This was to be expected for a long time and it only hit the wires this morning just before the opening bell at Euronext. Free (Iliad), the creative and innovative French ISP, has just announced they are buying Altitude Telecom, the only operator in the country with a Wimax license.
Free is the equivalent of the italian FastWeb, having been the first on the market to introduce fast broadband, then ADSL2+ with a 20Mb/s speed (ATM), also the first with VoIP, the first with TVoADSL, the first cool set-top box on the market (the freebox v4), etc. And they have consistently marketed their services at a unique price point, 29,99euros/month, refusing to enter the price war others ISPs were playing. They are now 2nd on the market. I guess they’ll use Wimax for 3 things:
- use for line-of-sight backhaul communications for their infrastructure: might bring down their costs, although they already have their own infrastructure
- extend their presence to those areas that don’t have fiber (see above), and complement it with either a normal DSL communication afterwards, or a WiFi communication
- in more dense areas, offer an alternative to 3G for phones, PDAs and laptops.
Altitude Telecom is a small operator offering a number of services. A couple of years ago, they got a license for a radio local loop, and through some players dropping out, was left with the only available national Wimax license in the country. As fas as I understand, the French telco authority ARCEP launched a consultation at the end of last year about how to allocate the only OTHER spectrum available. Their choice is to break it up regionally. Hence the Altitude Telecom license gets some interest, doesn’t it.
Expect Free’s stock price to go up in the upcoming hours.
Update: here’s the result at the end of the day (I posted at the opening bell this morning):
