Vodafone, O2, Bouygues: Emerging DSL Giants

Giant_Ainu_StatueJust as we were giving up on new DSL competitors, the European wireless companies have been ramping up. Vodafone has added 1.1M fixed broadband lines in 12 months, reaching over 5M customers and investing to go after more. That includes 3.3M in Germany and 1.1M in Italy. Voda has plenty of room to grow; they have 34M mobile lines in Germany, 22M in Italy, 18M in Britain, and 16M in Spain. Voda in Germany is offering seven months free for new customers, with a price of 29,95 € for “up to 16 megabit” service + telephone.

O2/Telefonica has 22M mobile customers in Britain but only 527K DSL lines. So they are offering “up to 8 meg DSL” plus unlimited landline calls to 20 countries for £20, about $32. Their German branch is offering four months free. Bouygues Telecom, the #3 French wireless company, decided they had to offer a bundle with DSL and built a network. With a quadplay at 44 euro, including wireless, they won 100,000 customers last quarter.

Except for Italy, these deployments are all in countries with relatively strong competition policies. The pattern has been to sign on to the incumbents' resale to offer immediate coverage in most of the nation while building an unbundled network. There's no reason to think mobile carriers in countries without strong CLEC results are likely to enter the market. For example, there's no sign any of the U.S. or Canadian mobile companies are expanding fixed offerings.
Written by Dave Burstein

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