When a company that has been thought of as entirely a 3rd string wireless operator, says it has an IPTV system, people should sit up and take note, which is what happened this week when Bouygues Telecom in France announced its IPTV service.
There are several strange things about this, not only that it owns no fixed lines, but also that it is launching into the most crowded and aggressive IPTV market in the world, with Orange, Free and Neuf Cegetel lined up in the telco, DSL, corner while a single major cable operator in Numericable is revitalized in cable.
Bouygues’s basic offer costs €39.90 a month (around $51) and has 51 TV channels and broadband access is included in the bundled price, as is fixed line telephony, and the basic price also includes three hours mobile phone credit. It includes all the usual popular French channels and an introductory offer of 6 hours of talk time a month for the same price is valid until January. For another €9.90 a month it will add another 24 channels, including many of the music stations. As far as we can see this offer is competitive with Free and other French services which are around €30 for a triple play, where the TV is free.
The broadband lines are clearly ADSL2+ because the fastest speed offered is 20 Mbps, but it remains a mystery just where those broadband lines have come from. It talks about a home gateway called the BBox, and this seems to be a DSL device. So the likely story is that its attempted purchase of Completel just over a year ago, which resulted in a partnership and reseller agreement for ADSL lines ‘ initially targeted at businesses – is now ready for domestic broadband.
Completel was the third largest business to business telecommunications operator in France with a national backbone and a DSL network with 600 exchanges in 110 cities. It also offers fiber. Completel then got its acquired by Altice in partnership with private equity group Cinven.
It just so happens that Cinven has control of the leading French cable operator Numericable, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see a quad play coming out of Numericable, based on Bouygues’s wireless offering. Similarly the Numericable cable could, in the future, be used to supplement the coverage of Bouygues once its cable is all digital and using DOCSIS 3.0 connectivity, although it would need a completely different home gateway design for this.
France already has around 16 million ADSL subscribers, and the market is semi-saturated.
Already Bouygues and Numericable have worked together to produce an MVNO sold as part of the Numericable bundle, which gives the private equity owned Numericable a strong quad play bundle offering against the telco based offerings.
Just last week Bouygues had a big set back in the European courts when its appeal was turned down in a case it brought when it did not get a 3G license because the price was too high. The companies which bid and won the 3G licenses later had the price halved, and at that price Bouygues said it would have bid. There were 4 licenses up for grabs and only two issued. The case pushed the idea that by halving the fee, Orange was being subsidized illegally by the state, a notion that has now been rejected.