ADSL in France

Lines

On the 30 June 2006, France had 11.1 million broadband connections, of which 94% are ADSL subscribers, a 3.2 million lines or 41% increase from a year before. This makes France the second largest ADSL market in Europe. At the end of 2005, 30% of those DSL lines were unbundled, and 37% of those unbundled lines were totally unbundled without any direct invoicing of the historical operator and a greater progression rate than partial unbundling. At the end of September 2005, more than 95% of the population can have a DSL connection, albeit some of them only 512/128.

Furthermore, actual Internet transfer rates may stay far behind the advertised DSL connection speed, depending on the subscriber's home distance to the DSLAM. While a connection of 20 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload may give transfer rates of only roughly 2 Mbps (200 kB/s) or less download and 500 kbps (50 kB/s) upload (to various servers in France, Germany and USA, academic and hosting services), other people have no problem reaching the advertised speed.

ADSL Market

Wanadoo, now known in France as Orange SA, a subsidiary of France Telecom, is the leader with half of the market with 49.5%, helped by the reputation and availability of physical shops of the incumbent operator to overcome slightly higher prices because of its obligation of using fixed prices. Other operators shares the rest, with the first being Free (subsidiary of Iliad) with 17.9% (18.2% at the end of Q2 2006[5]) of the market, just above Neuf Telecom (Louis Dreyfus Group) which merged his ADSL activities with Cegetel (Vivendi Universal) with 13.2%.[6] Then came the other operators: Alice (Telecom Italia) which bought Tiscali, for 6.1%, Club internet (Deutsche Telekom) for 4.4%, AOL, Tele2, and small operators, frequently virtual. The trend is a slow augmentation for the challengers at the expense of Wanadoo.

ADSL Technology

After selling the first ADSL2+ offers in Europe, providing a speed of 18 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up in 2004, French operators continue to offer new services, driven by the competition. It is possible to use video telephony, video on demand, Reach Extended ADSL for 8 km lines soon. Experiments aren't any more the Iliad/Free trademark: they recently demonstrated an aggregated 174 Mbps link,[10] while Telecom Italia innovates on the service with a free hotline and France Telecom is pushing VDSL. In December 2005, Free enabled a TV multicasting service on the customer's local network, an open solution based on RTSP. This completes the media center capability of the freebox, also using the VideoLAN project. They launched on April 2006 a new Freebox divided in two devices with DVB-T and HDTV capabilities and a Mimo WiFi network.

Quadruple play, triple play with mobile communications, is available: neuf cegetel is selling for 200€ and 1€ with a plan Twin, a GSM/WiFi hybrid telephone after the experimental beautifulphone, by the means of a QTek 8300 and Wanadoo sells Unik, a Motorola, Nokia or Samsung handset for 100€. Free develops a wifi mesh network of HD freeboxes to be used to provide mobile telephony and compete with traditional cellular operators.

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