Free goes nuclear with North Korean strategy
UPDATE (at the end!)
UPDATE2 below!
Renegade French broadband provider Free are adopting a nuclear weapons survival strategy.
They've just distributed an amazing press release. The highlights:
- Free have lab tested ADSL running at 174 mb/s down / 18 mb/s up.
[translation: we are actively seeking nuclear weapons]
- These speeds are achieved using paired ADSL2+ technology, using their existing DSLAM infrastructure, without any modifications required.
[translation: this is no joke; we've got the goods- reactors, uranium, etc.]
- There are no plans at present for any commercial deployment.
[translation: don't panic. we're not crazy enough to use our nukes, but we could if provoked]
- Deployment of this service, called F-ADSL, requires no new capital spending
[translation: haha, you capitalist (incumbent telco) swine. Go ahead, spend billions on absurd missile defense systems (or on laying fiber everywhere!). My nukes are cheap, and will cause you much more pain than yours will ever cause me]
I can only guess this is all to help Free position itself for an endgame where it both survives and wins the shift to the next generation of broadband upgrades:
1. Value boosting PR for a buyout [yo, world? Anybody wanna buy some nukes? I've got some]
2. Avoiding a damaging capex war that they wouldn't win ["look competitors, let's stick to this path- cheap upgrades to existing infrastructure; don't do the expensive fiber thing...please. I'll even wait to launch my product to give you time to catch up."]
3. Preemptively destroy any chance FT could have of doing a Verizon FIOS in France ["still thinking about that expensive fiber plan? well, don't. I'm telling the world's capital markets as of today that spending on fiber upgrades is a path that will only end in tears: You spend a billion, I spend nothing, we both offer the same product to the same customers."]
This is the asymmetric warfare that Kim Jong-Il has basically used to stalemate his much larger and better capitalized American enemy for years now. This is brilliant strategic work by Free.
UPDATE:
- Free is *slowly* starting to break out of the francosphere, and getting more attention in the English-language press: BusinessWeek has just published this good profile (although no mention of the new F-ADSL product)
- Om cites a report that Verizon is actually thinking about selling 1 meg broadband using its fancy multi-billion dollar FIOS fiber network. This is absolutely hilarious. "1 meg over fiber?"....puh-lease!...where's that "174 meg over copper"? Consumers want to know, and soon, enough, your investors will, too :)
TelcoThink is just tragic: thankfully they were never in charge of developing the automotive industry. They would have asked capital markets to support them in multi-billion dollar investments in 10-lane expressways, so that they could then sell consumers "low-cost" and "accessible to the masses" products like horse-drawn carriages and personal donkeys.
UPDATE2: Dave Burstein kindly contributes his perspective in the comments. He's looking into it, but questions how revolutionary the product really is. It seems that the key is *how many* paired ADSL2+ lines are needed to achieve that magical 174 mb/s. Free's press release doesn't say; are we talking about 2-4 lines or 10-15? It's important because the economics of the product will revolve around that number.
FYI- if you don't know Dave Burstein, he publishes by far the best newsletter on all things related to broadband (particularly good for global news and technical/infrastructure news - hence his comments are much appreciated).