Free, the hot broadband provider of France, just released their latest numbers.
They now have 1.3 million ADSL subs, of which almost 900k are on unbundled lines. Free have kept their overall 17% ADSL market share, and 43% market share of unbundled lines.
They are innovative and profitable. For 30 Euros/month, you get blazing 20 mb/s ADSL2+, unlimited local and national telephony, 80 digital TV channels with option to get 200 channels, and a bunch of digital radio stations. All this is delivered in a single box that plugs into your TV, can plug into your home stereo, and has built in Wi-Fi to talk to your computer.
This service is SO unbelievably further ahead of what is currently being offered by its competitors and even neighboring countries like Spain, the UK, and Germany.
With this in mind, I dedicate this post to the management of Carphone Warehouse in the UK, and implore them to buy Iliad, the parent company of Free. Let me repeat that in bold: Carphone Warehouse, if you’re listening, please acquire Iliad. You have been boldly expanding throughout Europe. You are an innovative company that is achieving great success with your TalkTalk product, but even you must recognize that long-term TalkTalk as a standalone voice product doesn’t have a great future. You know that voice will be bundled with ADSL, the way Free is doing it today. You must surely see that buying Free would give you amazing technology to complement the Europe-wide retail, marketing, and distribution network you’ve built up.
If you don’t move fast….someone else, someone with much less competence (of which there is a rather long list of candidates in the telco industry), might beat you to it and ruin it for us consumers.
