Free

Free , company subsidiary of the group Iliad, is one of principal the suppliers of access to Internet French (third in term of subscribers high-flow, after Last nine and Orange). The network of Free (used by companies of the Iliad group) is called Proxad .

History

  • offer Internet in STN
Free has the appearance of a pioneer of the access to Internet, in France, while being one of the three first to propose as of the April 26th 1999 an access to Internet without subscription nor surtaxed number. Its predecessors on the crenel of the access without subscription were World Online (April 1st 1999), then Freesurf (April 19th 1999), but on a number of areas more limited.

This service also includes the Email (POP3/IMAP4) accessible by an interface Web IMP. Destruction of the undesirable emails, as well as an automatic classification of the emails entering various repertories (if the interface Web is used), is possible thanks to the tool mfilter. In the past, mfilter also made it possible to send an automatic answer personalized to the declared shipper of the refused emails. This possibility was removed between the 23 and the 26 August 2007 (without those which used it in being informed). The purpose of this suppression is to avoid the problems of buckles with the emails in automatic answer announcing that the shipper of the spam does not exist.

Free also proposes a Hébergement free Web whose initial capacity of 100 Mo passed to 1 Go since the beginning of 2005 then 10 Go since June 2006 by defect with support of and MySQL. Since September 2006, Free also proposes PostgreSQL. Moreover, Free proposes a management of plugins now making it possible to transform its space Web into Wiki, photo album, Blog… (this is currently suspended because of bugs recurring, in the future version the integration of the modules will be done directly and not a night afterwards.)

  • offer Internet ADSL

Free is also one of the French companies pionnières in the access and offer Internet by ADSL, after a chaotic beginning with the beginning of the year 2000 which was used mainly as test: at the time, the technical infrastructures and the legislature were not with go (conflict in particular with France Telecom on the Dégroupage).

  • the offer Triple Play

Free finally launches in November 2002 an offer ADSL dégroupée at a price weaker than its competitors, while adding, several months after, of the services like the unlimited telephone service (August 2003) towards the fixed ones (VoIP: Voice over IP or voice on network IP) or television (December 2003) for the subscribers profiting from the Freebox, and this without overcost of subscription. This subscription with Free High banc costs 29,99  € per month since its launching.

  • the total grouping

In 2004, Free is the second supplier of access in France to propose the total grouping, after Alice (Telecom Italia in end 2003), and makes it possible to be freed from the subscription with France Telecom. Then the offer ADSL 2+ is launched: it makes it possible to obtain an higher capacity compared to a traditional connection ADSL, remotely equalizes telephone center, and a range higher of the equipment than equal flow.

  • the offer fiber FTTH

Free launches in September 2007 a fiberoptic offer in FTTH (Fiber To The Home). 50 Mbps in reception, 50 Mbps in emission, two cases FreeBox which can receive television in HD. Optical case FreeBox, equipped with 4 ports Ethernet, integrating the functions Router and Wi-Fi. Case FreeBox HD, including a digital video recorder and being able to be connected to Optical Freebox in Ethernet or Wi-Fi. This subscription with Free High banc costs 29,99  € per month.

  • internationalization

Free has the 3 network (network traditional DWDM) private in terms of national cover and capacity. The network of Free is from now on international: it is present at Washington (the United States), London (the United Kingdom), Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Frankfurt (Germany). Although these connections are often on fiberoptics rented with important international operators (Level 3, Global Crossing…), that makes it possible significantly to reduce the associated costs with the traffic bound for the countries in which Free is from now on present.

Offers of Free

Free proposes three offers:
  • Freebox (of type ADSL or FTTH)
  • Free 50 hours (of type STN)
  • Free access (of type STN)

Services

For all the subscribers

  • Email with 100 Mo of space (unlimited number of email addresses, antispam and filters)
  • Lodging of perso pages with a space of 10 associated Go and services (, MySQL/PostgreSQL,…).

Freebox

  • Access to Internet (in FTTH, 50 Mbit/s in reception and 50 Mbit/s in emission in fibrée zone and soon 100 Mbit/s in the two directions), (in ADSL, 28 Mbit/s in reception and 1 Mbit/s in emission in zone dégroupée and 10 Mbit/s in reception and 1 Mbit/s in emission in zone not dégroupée, flows maximum ATM) and associated services (addresses fixed IP, reverse DNS, DHCP, Routeur, Wi-Fi, WoL, switch, wifi MIMO…)
  • Telephony by VoIP (unlimited towards fixed the France Telecom, numbers Freebox, and 70 destinations since October 1st, 2007) and services associated (traditional voice mail and other functionalities, count SIP, Ring Back Tone,…)
  • Television for the subscribers dégroupés thanks to the bouquets Freebox TV, Canalsat, Canal+ the bouquet, Canalplay (VOD) and services associated (Multipost Freeplayer, ,…)
  • Television on Computer open even to not dégroupés.
  • Sending and reception of telefaxes and number associated since April 25th, 2007.
  • Since Freebox HD: availability of contents HD (Roland Garros, concerts, some films, world cup FIFA), Multipost HD, digital recorder (since September 4th, 2006), TV perso makes it possible to create its clean Télévision thanks to a Caméra or another source (since June 28th, 2007)

