Yankee Group: The “Free” Miracle: How Your Unbundling Costs Pay for Your FTTH Deployment

Disruptive altnet Free (Groupe Iliad) has been rocking the French market for the last decade. Back in 2006, Free announced that it would be rolling out fiber to the home, and that it would pay for itself in six years then generate huge amounts of cash. Yankee Group has dissected Free’s business plan to show you how it works and how it can be replicated.

On March 19, 2009, broadband player Free (Groupe Iliad), the second player in the French market behind incumbent Orange, presented its annual results. Anyone expecting “economic crisis” news was in for a shock: Free announced a 17 percent organic increase in broadband customer numbers, a 1.7 percent increase in ARPU and a 44 percent increase in net income. These numbers don’t account for the customers added through the acquisition of Telecom Italia’s subsidiary Alice in late 2008. ...

Keywords

FTTH, Free, deployment, unbundling, payback, broadband, gross margin, business model

Pages
Publish Date & Author(s)

April 2009
3 pages
Benoit Felten
Principal Analyst