MuniWireless

Last Friday in Paris, the French regulator ARCEP held a press conference to announce that Iliad-Free will be the new mobile operator in France. It has taken five years for the French government to bring a fourth operator market because of strong opposition from the other incumbents, France Télécom-Orange,  SFR and Bouygues.  ARCEP had no other choice because Iliad-Free was the company to respond to the second RFP which was issued on 3 August 2009 (two years after the first…

Jean Louis Missika, a deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of technology, has wasted no time in taking advantage of the end of the “fiber war” among the four major operators in France (Iliad-Free, France Télécom, SFR and Numéricable). He brought them together the to sign a “charter of good conduct” whose aim is to install fiber optic networks in all social housing units in Paris. The fiber network will deliver up to 100 Mbps to about 400,000 people, or…

The European Commission has endorsed the rules to be imposed by French regulator, ARCEP, on operators rolling out fiber lines into homes, regardless of whether the operator has significant market power. ARCEP wants to force all in-building operators to provide access to their fiber networks to alternative operators in order to give people a choice of competing providers of high-speed Internet access.

For the very densely populated areas, ARCEP also requires any in-building operator to meet “reasonable requests from alternative operators…

Last week, Jean-Ludovic Silicani, the new president of ARCEP, held a press conference and announced several propositions to stimulate commercial investment in FTTH deployment in France. These propositions were put together after year of tense negotiations between ARCEP, the operators and local collectives. They will be issued for public consultation in July and are expected to be adopted in the fall. If Sarkozy’s government is to meet its goal of at least 4 million households that are fiber-enabled by 2012,…

Last week as the French National Assembly debated the allocation of wireless spectrum to expand the mobile telephony market, Luc Chatel, Secretary of State for industry and consumers told legislators that the entry of a fourth cellular operator will boost the mobile market in France. The debate has been roiling the French telecom industry ever since ARCEP argued that it was better to allocate frequency to a fourth cellular operator in order to further competition and push the existing three…

Jean Claude Mallet has been appointed to succeed Paul Champsaur as President of ARCEP, the French telecom and post regulator. Many believe that this marks a new era for the regulator which has aggressively pushed for local loop unbundling and lower mobile phone charges.

Jean Claude Mallet belongs to the family who created the Bank Neuflize Schlumberger Mallet in 1667 (it is now a part of ABN AMRO). After classical studies in literature at the elite Ecole Normale Superieure where he…