RFI Monde

RFI Monde ranks 34 among 710 stations in France. High enough that the country hub carries it in its own tables, and far enough from the head that the neighbours below are a genuinely different set of stations from the famous ones.

The directory counts 37 opens against this stream. That is well above France's median and it is the reason the station sits where it does on the country list, since the ordering is the count and nothing else.

Three stations in France lead with the tag info, and RFI Monde is one of them. That is a small enough group to hear end to end, and the tags are the broadcasters' own words rather than a classification imposed here.

The gap here is large: 64 kbps where France's stations typically run 128. Rates at this level were designed for dial-up and for mobile data that was billed by the megabyte, and plenty of stations simply never changed the setting.

Its audio comes straight from rfiafrique64k.ice.infomaniak.ch, an address unique to this entry in France's listing. That is the simplest case there is, and it is the one where pressing play tells you the whole truth about whether the station is on air.