[ravloony]

I remember when I got to university (Nantes, France). On my very first day, another guy said to me: "By the way if you are shopping around an internet connection, go with Free, they rock!". No other user has ever said that to me about a telecoms company. Not once.

And they did rock. It cost 29.99€ per month for 2MB/s at the time (2003), which was 4 to 20 times the competition (my brother had a 128kb/s connection, I seem to recall - it took ages to download songs from napster. It kept on getting better, too. Within 6 months I had 8Mb/s, and a year after that 18, then 24.

The modem was huge, but it told the time in letters of green, and had its own IP adress. I lived in a tiny flat in the same building as my other brother, so we trailed a network cable across the corridor - enough bandwidth for both of us. We moved to a new flat, and they upgraded the modem, or Freebox (every modem in France is now called *box)

That was one of the most successful market disruptions I have had the opportunity to witness. I think M. Niel just did it again. He's turned the leaders of a market into followers, desperately copying his every move. Watch and you'll see. They already started, trying to undercut what they thought was Free's offer with Sosh (Orange) and Red (SFR). Too little, too late. I think the market will vote with it's wallet. Things should get interesting.

[babebridou]

Official press releases from competitor Orange says (paraphrasing): "Dear customers, we will let Free celebrate their D-Day, but stay assured we will make sure to come back to you later."

All online & phone services for ending or transferring mobile contracts are of course overloaded and currently unavailable in France. FreeMobile's registration webpage (http://mobile.free.fr) has been unavailable for the past 5 hours. Figures fly on twitter, as apparently about 1.5 million people tried to access it this morning.

Streaming figures for the live keynote amount to 80Gb/seconds over 300 servers, Online.net representative @Online_fr said on twitter. Apparently 600,000 people watched the keynote live, Online.net even claimed it's a world record. (Online.net = Iliad/Free subsidiary dedicated to hosting services)

You are indeed witnessing Market Disruption - that or a highly successful launch, maybe a bit too successful :)

[baby]

The introduction of Free on the provider market was a huge disruption. We used to had crappy prices with crappy services before free came around. Actually the big one was France Télécome (Wanadoo/Orange) who is also one of the big one (or was?) in the mobile market.