Free is a French telecommunications company, subsidiary of

Iliad The ''Iliad'' (; grc, Ἰλιάς, Iliás, ; "a poem about Ilium") is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the '' Odys ...

that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications to consumers in France. Its head office is in the 8th arrondissement of

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. ...

and it is the second-largest ISP in France. Free provides ISP services in France and in the 30

OECD The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; french: Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, ''OCDE'') is an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate ...

countries. It was the first company to offer a "

triple play In baseball, a triple play (denoted as TP in baseball statistics) is the act of making three out (baseball), outs during the same play. There have only been 733 triple plays in Major League Baseball (MLB) since 1876, an average of just over five ...

" service in France through its self-produced singular Freebox

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of si ...

, claiming to have invented the ''

box A box (plural: boxes) is a container used for the storage or transportation of its contents. Most boxes have flat, parallel, rectangular sides. Boxes can be very small (like a matchbox) or very large (like a shipping box for furniture), and ca ...

'' marketing concept in France in reference to all the other French ISPs who thereafter released "triple play"

modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more c ...

s named to include the

anglicism An anglicism is a word or construction borrowed from English by another language. With the rise in Anglophone media and the global spread of British and US cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries, many English terms have become widespread in o ...

''box'' as a suffix. These ''boxes'' provide comprehensive telecommunication services such as

high-speed internet Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...

telephone A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into el ...

and

digital television Digital television (DTV) is the transmission of television signals using digital encoding, in contrast to the earlier analog television technology which used analog signals. At the time of its development it was considered an innovative advanc ...

packages, leading Free to become the world's number one IPTV provider offering almost systematically IPTV to subscribers and optimizing it to be available on most landlines. Developing its own 3G and 4G networks, Free Mobile was launched in 2012 and became the fourth mobile network operator in France.

History

1999–2001

Free was the third ISP in France to offer

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

access without a subscription or a surcharged phone number, on 26 April 1999. Unlike its predecessors in the niche of access without subscription (

World Online World Online (WOL) was a European Internet Service Provider (ISP) which came to prominence in the late 1990s dotcom boom. Founded by Dutch entrepreneur Nina Brink, World Online's name indicated its aspiration to rival the hugely successful Amer ...

on 1999-04-01 and on 1999-04-19), Free's offer was not restricted in time or number of subscribers. In 2002, Free was the first ISP to provide a V.92 connection.

2002-2003: ADSL at a disruptive price

Since September 2002, Free contributed significantly to French

ADSL Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) is a type of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over copper telephone lines than a conventional voiceband modem can provide. ...

boom. The offer was able to launch as soon as the incumbent was forced to stop abuse of dominant position and to apply fair wholesale prices.

2004-2006: Unbundled ADSL and "triple play"

Unbundling, in France, refers to the obligation for the incumbent carrier

France Telecom Orange S.A. (), formerly France Télécom S.A. (stylized as france telecom) is a French multinational telecommunications corporation. It has 266 million customers worldwide and employs 89,000 people in France, and 59,000 elsewhere. In 2015, ...

to lease the

Local loop In telephony, the local loop (also referred to as the local tail, subscriber line, or in the aggregate as the last mile) is the physical link or circuit that connects from the demarcation point of the customer premises to the edge of the comm ...

, because it is a

natural monopoly A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming ad ...

. Although the unbundling process was intended to start by 2000, the actual unbundling process actually started at the end of 2002, after a long conflict between the French regulation authority ARCEP and the non-cooperative incumbent. Free has to pay a rental fee of €9 per month and per subscriber to the incumbent for the

Twisted pair Twisted pair cabling is a type of wiring used for communications in which two conductors of a single circuit are twisted together for the purposes of improving electromagnetic compatibility. Compared to a single conductor or an untwisted ba ...

Copper Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish ...

between the area central office and the subscriber premises. Although more expensive than the real cost of €7.63, this solution is still far more profitable than the bundled option. Since January 2003, a ''Freenaut'' has maintained an unofficial website, showing figures and graphics about Free unbundled network deployment (Free Unbundling). Another ''Freenaut'' website has provided network status monitoring maps Unbundling status and location since the end of 2003. These initiatives are made possible thanks to the transparency of Free's network: their equipment replies to ping and has a meaningful reverse DNS.

2007-present: Fiber to the home

On 11 November 2006, Free announced the deployment of a new

fiber to the home Fiber to the ''x'' (FTTX; also spelled "fibre") or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic ...

