NormanH Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 There is ancient history between these two. This time Que Choisir have alleged that Free is deliberately letting its 3G network get into a poor state in order to discourage its users from downloading too much, and so economising on what Free itself has to pay to Orange.http://www.midilibre.fr/2013/01/17/l-ufc-que-choisir-porte-plainte-contre-l-operateur-free-mobile,628234.php Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quillan Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 Well I am not surprised really. I mean look at it this way, you want to set up a mobile phone network for voice and data but you don't have enough money to install it all in one go. The aim of you network is to undercut the opposition. To get users you have to launch with only half your network built so you buy airtime from a competitor, one of those you are going to undercut.On top of that you don't buy enough airtime (or in this case petrabytes or exabytes of data download) from your competitor because not being in the business before you can only estimate how much you need to buy based on data in the public domain. On the other hand Orange has historical data of peoples download usage with mobile phones and see you have grossly underestimated how much you need to keep your clients happy, what do you do if you are Orange. Well exactly what Orange have done, signed the contract and said "that will do nicely".Orange know Free will have to come back to them at some time or another, they probably calculated when to within a month that you will return. You know that Orange now has you over a barrel and all you can do is try and bluff your way out. The only trouble is your competitors are now offering realistic packages to compete with you along with a known quality service so people are leaving you and going to back to companies like Orange and SFR.On top of that you know that to buy more data from Orange is going to cost you a lot more than you paid the first time round. Your now caught in a Catch 22 situation. The income you thought you would be getting is drying up as people are leaving you, you now have to pay out a load more money to Orange to keep your customer base happy and you don't have enough money to complete your roll-out. That in turn means your probably have to go back to Orange, or another provider, a third time later on. Alternatively you can borrow money but then to pay it back you will have to increase your end user charges. This could get very messy for Free and I fear they will loose even more mobile customers especially in big cites. Great idea but poorly executed.Still the good news for Orange and SFR customers is that prices of mobile use has dropped. My monthly SFR payment dropped from 9,99 per month to 4,99 per month as of Jan 1st. I can go back up to 9,99 per month and have free landline calls both national and International and some mobiles (according to the text they sent me and is only available to existing customers, it's not on their website). Data prices are also dropping like a brick which is good news as without data 'Smart Phones' are almost useless.Free will sort this out, it won't be the end of them but I suspect prices will have to go up and/or functionality of their mobile service will be restricted in some ways. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NormanH Posted January 17, 2013 Author Share Posted January 17, 2013 I think it is likely that Orange are deliberately throttling the 'service' to Free subscribers... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quillan Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 The way I read the article is that Free have used up their bandwidth with Orange and that the Orange chap said he is open to talks. It is quite possible that they are also throttling as well. One thing I have noticed in France that the bandwidth of both mobile and fixed devices suffer from drops in speed at particular times of the day. Probably not so much in the cites and big towns for fixed but out in the country. The opposite is probably true in towns with mobile devices. It's like they never anticipated so much data use in France. It will be interesting to what happens with 4G when that really starts to roll out and more companies offer it. Strange how it's only available in Lyon ad now Montpelier, you would have thought Paris would be the first city to get it. Mind you at 50 Euros a month for the pleasure of using it I can see it only attractive to business users. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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