Free ISP Market Heats Up in France

A third France-based free ISP enters the market.

ISP-Planet Staff
[April 18, 2000]

Freesbee is France's third largest free ISP. With 90,000 active accounts out of 160,000 total, it is still small, but it is making headlines. The (French) Association of ISPs (AFA – Association des Fournisseurs d'Accès et de Services Internet) defines an active account as one that has been used in the past ninety days. Thus, the number of truly active accounts (those used almost every day) is unavailable.

Having raised FF 200 million (about $30 million) in three rounds of venture finance, Freesbee has sufficient ammunition to survive the jungle wars of free ISP service.

In a truly fluffy marketing statement, Freesbee claims that it is spending FF 28 million (about $4 million) "to change the nature of the ISP simply by providing solutions for the problems encountered by Internauts (surfers)" ("de révolutionner le discours d'un provider simplement en répondant aux questions que se posent les internautes").

Basically, this means helping users deal with metered local phone calls and allowing them to access their account from several locations (i.e., home and work). And, of course, there's a portal created with myway.com, as well as numerous other content alliances.

Freesbee needs to catch up to its competitors, LibertySurf and Free. A recent article that appeared on france.internet.com showed that LibertySurf, France's top free ISP, has a significant lead over Freesbee, with about 610,000 subscribers in eight European nations, of which about 338,000 subscribers had used their account in the last 40 days.

Source
Article on Freesbee in French.

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