(FTTH) network for its subscribers. The initial plan's goal is to cover Paris as well as some towns in the Paris suburbs and selected neighborhoods in other French cities by 2012. By December 2007, the work was 30% finished, and the remaining work was progressing "at a furious pace". On 31 August 2007, Free updated the offer with more details. Download bandwidth shall be 100 Mbit/s and TV services shall be available for two televisions, at the same price of €29.99/month. Free has developed its own fiber network technology, called Iliad P2P, based on

Ethernet in the First Mile Ethernet in the first mile (EFM) refers to using one of the Ethernet family of computer network technologies between a telecommunications company and a customer's premises. From the customer's point of view, it is their first mile, although from th ...

and having a point to point (P2P)

topology In mathematics, topology (from the Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing ho ...

. High curvature optic fibers are manufactured by the Dutch company Draka. The

deployment Deployment may refer to: Engineering and software Concepts * Blue-green deployment, a method of installing changes to a web, app, or database server by swapping alternating production and staging servers * Continuous deployment, a software e ...

is still essentially in the horizontal phase (the vertical phase being connection to the subscriber premises), and large-scale deployment to customers is foreseen. On 26 June 2008, and the mayor inaugurated Free's FTTH network in a district of Montpellier. In March 2008,

made the commitment to cover Paris at 75% by the second half of 2009, and reiterated its goal to connect 4 million French homes to its own

FTTH Fiber to the ''x'' (FTTX; also spelled "fibre") or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic ...

network by 2012. Significant volumes of subscribers will be connected as soon as the legislative framework is in place, expected by ARCEP for autumn 2009.

Offers

Voiceband

Extent

The

Voiceband A voice frequency (VF) or voice band is the range of audio frequencies used for the transmission of speech. Frequency band In telephony, the usable voice frequency band ranges from approximately 300 to 3400 Hz. It is for this reason th ...

Dial-up internet access Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telep ...

offer counts for a very small number of subscribers currently, as 98% of French homes were eligible for

in 2006.

Pricing

Free began its activities with the famous free-of-charge Internet access, although data

phone calls A telephone call is a connection over a telephone network between the called party and the calling party. First telephone call The first telephone call was made on March 10, 1876, by Alexander Graham Bell. Bell demonstrated his ability to "talk ...

fees are not included. Another offer combines an Internet access with 50 hours of data

for 14.94

euro The euro (symbol: €; code: EUR) is the official currency of 19 out of the member states of the European Union (EU). This group of states is known as the eurozone or, officially, the euro area, and includes about 340 million citizens . ...

s per month.

Freebox offer

Initially, Freebox was the name of the Freebox device, which consists of the

Set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of si ...

and

Modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more c ...

. Because of the device's popularity and reputation, it eventually became the name of the offer. * Price: 29.99

s; * Best

broadband In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals at a wide range of frequencies and Internet traffic types, that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. ...

connectivity available for the subscriber home:

, unbundled or bundled; * "

Triple play In baseball, a triple play (denoted as TP in baseball statistics) is the act of making three out (baseball), outs during the same play. There have only been 733 triple plays in Major League Baseball (MLB) since 1876, an average of just over five ...

" (broadband bundled connection) or "quadruple play" (broadband unbundled or

connection) services; * Free-of-charge migration to better connectivity when available to subscriber; * Possibility to update the Freebox device; the upgrade price decreases with time and is free of charge after three years of subscription; * A /60

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. I ...

prefix.

Services

Internet access

;Early IPv6 deployment According to a study published by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

at the RIPE meeting in October 2008, Free is probably the largest native

ISP in the

World In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...

. By end 2008, almost all French

traffic measured in the study comes from Free customers. Free deployed the

infrastructure in only 5 weeks, from 7 November to 11 December 2007, thanks to an innovative 6rd (IPv6 rapid deployment) proposal by

Rémi Després Rémi Després (born January 16, 1943) is a French engineer and entrepreneur known for his contributions on data networking. Education In 1961–1963, Rémi Després attended École Polytechnique of Paris, of which he holds an Engineer degree. ...

. ; Wi-Fi community network In May 2009 Free reconfigured the set-top boxes to act as Wi-Fi hotspots by default. With over 3 million hotspots, it is thought to be the largest Wi-Fi hotspot network in the world during that time. They require authentication which makes them only accessible to Free's ADSL and now

mobile Mobile may refer to: Places * Mobile, Alabama, a U.S. port city * Mobile County, Alabama * Mobile, Arizona, a small town near Phoenix, U.S. * Mobile, Newfoundland and Labrador Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels * Mobile ...

customers. Their main use is thus to let customers away from home continue accessing the Internet using the ADSL connection of other Free customer within Wi-Fi range. For security reasons this access is isolated from the ADSL user's normal Wi-Fi network, and is given lower priority.

