I'm French, and moved to the US a couple years ago. The high price and awkwardness of internet and mobile phone offers here compared to France is one of the biggest tech differences that struck me, as I always had imagined that the US would be far ahead.
I still don't own a smartphone (I use Google Voice most of the time at home/work, and a pay-as-you-go phone the rest of time), because the offers and price just don't make sense to me.
It's clearly a market that's ripe for disruption, and there are a couple interesting and promising startups in that space, although I'm not sure how likely it is to change given the huge monopoly and control the carriers have consistently had.
Well, your question includes the answer itself. The US is not the anomaly, France is and for a very specific reason: Free.
France would have been in the exact same situation as the US if Free had not been a disrupter. Free isn't the natural byproduct of the sane telecom environment that existed in France at the moment of its inception. It's rather an initiative championed by very very smart people, with very decent ethics.
So the question isn't so much, why the US (and Canada) have such gouging prices, but rather what could be done to recreate the Free experiment there.
No, US is the anomaly, since other countries in Europe have better/cheaper offers both for mobile and fixed connections (dsl,cable,fiber). I agree with the poster above, the US mobile and broadband offers are a joke and for that reason I also use a cheap prepaid and make most of my calls through voip.
Initially coming from Europe, I started with a ISDN line at 128kbit/s about 14 years ago and 9k6 mobile connection through a cheap gsm phone with internal modem (it accepted AT commands and I built a simple adapter to connect to my laptop).
Later on I migrated to cable at roughly twice the speed and for the past ten years had increase in speed and same or price reductions due to competition (3g, dsl, fiber).
Now for the same monthly payments I have here in the US, over there I have 3 times the bandwidth over cable, and this service also allows me to purchase a cheap USB dongle to use the same subscriber account for 3G mobile data access.
Not only that, the increase in speed has been mostly non-existent for the years I've been in the US, although living in a large and densely populated city...
Do not forget that France Telecom had at the time of opening the market the best network in Europe with a totally homogeneous DSLAM setup and incredibly good backbone. With the rules to force FT to open its systems to the other players, it was possible for them to piggy back on the best network, offer an incredibly good quality of service for very cheap while at the same time build their own network.
So, you can thanks the ARCEP and FT.
In Germany this was not the case and the quality over the country varies a lot. If you are lucky you have as good or better than in France, if not you have a 1 Mbps connection.
In other parts of Europe we don't have Free, and still prices for mobile and internet (speed might be better in a lot of areas as well, especially considering the price/speed ratio) are way more convenient, AFAIK.
France is still one of the cheapest country for landline internet (the standard price is ~30 EUR/month for 20+ Mb/s, with unlimited landline calls and tv).
In The Netherlands an all-inclusive package starts at 37.50 Euro per month (20MBit DSL-only subscriptions are around 20 Euro per month). Extra bandwidth is also relatively cheap, I am on a 120/10 MBit [1] cable connection (with TV and telephone) for 67 Euro per month.
There is also healthy competition, most ISPs offer comparable prices, except for one ISP (XS4All) who use their reputation from their glory years to overcharge royally.
[1] In practice I usually get speeds between 120 and 130 MBit downstream.
France from what I hear is ahead, but the UK, Italy, Germany and Ireland that I know of are nowhere near as backwards as the US in respect of mobile access.
> It's rather an initiative championed by very very smart people, with very decent ethics.
Let's not go there! Niel, founder of Free, did it all "for the lulz". His favourite passtime as an engineer founder is to take a market, build a 100% better product, vastly undercut the competition and watch the competition rage, killing businesses in the process. He did exactly this with all his former businesses, starting with Porn services on the Minitel, and was even sentenced to deferred jail time for misuse of company asset.
The part about him doing it "for the lulz" was never officially acknowledged. With that said, French media have nicknamed him "le Trublion" which means roughly "the troublemaker", and he clearly likes it.
An example of pure trolling from Niel: as a justification for why he invested money in a newspaper in financial trouble, he said "You're asking me if I have 35 million euros? Don't take this the wrong way, but this amount is roughly equal to the daily variation of my fortune on the stock market" - "Si je dispose de 35 millions d’euros ? Je ne voudrais vexer personne, mais cette somme correspond à la variation quotidienne de mon patrimoine en Bourse."
Now I agree that businessmen should be judged on their actions. He is smart, he is good, and I like his way of dealing with things. But he was always and will always be a Troll at heart, a well-intentioned one maybe, but "very decent ethics" clearly does not accurately describe him.
- sorry for the mix-up I messed up my reply earlier.
I skimmed the first couple of articles, but other than his beginnings in porn (not a business I'd want to go into, but to be sure there are more and less ethical people there!), he doesn't strike me as someone who's either a troll or very unethical.
Your definition of trolling isn't how most people think of it. Trolls tell lies, make personal attacks, and make outrageous & false claims solely to upset other people and waste their time.
Your quote from Niel (about investing in a newspaper) shows ego, but is he lying? And even if he's exaggerating, who does that upset?
Personally, I don't like the porn history, but he gets many extra points for "causing trouble" in corporate France. I've wasted many hours of my life dealing with France Telecom/Wanadoo/Orange, SFR, and Bouygues (been through them all), and know monopolistic abuses when I see them (how about the whole concept of customer support phone calls that are more expensive than a normal call?), and I really, really do not feel sorry for them being forced to actually compete a little.
If you have better examples of "trolling", that'd help perhaps...
The thing is, you need to remember that in France, you can't talk about personal fortune/money without raising public outrage. We have an extremely special relationship with money, it is absolutely taboo to talk about how much money you make or have, and not only in public, in private too, one has to make amends when they reveal that they earn more than the minimal or (god forbids!) average wage.
