After many tries, we finally got our new broadband connection this saturday. That was about time. So what went wrong?
We selected Free as a provider, because it's fairly cheap, it provides us with a fixed IP address, and their telephon offering is simply the best (free calls to Australia!). At first, I tried to subscribe without going through France Telecom at all. In principle, you send Free the phone number of the previous tenant, along with whatever else they need, and you get a fully degrouped line without ever talking to FT.
This method just doesn't seem to work. Thinking about it, I also don't understand how it possibly could. The previous tenant took their number with them, as most people do nowadays, so how does their number identifies anything about our current phone line?
After a month of waiting (and here is my biggest reproach to Free: if something goes wrong somewhere, they don't seem to tell you anything at all), we resolved to subscribing to a FT line, which we got in under a week. Now, FT manages to connect the line with the number of the previous tenant and the address. Hmm.
Now owning our very own FT number, we tried Free again, and this time it all went smoothly: 7 calendar day exactly to receive the magic Freebox and get everything working. Not bad.
So, we've now moved the server to our new home, and we're enjoying Free's beautiful service: it's fast, that's the fastest connection I've seen so far.