Telephone

;Included telephone calls In 2003, Free introduced unlimited phone calls at no additional price, while other phone operators or ISPs charged per-minute fees for telephone calls. Competitors have then been forced to imitate these changes, but with fewer destinations included or at an additional price. Bundled Free subscribers enjoy same free calls as those unbundled since March 2004. Calls to United States and Canada have been free of charge since December 2005. In 2006, Free and

were in conflict against an unfair increase of

Neuf Cegetel Neuf Cegetel was a French wireline telecommunications service provider and a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). It offered various telecommunications services to consumers, enterprises and wholesale customers, ranking second in the country ...

own termination tariff, aimed at undermining unlimited phone offers in France. The French regulator ARCEP then decided to apply a threshold for call termination. Unlimited free phone calls have been perennial in France since then.

Telephone services

A wide range of telephone services are provided at no additional cost, such as an online

answering machine An answering machine, answerphone or message machine, also known as telephone messaging machine (or TAM) in the United Kingdom, UK and some Commonwealth countries, ansaphone or ansafone (from a trade name), or telephone answering device (TAD), ...

ringback tone Ringing tone (audible ringing, also ringback tone) is a signaling tone in telecommunication that is heard by the originator of a telephone call while the destination terminal is alerting the receiving party. The tone is typically a repeated cade ...

customization,

call transfer A call transfer is a telecommunications mechanism that enables a user to relocate an existing telephone call to another phone or attendant console, using a transfer button or a switchhook flash and dialing the required location. The transferred c ...

caller ID Caller identification (Caller ID) is a telephone service, available in analog and digital telephone systems, including voice over IP (VoIP), that transmits a caller's telephone number to the called party's telephone equipment when the call is ...

, inbound and outbound call filtering,

conference call A conference call is a telephone call in which someone talks to several people at the same time. The conference call may be designed to allow the called party to participate during the call or set up so that the called party merely listens into ...

s, and

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio w ...

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production ...

SIP. Since April 2007, each customer has been assigned a fax number in addition to the traditional phone number. This additional

line Line most often refers to: * Line (geometry), object with zero thickness and curvature that stretches to infinity * Telephone line, a single-user circuit on a telephone communication system Line, lines, The Line, or LINE may also refer to: Art ...

is dedicated to the online faxing service.

Television

IPTV leader

According to a study published in 2008 by Light Reading, Free is ''by far'' the largest

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded med ...

carrier in the

. This fact is also confirmed by the TV Markets Quarterly Monitoring.

ARDP protocol creator

Access rights of television channels are applied securely without requiring any

smartcard A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC or IC card) is a physical electronic authentication device, used to control access to a resource. It is typically a plastic credit card-sized card with an embedded integrated circuit (IC) c ...

, thanks to the ARDP protocol created by Free and submitted to the community through the IETF.

Freebox device

The sole property of Free, the Freebox device is loaned to the customer for the duration of the ADSL contract. More than a simple ADSL modem, it is the primary conduit through which Free provides many of its services. It also replaces many devices that customers may otherwise have to purchase and thus provides added value of its own. Customers wishing to use newer models — such as the Freebox Revolution — must pay an extra fee. The latest revision is actually composed of two parts: * A 'Server' device which houses an ADSL / optical fiber modem, 4 port gigabit switch, 802.11n/b/g Wifi access point/hotspot, powerline networking, router, 250GB NAS (extensible through USB and eSATA), wired and

DECT Digital enhanced cordless telecommunications (Digital European cordless telecommunications), usually known by the acronym DECT, is a standard primarily used for creating cordless telephone systems. It originated in Europe, where it is the common ...

wireless phone base,

UPnP Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices to seamlessly discover each other's presence on the n ...

media server and more. * A 'Player' set-top box which acts as an HD DVB recorder (using the Freebox Server NAS), TV over internet player,

Blu-ray The Blu-ray Disc (BD), often known simply as Blu-ray, is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released on June 20, 2006 worldwide. It is designed to supersede the DVD format, and capable of s ...

player, gaming console equipped with a gamepad and motion sensing remote, web browser.

Other services

* Unlimited Email addresses (1 GB each), web GUI based on Zimbra Collaboration Suite * 10 GB personal pages (

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

, web tools such as

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP, hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported secure hypert ...

) * Large file exchange (up to 10 GB) with features such as

online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed "on line" o ...

movie player, etc...

Corporate affairs

Market share

Since August 2008, the parent company