
Iliad confirms its interest in T-Mobile US [pdf] - djug
http://www.iliad.fr/en/presse/2014/CP_310714_Eng.pdf
======
ucha
Iliad is awesome. They own "Free" in France. It's the company that started
offering TV + phone + broadband at 30€/month that every other company had to
align with in the mid-2000s. They entered the mobile carrier market two years
ago and offered something unheard of - Unlimited calls/text (to France and
dozens of other countries) + a few gigs of data for 20€/month and another plan
that costs 2€/month. Other carriers had to lower their costs as well. They
managed to capture more than 10% of the market in 2 years.

I'm very excited to see what they'd be up to in the US; the current oligopoly
needs a bit of a shake up... and I don't think there could be a better new for
US consumers that Iliad entering the market. Savings for French consumers were
estimated to 7B€ and a minister even said that "Free increased the purchase
power of the French people by more than Nicolas Sarkozy ever did in 5 years".

~~~
Gmo
Iliad/Free is nice as an "agitateur", but not everything is pink int Iliad-
land. Yes, they promised and delivered unlimited calls and texts, but with a
launch which was relying on 90% on the main French provider (Orange) and with
plenty of technical problems.

Same with their box, the launch was much smoother, but lately, there has been
a lot of complaints regarding streaming rate for Youtube particularly.

In short, they have a lot of followers and supporters, who, sometimes, talk
only about their brighter side and never about their darker side. Like pretty
much everything else, nothing white or black.

~~~
bluemx
I agree, everything isn't pink in Iliad-land, but you can expect occasional
fuck-ups from any massive service provider.

I've been a 'free' home internet customer for a little over 10 years now and
mobile customer since they launched their mobile services (jan 2012)

I'm a happy customer. My phone bill dropped from an average of 70€ to 16€.
Yes, part of the network relies on Orange (Previously called France Télécom,
French main carrier). As long as i can make phone calls, send text mssgs and
have 3G/4G coverage, i'm ok with that

As for the Internet + TV + Landline Phone it's been a blast for the last 10
years. It costs 36€/month for broadband internet, unlimited phone calls to
landline phones of over 100 countries + a fantastic box that plays blu-
rays/dvds, streams AirPlay, it has an internal 250Gb hard drive which makes a
very capable multimedia player (it can download torrents, you can securely
have access to the box from any computer so it can be used as a nas etc..

Regarding YouTube streaming, it can a bit slow at times. That's true. But the
discussion/debate between service providers vs content providers is
interesting.

Content providers such as google (youtube), netflix (soon to be launched in
france) etc.. make money distributing content, yet service providers are they
ones who should support the cost and invest (in other words buy bigger pipes)
to stream content to the end users. But maybe that's not relevant in this
topic.

Anyway, fellow americans, i think Iliad/Free will definitely be good news for
you. They shake things up. Here in France, the same pattern happened when they
launched the Freebox (home internet package) and again when they became mobile
carrier. Competitors dropped their priced dramatically. Competition is always
a good thing in a free market. Economics 101 :)

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chrisBob
TmoNews claims this has already been shot down.

[http://www.tmonews.com/2014/07/french-telecoms-company-
iliad...](http://www.tmonews.com/2014/07/french-telecoms-company-iliad-makes-
bid-for-t-mobile-us/)

------
Zikes
I'm on T-Mobile and have no idea who Iliad are. Should I be excited or scared?

~~~
lloeki
Definitely excited. If they win that bid, prepare for some shake up down the
line.

Their strategy is to provide service at a _fixed_ , fair price: No options,
all included. Although they provide additional services, it's an ISP that
actually knows it's a dumb data pipe: on broadband, you get the maximum
bandwidth you can have; on mobile, data is data, so tethering is bundled. They
were the first to provide native IPv6, FTTH, Gbps ports, etc... to end users.
They definitely like to try out new tech (e.g they have additional compression
and error correction on their ADSL2+ system, that provides a boost to
throughput and stability).

They leverage FOSS products to integrate them into their architecture. For
example, their set-top box is an AirPlay audio and video receiver. Back in the
day they provided free FTP and web hosting (basically Apache and vsftpd) to
their users, along with 1GB of IMAP mail storage when everyone was stuck with
a dozen megabytes and POP. On the whole, they have a tendency to please the
tech tinkering crowd, the router having features often found on homemade Linux
NAS or Sinology systems†.

They regularly stand up for their users. When they were legally required to
provide personal data from IP adresses, they did so in the most unpractical
way possible (IIRC printed out via fax or snail mail). Recently they refused
to pay for unbalanced peering, resulting in slow Youtube performance.

On the bad side, they're known to sacrifice stability to reach the price
target, knowing that things will improve later as the system stabilises. Their
service usually works well but they often have trouble scaling up to match
demand, up to when the demand stabilises and they're finally able to catch up.
Customer support used to be weak but has greatly improved. On mobile, SMS
suffered delays and delivery issues††, calls failed to connect, power
consumption was higher (I bet a failure to negotiate proper power profiles
with baseband), but things have largely stabilised. IOW, they release early
and often.

† but NO STATIC ROUTES. Seriously.

†† actually left for that reason.

~~~
hokkos
What is the difference between free on youtube (and app/play store) and
comcast on netflix ? I don't see one, Free is an enemy of net neutrality, I
left them for that, and had a 15min call with their customer support after
where they acknowledged that fact. I also left their mobile offer because it
just didn't work (dropped http, call, sms).

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adelain
Iliad/Free is amazing, when I was in France I had a 20GB of Data with
unlimited calls/texts (some foreign countries are included: US/Can/EU etc...)
for 15.99 euros (~ 20 dollars/months). PLEASE COME SAVE US FREE

------
cnst
Iliad is simply amazing. They've opened up dedibox.fr /
[http://online.net](http://online.net) for international customers sometime
last year; if you know anything about dedicated servers (like how much stuff
costs and on what terms), your jaw will simply drop when you visit the site!

------
sudonim
Related for this crowd, Xavier Niel, the founder and majority shareholder of
Iliad is also a large portion of the capital behind Kima Ventures -
[http://kimaventures.com](http://kimaventures.com) . They're our investor and
have been a pleasure to work with.

~~~
jber
Thanks ;-)

