Halfway down a valley in the Aveyron département of south-west France, Thomas Guillot’s home-office in a small village with only 15 permanent residents backs on to rolling hills, chestnut woods and sheep pastures. Yet his customers and colleagues are based in Paris, Tokyo, Helsinki and Delhi, and his business trips take him to Rome, Amsterdam, and the west coast of the US.

For Mr Guillot, a pre-sales engineer for Planar Systems, a US supplier of video-walls, the belated roll-out of broadband and mobile networks to rural France is enabling a new kind of working.