communicating anywhere in the territory, and highlight the inequality that some villages suffer from compared to others, and sometimes their neighbors.
The network tends to improve.
Faced with the inequality of access to the telephone network, progress is already evident. The installation of antennas to better connect Comminges comes mainly from improving the network in the best municipalities. Indeed, when an operator installs a 5G network, as was the case in January 2023 in Saint-Gaudens or in December of the same year in Luchon, the said operator must make a comprehensive improvement in the quality of the network in the area.
This is the counterpart to the development of the telecom operators' offer: in exchange for the licenses that allow them to operate their services in a territory, they undertake to cover areas that were not previously covered, or to improve coverage elsewhere. Thus, mobile phone access has improved significantly in the villages of the Coteaux Saint-Gaudinois, or even in the Larboust Valley.
According to our calculations, nearly ten municipalities in Comminges still need to be covered to ensure equitable access throughout the territory. A challenge that is about to be met, as operators have already installed relays this year, with the promise of connecting Comminges better from year to year.
Internet: The Rise of Fiber Optic
Fiber optics have taken the high-speed train, if we are to believe the number of Comminge municipalities covered by the ultra-high-speed internet network. The digital backbone of Haute-Garonne, fiber optics now reaches all municipalities in the south of the department, except for three: Artigues, Laffitte-Taubières and Francon. In just six years, almost all of Comminges has access to the internet efficiently and at great speed.
However, there are still some grey areas. Apart from the three villages mentioned above, which do not have fibre coverage, some municipalities only benefit from very partial coverage of the fast network. This is the case in Samoilan, near Orignac, where only 15 homes can be connected. This only allows a maximum of 25% of the village’s population to be connected.
The same statistic in Salish, in Salesians, where only 10 to 25% of buildings can be connected according to Arcep. It is slightly better in Benque, Montespan or even Sacoué en Barousse. In these three villages, at least a quarter of the buildings could benefit from fiber. Coverage can reach 50% of the municipality in some cases.
The vast majority of municipalities covered
Other municipalities have a fibre access rate of between 50 and 80%. This is particularly the case in Gensac-de-Boulogne, Terrebas, Casseau-de-l'Arbot and Salles-et-Pratteville.
All other municipalities, towns and villages, in the plains and mountains, benefit from almost complete fiber coverage. This allows Comminges to be one of the rural areas in Occitanie with the best high-speed internet service. In Saint-Gaudens alone, more than 8,000 local residents can access it.
Christine: “When I want to call, I have to leave the house.”
Christine lives in Martres-Toulousan. Every day, when she calls her sister on the phone, it's the same ritual. She has to go out onto her balcony, her phone doesn't get reception inside her house. “It's very painful,” admits La Martreis. “Every day, even when it's raining, I have to leave the house when I want to make a phone call.” At first, Christine thought of the thickness of her house's walls to justify this problem. “I even imagined installing a small relay antenna in the living room,” she exasperated.
In Saint-Gaudens too, sometimes the cell phone “doesn't fit” into the interior. Perrette, who lives on rue François Mitterrand, has experienced this at her own expense. “The best thing if I want to call someone is to leave my apartment and go to the lobby of my building,” she explains. Another “trick”, in this case, involves making calls over the internet. But for Perrette, it doesn't work any better. “If it were just the phone, it would be fine. But even access to Wi-Fi is not great,” she adds.
Anaïs, who also lives in Saint-Gaudens, often complains about the lack of telephone network in her apartment. “It's a real pain. I realize that I get better reception when I cross to the other side of the street, or when I go to the ZAC des Landes,” she complains. In short, telephone networking, a science that is far from precise for Cummings, occasionally has its share of unpleasant surprises.
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