Iliad confirms its interest in T-Mobile US [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Iliad confirms its interest in T-Mobile US [pdf]

iliad.fr

76 pointsdjug30 comments

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".

Thank you, that helps to put this announcement into context. It sounds like their business strategy is pretty closely aligned to T-Mobile's, so that's one less thing for me to worry about as a T-Mobile customer.

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.

Regarding the fact that they relied mostly on other operator's networks, I really don't see that as an issue (passed the initial technical glitches). It's business and as long as they sign agreements (and pay!) with other operators for their infrastructures, there's nothing to complain about. They essentially rent the infrastructure.

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 :)

Nice use of the pink there considering the founder past :D

On the 20€/month plan you get 3GB on 3G and 20GB on 4G.

The 2€/month plan: 2hours to mobile+landline on the same destinations as the other one + 50MB of 3G.

Oh, and if you're also an adsl/fibre customer, 20€ becomes 16€ and 2€ becomes 0€.

They have also popularized the idea of a no-commitment phone bundle.

Free [0] really has shaken things in France, and I'm happy to be a client to show my gratitude.

[0] www.free.fr

And you can cancel at anytime without fees.

And if you want to use more internet, or call more, or roam, or call foreign countries you can at really small prices. I have the 2€ plan that I use extensively like I'm unlimited and I usually pay 7€ per month in total.

And when I travel I can use my phone now :) the prices before for roaming were ridiculous.

As a tech saavy guy, what I always appreciated is the low cruft of their systems. Free was always trivially simple. They gave you access to simple ftp and mail servers. No need for special programs. It's not the most user friendly but it doesn't add another layer of fat on top of existing systems. Most companies wrap everything in their own shiny interfaces that will appear as added value for non knowledgeable customers, justifying the higher cost. This was something heavily discussed when they entered the mobile market. The old triumvirate tried to blackmail public opinion saying Free will force massive layoffs. But we don't need, useless branded programs, layers of hotliners, or incompetent salesmen in the first place.

They were awesome, now they give comcast like speed for youtube, apple app store update, google play store update. And there mobile offer is the worst of all.

TmoNews claims this has already been shot down.

http://www.tmonews.com/2014/07/french-telecoms-company-iliad...

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

"Iliad is a French provider of telecommunication services. It is based in Paris and its operations comprise fixed and mobile telephony services, prepaid phone cards and internet access providing and hosting services. The company was founded by Xavier Niel in 1999." -Wikipedia

That's not exactly what I'm after. Being so far removed from the country they're based in, I have no idea what the general sentiment about the company is.

How is their customer service? Are their product offerings priced competitively? Do they generally "go to bat" for their customers on issues like privacy and net neutrality?

On a scale of Google Fiber to Comcast, how do they rate?

Extremely competitive pricing, so so customer support (well, understaffed so hard to reach but polite and competent, nothing like the horror stories coming from the US).

Very simple commercial offering, little in the way of options and extra charges.

They design lots of their networking equipment, from the triple play boxes customer get to some of their core infrastructure.

They also keep their engineering in house, where the competition (Orange, SFR, Bouygues) relies a lot on external companies for about everything...

A very peculiar company, unlike any other in France, save maybe OVH the hosting giant.

(... nothing like the horror stories coming from the US).

I've had really good experiences with Tmob customer support, so I get aprehensive when there is acquistion talk.

> Being so far removed from the country they're based in

You do know that T-Mobile is German, yes? [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Telekom

Semantics and a poor choice of wording on my part. T-Mobile may be based in Germany, but they do operate in the US and are one of the most well-known cellular providers.

Yes, but they do business in the US. Aldi is German as well, but they have stores in the US so Americans can visit and form their own opinions about the brand. Not so with Illiad, so T-Mobile being owned by DT isn't relevant to the discussion.

I am not sure how it is not relevant. Tmobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom, a German company. T Mobile operates in the US and many other countries. If this offer goes through, T mobile US will be owned by Free, a French company. But it will continue to operate in the US.

I'll break it down. Generally, an acquisition implies some type of change. Not always, obviously, but usually when a company gets bought, its customers are going to feel some effects.

Now, current customers of T-Mobile know the company pretty well. They know its reputation, its quality of service, its recent history, etc. If, for example, AT&T were considering acquiring T-Mobile, these customers would have some idea of what to expect. They have all heard of AT&T, know its reputation, service, etc. So they could make some reasonable assumptions about what is going to change.

However, these customers probably haven't heard of Iliad. They don't know its reputation, its quality of service, its history, anything. So making any guesses about what this acquisition would entail is very difficult.

The locations of these companies are only relevant because they give us an idea of whether most people know anything about each company. T-Mobile is based in Germany, but that doesn't matter, everyone in the US knows them anyway. Free is based in France, which does matter because most Americans have never heard of them and know nothing about them.

Ah, I understand what you're saying right now. Still, if this offer were to go through, I'm willing to bet that 95% of Americans will not know the parent company's name - as is the case today (a shock I see on everyone's face when I tell them that T-Mobile is essentially a German company, or at least owned by one).

> How is their customer service?

Not that bad, not that great, and its developers are underpaid ;) (I was one of them).

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.

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).

Both. They are a pretty good group of people by US standards but I'm not sure they are better than the existing T-Mobile management.

They do provide some very nice hosting [ Online.NET ] if you are looking for dedicated servers. ;)

http://www.online.net/en/document-legal/legal-notices

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

Iliad is simply amazing. They've opened up dedibox.fr / 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!

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 . They're our investor and have been a pleasure to work with.

Thanks ;-)

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