French operator introduces €20 unlimited everything plan, only in France

For people living in France, 2012 is starting out with some pretty sweet news. Free, one of the many internet service providers in the country has just launched a wireless network. They have two plans, and each plan has two tiers. First up is the free plan. If you’re already using Free to watch television and/or browse the internet, you get 60 minutes of talk time and 60 text messages a month for zilch. Nada. If you’re not a Free subscriber then that jumps up to just €2 per month. The unlimited plan is where things get juicy. If you’re already a Free subscriber then €16 per month will get you unlimited everything. Voice, data, texts, literally everything. If you’re not using Free, then that jumps up to €20 per month, which is still an incredible deal when you think about it. Yes, you have to bring your own phone to their network, quit a good idea considering the fact that we have the same thing in Kenya and it cost an arm and a leg to opt for a network phone lest you ain’t got a problem with your finances…

So how these guys do it? Free’s attitude is that they’re just a data network, a dumb pipe essentially, and everything else they offer no top of said data, such as video or voice, is just extra. They also design their own equipment instead of buying off the shelf components, and most importantly they design their own setup boxes. When you sign up for Free’s internet or television services the box that they give you acts as a femtocell, meaning it routes your calls via the cellular antenna in the cable box instead of routing it over the resource constrained network. That’s really smart when you think about it. Why aren’t Safaricom, Orange and Airtel not forgetting Essa trying to sway the cable operators to make their cable boxes femtocells?

The reason I wanted to share this bit of news with you was to enlighten you about how wireless pricing works in different parts of the world. Will Kenyan operators adopt the French model? No, why should they? There’s no competition, remember as in only one monopolistic player and the other two who never get it right?