Orange challenges cheapo French spectrum
The French regulator has put a price tag of €240m on a chunk of spectrum to run a fourth 3G mobile network - a third of the €619m paid by the incumbents, who are not amused and could challenge the decision. Orange has said it is prepared to take the issue all the way to the European Commission - accusing the French Government of …
That would be FANTASTIC. That's the same company as the free.fr ISP, a bunch that actually has a clue, and about as far away from Orange-utang as you can get. I for one am looking forward to a bit of four-play.
-A.
...you takes your chances. If you pay too much, that's your bloody look out.
If I buy something for £100 and the shop has a sale next week where the same item is only £50; can I go in and demand they pay me back £50 or stop the sale? Can I horse hockey. Why should it be any different for France Telecom?
They paid to much, they lose.
End of.
Errm.... You're saying that this bunch actually has a clue? As a former free.fr customer I can assure you that these people have about as much clue as a freeze-dried slug. Atrocious QoS (dialup was faster, and forget the phone communications), a customer service that must have been running competitions to see which member of staff could blame the user the quickest, and no response to written requests, even when sent registered.
I ditched them, shacked up with nerim.net (much more expensive but you get what you're paying for, right?) and immediately enjoyed a connection at 20-23 mbps on a non-unbundled line instead of the 3-4 kbps with free.fr that was my fault because I happened to use Linux on my machines.
Please don't try and tell me that these retards with no concept of customer service actually know what they're doing.
French corporation complains about others receiving state aid. Hilarious.
Mileage varies. I've heard customer service hell stories before, but can only go on my own experience, and those of friends and colleagues who also use free.fr. And Linux is no problem -- the entire Proxad infrastructure is run on OSS, including the Freebox modem itself. I get >10Mbs at nearly 2km from the exchange. There's no cap and they don't mind me running servers on the (included) fixed IP address.
After a year with Wannadoo-doo, I switched without hesitation.
-A.
Seriously, French ISP's??? What an utter waste of time! I arrived in France on 1st January 2007, first thing I did is call Neuf tel to get internet, a month later I still had none ... neuf blaming france telecon, who were blaming neuf. I told them from the start the modem was flaky, I got ADSL sync'ed for a couple of minutes then it would de-sync ... after a month they gave me a new modem and I was surfing ... I just did not manage to convince the hamburger experts they have in their tech support. And since I just arrived, I had nobody to test with.
Next, I had to move in march 2009, and did not want any of that shit again, so I went Orange ... guess what, 6 weeks YES, 6 weeks to get my internet going, incredible but true. Apparently, there was a sectioned cable and dirt in the canalization and they could not poke another cable through, they had to dig it up ... incredible. Hang them!!!! I was surfing with my iphone sim in my 3G dongle ... ;-).
I got three months for free internet after that, which is nice ...
Now, who claims free.fr have a clue??? I mean come on, having the ui to configure your modem only accessible on the interweb does not sound very wise to me ... ;-).
All in all, French and technology are not a good mix ... vous m'excuserez, mais je me base sur mon experience! Putain, la je casse du francais sec! Desole, les gars ...
French are very good at making Pastis and Cognac, though!
Un jaune sec avec un glacon, svp (ca suffit largement niveau hydratation)!
It's not French ISPs, it's French companies in general that have no concept of customer service. That's a sorry fact of life in France. What Iliad/Proxad/Free.fr has over the rest is technical competence. Rather than re-sell wholesale ADSL, the company went for LLU from the outset, in 2002, using its own design of terminal equipment, the "freebox".
In 2004 the network was upgraded to ADSL2+, free of charge. When did Britain get speeds over 8Mbs?
Here's what you get with free.fr:
- The freebox is provided gratis. It is delivered already configured, so there is no issue of access to the configuration. The current model is also a WiFi router and hard disk TV recorder.
- Up to 22Mbs IP downstream. No caps or fair usage policy.
- Free unlimited VoIP to >70 countries, using a standard handset plugged into the freebox or any SIP client anywhere on the net (only calls to France for the latter).
- A couple of hundred TV channels included, many in HD, with various additional packages available at extra cost.
- Video on demand.
- Media streaming.
- Fixed IP address, and no restrictions on what you (legally) do with it.
- No minimum contract term. As far as I know, this is unique in France.
It costs 30 euros per month all in, no up front fee. I once tried to price up what the same service would cost from Orange. In fact you couldn't actually get it all, but something close cost 70 euros a month.
And unlike Orange, my experience is that the customer support people actually understand technical issues. Actually, that experience is limited, because mostly it just works.
I am not affiliated in any way with Iliad.
-A.
As previously said, Free (Illiad) sucks at almost everything. Depending on where you are you may get lucky or not.
The only ISP that stood above the rabble was Orange. I opened a couple of lines with them as years passed by. Usually, the sales rep says you should have the internet in 2 weeks top. So far, I found out it's more 3 or 4 DAYS.
Thumbs up for them.
Free? Well, last time I was with them I kept loosing sync about 3 times every 10 minutes.
9 Tel? I particularly enjoyed coming back from vacation, discover I didnt have the Internet anymore. "Sorry you are not one of our customers anymore and I cant exactly figure out why."
No, the good, the EXCELLENT thing with Free getting on this market is that they have a habit of screwing up the practices of their competitors.
Currently, there is a "ménage à trois" with the 3 main cell phone operators and they agree on prices even though that's illegal.
You can be sure Free will do the same for cell phone prices as they did for Internet prices.
And that's good. Even though I dont think I'll ever go back to them.
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