Stay Connected in Bordeaux

Bordeaux's connectivity is solid, as you'd expect from a major French city. 4G blankets the city centre, the quays, and out to Mérignac airport. 5G has rolled out across most arrondissements over the past couple of years. Cafés in Saint-Pierre and Chartrons almost all give you free WiFi, and the tram network (lines A, B, C, D) holds reliable signal end to end. Here's the catch. French carrier shops keep stubbornly French hours, often closing for a two-hour lunch and shuttering entirely on Sundays. Land at Bordeaux-Mérignac on a Sunday afternoon hoping to walk into an Orange boutique? You'll wait until Monday. The other frustration: 'free' hotel WiFi in Bordeaux's older stone buildings can be patchy. Thick limestone walls in the 18th-century hôtels particuliers around Place de la Bourse muffle signal more than you'd think. Plan for it.

Three main carriers cover Bordeaux. Orange, SFR, and Bouygues Telecom, with Free Mobile as the budget challenger. Orange has the strongest rural coverage, which matters if you're day-tripping out to Saint-Émilion, Arcachon, or the Médoc wine châteaux. In the city itself, all four perform comparably on 4G, with download speeds typically landing somewhere in the 50-150 Mbps range on a decent day. 5G is live across central Bordeaux, Bastide, Caudéran, and the airport corridor, with peak speeds well into the hundreds of Mbps when you're near a node. Coverage gets spotty once you're deep in the vineyards west of Saint-Émilion or out on the Cap Ferret peninsula. Fair warning. Free Mobile is the cheapest. But its rural footprint is the weakest of the four. For travellers, Orange and Bouygues are the safer bets if you plan to leave the city. The Bordeaux tram and the TER trains to Arcachon hold signal well throughout the journey, worth noting if you plan to work en route.

Public WiFi in Bordeaux is widespread and fine for casual browsing. Worth thinking twice before logging into your bank from a café on Cours de l'Intendance. Hotel networks, airport WiFi at Mérignac, and the open networks at chains like Starbucks or Columbus Café are shared spaces where, in principle, other users on the same network can attempt to intercept unencrypted traffic. Travellers make appealing targets. We log into more accounts than usual, often in a rush. A VPN like NordVPN encrypts your connection between your device and the VPN server, which means even on a sketchy café network your traffic looks like gibberish to anyone snooping. Useful for streaming, too. It also lets you reach services from home while in Bordeaux. Not paranoia. Just sensible practice for banking, email, and anything with a password.