Which will allow the French to make savings

Orange is to out more alone in Britain. The operator announced Friday signed an agreement with BT in broadband. By this alliance, Orange outsources the management of its network to its ADSL subscribers access to the Internet. For its part, BT will resume the infrastructure of existing fixed lines of the French operator, covering about 65 of the population, to incorporate it into its own network, and 70 employees of Orange. Which will allow the French to make savings.

Orange, set to merge with T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom) in the United Kingdom, will always propose a range of high-speed Internet services under its own brand, but the connections will pass by the BT network. "We are not satisfied of our position in the broadband", commented Bruno Duarte, in charge of the strategy of Orange UK. "Our customer base is reduced and we have not achieved une good performance." But we must remain in the Internet at high speed. "So we decided our way of doing", he explained. Orange obviously prefers to focus on more lucrative, mobile telephony. Its alliance with T-Mobile is also the first mobile operator in Britain.

Loss of 300,000 subscribers

In fact, it is a bit as if in France, Free externalisait unbundling with France Telecom network. It was in December 2000 that the French company, via its subsidiary Wanadoo, put the hand on Freeserve, a provider of Internet access, in great shape at the time. He had 2 million subscribers, with access to the Internet at low flow by a large majority. Wanadoo had established approximately EUR 2 billion on the table to offer this start-up, created two years earlier... But as Freeserve had no network, it was necessary that Wanadoo, since Orange, invest in infrastructure to be able to sell the ADSL.

It did however never really worked, because of problems with the quality of service. In two years, between 2007 and 2009, Orange UK has lost subscribers 300,000 ADSL, while the market was growing. End of 2009, it had only 840.000 subscribers broadband, which related him each 18 books (20 euros) each month.

It must be said that the British market is different from the market French and very difficult for a player who is not already present in the audio-visual sector. Two players in the media, BSkyB and Virgin Media have taken a dominant position in broadband. Late last year, the first cable operator in the country, Virgin Media, there were 4.1 million subscribers to the Internet broadband. The bouquet of satellite, BSkyB, as claimed, television channels, 2.4 million. In 2005, the subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch had bought the provider of access to Internet Easynet, for EUR 310 million. These two groups sell subscriptions to broadband, often coupled with offers of television.

With these two giants, Orange, he never succeeded in imposing an offer of TV over ADSL, unlike what he succeeded in France, alongside Free and SFR. In addition to too much competition in this area of Virgin Media and BSkyB, both already present in most British homes via their television stations, the French operator often accused the poor quality of the BT copper network. As it is now up to the British incumbent operator to offer ADSL of Orange, he was not sure that this argument be used again.