Waiters

  • waiter POP3: pop.free.fr
  • waiter proxy: proxy.free.fr: 3128 (nonobligatory)
  • waiter IMAP: imap.free.fr
  • waiter smtp: smtp.free.fr
  • waiter NNTP: news.free.fr on port 119 (also possible access via ports 53,80,109,110,143,220,434,443,993 and 995).
  • waiters DNS: IP variables according to connections, they are given by the waiter DHCP. For example: 212.27.54.252, 212.27.53.252

Other services

Free lodges the mirrors of many free software and distributions Linux.

Free makes it possible to store a file going up to 10 Go throughout one 30 day (renewed with each remote loading of the file, the number of days depends on free space on the waiters). That can make it possible to be freed from some limiting imposed to the users of Email (this kind of service generally limits the sending of enclosures to 2-5 Mo). This service is reserved in priority with the Free subscribers, this is why there exists a limitation of band-width for very subscribed of another operator. This service is currently in experimental version beta.

The “ Fondation of Company Free ” was created the September 11th 2006 on the idea of Xavier Niel in order to deal with the new services developed by the company via Iliad. The goal is to be able to provide minimal services of communication, while benefitting from the development of FTTH. These optical networks created in the buildings thus make it possible to have a line connected to this optical system, and having of a free Connection Internet Bas flow, of a reception of the chains of TNT, and a phone line.

Publicity

Free uses the fictitious mark Crétin.fr.

Problems

Limitations

It happened that the traffic of the various networks P2P is attached at the applicatif level (what implies that fastening is not avoidable by the modification of the numbers of ports used by the applications concerned) for the not dégroupés subscribers .

For certain zones, the fastening of protocols P2P had been transformed into blocking quasi-total, opposing by this fact any legal use of the P2P like the free remote loading of Musique on Jamendo, for example, or of images ISO of Linux, setting-with-day of certain plays using the protocol Bittorrent… And is added to the list of preceding fastenings, fastenings of the software of current use, of which here a nonexhaustive list: customers of Instant messaging like MSN or Yahoo! Messenger, customers using the protocol Jabber, customers of VoIP like Skype, IRC or even the most popular network games become suddenly unusable (although the users of these plays pay a month's subscription with the editor of the play)… These problems returned in fact the normal use of Internet (in addition to the Email, navigation on the Web sites, ftp, the Newsgroups) quasi-impossible for the subscribers in this situation.

Complaints

February 21st, 2006, Free is condemned by the Court of Bankruptcy of Paris to pay: 30000 € as Dommages-intérêts with the Federal union of the Consumers - That To choose and: 15000 € with association Families of France for 32 articles in the General terms of sale of Free considered to be abusive. Free reacted by regretting the instrumentalisation of the courts by certain consumers' associations in evil of publicity and financing . More than two months later, Free informs its subscribers of the change of CGV.

In May 2006 the defense association of the consumers UFC-That To choose lance several hundreds of legal procedures against the company, following a great number of complaints of subscribers. Following a complaint against X in slandering, leaders UFC-That To choose were put in examination.

Others polemical

Free uses free software in a great number of its equipment, of which the Freebox which is lent to its subscribers: it uses Linux for its core, as well as other software under license LPG (v2), in particular for its various pilots. However, license LPG forces to publish the source code of any software based on a software under license LPG, or re-using whole or part of its code, in particular when it is distributed. But Free always refused to publish the source code of the software used by its Freebox, estimating that there was not distribution, the Freebox terminal being produced and being lent to the subscriber who is held to restore it at the end of the subscription. The customer cannot thus modify the terminal, under penalty of being invoiced at the time of the cancellation (190 € for Freebox v4, 290 € for the multi-media case of Freebox HD, 150 € for gray case ADSL of Freebox HD).

More infos

Figures

  • : 2747000 subscribers ADSL at September 1st, 2007 (of which: 2179000 dégroupés and: 568000 IP/ADSL)
  • : 4920602 principal accounts “free access” at July 18th, 2007
  • 34,5 € HT of average revenue by subscriber ADSL (subscription, phone calls, paying chains, other options)
  • : 159000 subscribers with an offer of paying TV (including Canal+ the bouquet and Canalsat)

Internal bonds

External bonds

  • Official site
  • Crétin.fr

Random links:John Flanagan | Valencian general information | Monique Thierry | Regiment Mazarin-French | Middletown (Connecticut) | Langues_Pacifiques_centrales