Proprietary Modems 1/3 Providers

Introduction

Over the past 10 years, a digital coup has taken place in France. I remember how in the distant zero I bought 20 hours of Internet access and basically waited for page loads. And the pleasure was about 30 euros.

Then operators began to offer ADSL technology and an incredible 512 kb / s, and then 1 mb / s. And they all connected via modems from Sagem and Alcatel, which were branded providers. But in 2003, Free appeared, and offered its own modem, which went down in history.

So what is the historical and new he proposed? In this series of articles I will tell, and for a start I will outline the general situation.

Connections

Historically, in France, almost every family has a telephone line. This explains that over 95% of Internet connections go through ADSL. The speed is from 2 to 24 mb / s.

The rest are connected via FTTH and Coax, respectively. The latter exists only thanks to one operator, which at one time distributed only paid TV channels. And optics is under development for a little over two years, and is available to residents of the capital. The speed with this connection reaches 100mb / s.
So who are these providers?

Providers

The main providers are Orange (formerly France Télécom), SFR, Free, Bouygues for ADSL and Numéricable for Coax.

On Orange, less than half of the market falls, and Free and SFR are divided by less than a quarter. Bouygues and a half percent and Numeric about a percent.

Well, what are their suggestions?

Offers and service

All offers from operators are similar. All offer Internet access up to 24 Mb / s, a hundred channels and voip telephony with a phone number and unlimited calls. Below are the tariffs, between the operators the difference is 1-2 euros:

• The simplest Internet connection at 24 mb / s costs 16 euros
• Previous + Phone and HD TV costs 32 euros
• Previous + unlimited calls to mobile 38 euros
• The same as the previous one but via FTTH or cable for 41 euros. But provided that optics, or coaxial

Over 160 channels, including RTR Planeta.

Unlimited phone calls are distributed in green countries, over 100 destinations. Choosing your provider, or rather an operator, is not so simple. One of those has paid support, but technologically the coolest of all. The other has excellent support, and they will install everything for free, but some channels are not. Here the choice is for convenience and in accordance with their knowledge of IT. How do they manage to provide all this to their customers?

Modems

Since 2003, a revolution occurred when the Free provider developed its Freebox 3 in 1 modem. It connected through a filter to a telephone line and distributed the Internet via USB or Ethernet. A telephone and a TV were connected to it using a SCART chip . You could select a phone number and activate it during the day, and everything else worked out of the box. Over time, Freebox has improved including a router, wifi, print server, brandmauer, file server, etc. Other operators also began to produce their modems, followed by Freebox, came Livebox from Orange, Neufbox from SFR, BBox from Bouygues, Cablebox from Numéricable. Well, then?

Conclusion

And then, I want to describe the Freebox v5 modem that I have. And then make a comparative article of the main provider modems that are now offered to customers.

What's the point?

PS

The point is not to describe the situation, but to bring ideas to other providers. And maybe in the near future in the former union will appear the same chips.