I'm on T-Mobile and have no idea who Iliad are. Should I be excited or scared?
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.
They do provide some very nice hosting [ Online.NET ] if you are looking for dedicated servers. ;)
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?
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.
I've had really good experiences with Tmob customer support, so I get aprehensive when there is acquistion talk.
You do know that T-Mobile is German, yes? [1]
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.
Not that bad, not that great, and its developers are underpaid ;) (I was one of them).