This article draws on research carried out between 1998 and 2000 on households which had moved from one region of France to another, and discusses the effects of these moves on sociability and the role telecommunications play. The analysis deliberately focuses on the problem of maintaining ties and brings out how the most long-standing ties are given special value by geographically mobile households - as though having ties which go back a long time compensated for being spatially uprooted. The wish to maintain ties notwithstanding geographical distance means that use of the telephone shifts from being mainly a tool for coordination to being one which substitutes for face-to-face contact. We also note that the increasing importance of new means of telecommunications (mobile phones, e-mail, etc.) is tending to modify who, within the family, is responsible for handling sociable contacts with friends and relatives.