Likewise, comparative advertising is illegal in France. You can't be the French Coca-Cola and feature the French Pepsi in your ads.
Anyway, let's drop the troll word. I have more quotes to provide though, maybe these will better carry the reputation of "Troublemaker".
"The thing that surprises me is that our concurrents have done nothing yet. They micro-reduced their prices by a few percents, this isn't reasonable! They have to get at it for real, they have to lower the prices for real! Start to cut right now, before we arrive! (...) Ready your communication, build some aggressive marketing plans, then maybe you have a chance to keep on existing! Right now it's a joke, you didn't lower your prices! This isn't serious!"
"I invite you to go and visit their work places, their desks, their lifestyle, look at the leaders of these companies all with their car with driver. As for me I have my cab waiting for me outside! When they no longer have all that, management in these companies will begin to improve!"
Around 7:12-7:45 in the linked video:
"This struck me as a lack of courage, I had hoped they would, at last, offer unlimited phone calls from their box. [smiles ironically] But you see, we have to deal with copycats who don't go all the way with their copying philosophy. And that's it... actors who are bad, and who even when they copy become bad because they stop copying as soon as there's something good, I personally find it very disappointing. I believe that we're in a market that has always copied us, so companies need to be brave and copy us all the way."
About Orange:
"We have a relationship of tenderness with Orange." (I'm not sure it translates the right way: he implies a relationship that's akin to a kid and his grandmother)
Illustration of his audacity & engineering background, and, well, ethics: in 1996, he launches a minitel service that would become extremely profitable (while not being related to porn): a Reverse Phone Number Lookup directory. At that time France Telecom provided a phone directory to everyone, with the first 3 minutes of connection being free. He simply wired a hundred minitels and browsed the service 3minutes at a time until he had every single person in France on his own database. There was a public outrage. There was a trial, which ended in 1998. Iliad lost and had to pay 100,000,000 Francs in fines (roughly 15 million euros, which was a lot those days) to France Telecom.
I understand your points, I think -- you're talking far more about taste than about ethics.
"Ethics" is about right and wrong -- what actions harm people on the whole, and what actions help them, why and how.
It's not directly related to obeying the law, or following rules. Making decisions that greatly help the general public at the expense of a massive corporation, especially if those actions carry risk (like the risks that come with breaking laws)... that's easily interpreted as highly ethical. I certainly don't know enough about Niel to make any judgements about his ethics either way, but your examples here don't show unethical behavior.
It's actually more ethical if he lowers his own image (by breaking strong taboos) to talk about things that need to be talked about (I'm thinking of his comments about executive lifestyles...).
As a counter-example -- think about the ethics of being a corporate industry leader, and always acting perfectly refined, but still actively screwing your customers as much as you can -- charging far more than your costs, tricking them with hidden & confusing charges, making it extremely difficult for them to get customer support or even to end their contract... is that ethical?
What made Free, and the other competitors, possible was the French FTC forcing France Telecom to open to the competition at a fair price. Once real cometition could happened, prices went down fast while speed went up.
There is no nation monopoly in the US, but many local monopolies. I used to leave in an apartment complex were the only choice for broadband was Comcast (we could not get DSL). Even in the silicon valley, we have very few options for broadband.
DSL Internet speed can be explained, according to my brother who lives in the US, with the way that local carriers segmented the broadband network by area. ISPs in the US, maybe in Canada too?, apparently benefit from a quasi-monopoly per location, whereas in France network access is national and guaranteed, meaning that wherever you are in the territory, you can subscribe to any DSL offer from any ISP as a form of public service.
As a result, in 2002, Free came up with their disruptive all-in-one 30€/month DSL box. The announcement single-handedly killed AOL France which was offering 45€/month for an inferior service, like the rest of the competition. The survivors had to align their prices, and there was much pain and rejoicing.
What I saw this morning could be history repeating itself. I wouldn't be surprised to see Bouygues Telecom (the "weaker" of the three legacy Mobile Carriers) shut down within months. However you put it, Free's offer is both superior on paper and cheaper than the competition.
I'm not sure about pricing of mobile plans compared to French ones, it was actually the opposite when I did a quick survey of iPhone plans comparing France's Orange to USA's AT&T offers, I saw something like a 30% cheaper phone and a 10% cheaper plan in the US than in France with napkin maths for taxes. One thing is for sure, we've had quadruple play offers for a while now, and the very low DSL price since 2002 helped a lot with the overall family budget.
> I'm not sure about pricing of mobile plans compared to French ones, it was actually the opposite when I did a quick survey of iPhone plans comparing France's Orange to USA's AT&T offers, I saw something like a 30% cheaper phone and a 10% cheaper plan in the US than in France with napkin maths for taxes.
Yep, France had/has very good broadband thanks to Free, but the mobile scene is one of the worst in western Europe, pretty much every country around it provides better service at better rates. The "Big Three" (Orange, SFR and Bouygues) have basically colluded to keep prices high and offers dreadfully opaque rates (to avoid easy comparisons between providers), and so far MVNOs have not managed to dent this. French MVNOs also tend to be even worse than the big tree for data.
Free has both name recognition and a very good offer probably piggybacking on the forces it built as a broadband carrier, I fully expect the big three to get pulled kicking and screaming into finally providing descent service. Or dying. That would be nice too.
I still don't own a smartphone (I use Google Voice most of the time at home/work, and a pay-as-you-go phone the rest of time), because the offers and price just don't make sense to me.
It's clearly a market that's ripe for disruption, and there are a couple interesting and promising startups in that space, although I'm not sure how likely it is to change given the huge monopoly and control the carriers have consistently had.