Tag: Livebox

Articles – French language / Langue Française

Orange : la Livebox fibre à moins de 20€ | Degroupnews.fr

From the horse’s mouth

Orange (France Télécom)

Product Page

My Comments

The competitive French market has underscored another first with Orange (France Télécom) offering a baseline next-generation broadband triple-play service for EUR€20 per month. This is available to people who have Orange FTTP fibre-optic connectivity in their street or building.

Here, the baseline service has a symmetrical bandwidth of 100Mb/s, which may be considered a rarity for baseline Internet services offered by most telcos or Internet service providers. There is also included 10Gb of online storage, with the option to buy on 1Tb of “personal-cloud” NAS storage using the DLNA-capable Livebox Play modem router.

The fixed-line telephone service, which is VoIP-based, has all landline calls anywhere in France and its “Départements Outre-Mer” territories and 110 other countries including the commonly-called destinations included in the package. With this service, you can even call any mobile user in the US or Canada for as long as you like without paying extra. But Algeria and Tunisia are provided as “option-on” countries as far as this package is concerned.

The TV service includes 160 channels with 40 of these available in HD, and users can have multiple TV sets supported as an option. This is alongside the ability to option-on PVR-style recording.

But Orange are offering this service as a turnkey install for new subscribers with the ability to have 24-hour access to their support lines.

The device that is considered the bub of this service is the Livebox Play which supports VDSL2 or Gigabit Ethernet on the WAN (Internet) side and 802.11a/b/g/n dual-band WPA2 WPS Wi-Fi and a four-port Gigabit Ethernet switch on the LAN (home network) side.

The fixed-line telephony service is facilitated using a CAT-iQ base station for DECT or CAT-iQ compliant cordless handsets and a traditional analogue connection for regular telephones. You can also connect USB Mass-Storage devices to the Livebox Play in order to have their data on the home network.

What this package is highlighting is the benefit of sustainable competition on a market where there is an emphasis on value rather than a race to the bottom. It also includes the ability to target “sweet-spot” price points with service packages that have increased value and pitch these packages at users who see these price points as something they won’t go above. As well, the extant telco or ISP is forced to change its ways when it comes to providing a service like multi-play Internet service.

At the moment, the question to raise is whether France Télécom (Orange) will kill this deal after 16 November this year or simply let it roll on as the entry-level fibre-based triple-play package?

Article (French language / Langue Française)

Le VDSL2 d’Orange arrive à la Réunion | DegroupNews

Orange lance le VDSL2 à la Réunion | Clicano.re (La Réunion)

My Comments

France is even working on the overseas territories like La Réunion to raise the broadband capacity there

France Télécom (Orange) are now involved in deploying a VDSL2 next-generation broadband to La Réunion, one of France’s “Départements Outre-Mer” or overseas regions. This is part of an effort to raise the bar for Internet access in these regions such as this one which is near Madagascar.

Initially the service will pass 35000 households and businesses offering them 50Mb/s bandwidth and will be a “triple-play” Livebox package known as Magick, costing EUR€59 / month. The telephony component will provide unlimited calls to landlines and mobiles in La Réunion and mainland France along with unlimited calls to landlines only in other French Départements Outre-Mer regions and 50 other countries. There is the unlimited 50Mb/s Internet along with 50Gb online storage at Orange Cloud. As well, the TV component will also include the Deezer Premium online-content service.

At the moment, the subscribers have to be 1.6km from the exchange for this to work but Orange wants to double this target by 2015. This is in conjunction with a fibre-optic effort that is taking place in Saint-Denis to raise the bar here.

Personally I would like to see one or more of the other competing ISPs that are operating in L’Héxagone (mainland France) to target La Réunion and the other DOM territories for competitive service. This could then be an effort to reduce the price of a decent triple-play service in these territories.

Articles and Resources (French language)

La Livebox Play entre en scène – Tour d’horizon de l’offre Livebox Play – DegroupNews.com (Review)

La Box by Numericable (Interactive Advertisement by Numericable)

My comments

After the Freebox Révolution had appeared on the French market as a highly-credible piece of carrier-provided consumer equipment provided as part of a triple-play service, the bar had been raised for such equipment.

For example, the décodeurs i.e. the set-top boxes had become fully-capable video peripherals that integrate a slot-load Blu-Ray 3D player and provide the existing TV set with full smart-TV abilities. This even includes games-console functionality with access to a carrier-hosted app store for these games. Some of the remote controls that come with the set-top equipment have “out-of-the-ordinary” control methods like gesture-based control and RF controller-STB link, with some offering the HDMI-Consumer-Electronics-Control functionality so you can control your flatscreen TV’s source-selection, volume and power wit these remotes.

As well, the n-boxes i.e. the gateway devices are equipped with a network-attached storage based around an integrated hard disk. These would work to the common file-presentation protocols like SMB/CIFS, FTP, HTTP, iTunes (DAAP) and DLNA while offering functionality that a mid-tier consumer NAS would offer like a download manager / torrent server. Even the way the carriers have the gateway devices styled carries the message that they don’t look like your father’s old station wagon.

I have previously covered on HomeNetworking01.info the ability for French-market Samsung Smart TVs to work with Le Modem  which is part of Orange’s LiveBox Play package.

Numericable’s La Box package is an all-in-one device which connects to their FTTN / DOCSIS cable-modem service. But this device has the cable modem, router, VoIP gateway, NAS, PVR and Blu-Ray functionality in the one box. This setup even uses the QR codes as one of its methods for securely enrolling smartphones and tablets to the Wi-Fi wireless network segment.

The LiveBox Play gateway device, henceforth known as Le Modem, implements things like an OLED customer-information display and uses 3 WAN options – VDSL2, ADSL2 and fibre-to-the-premises.

There are others like the Bbox Sensation which also are equipped with the similar functionality but it would be interesting to see who else would run with similar hardware that has this high level of functionality or raise the stakes further through the firmware update cycles.

Similarly it would be interesting to see whether these devices just appear within France or appear in other markets where there is real competition on the Internet-service front.

Article – French language

La TV d’Orange débarque sur les Smart TV de Samsung – DegroupNews.com

My Comments

France has become the first country to bring to the mainstream one of the key pillars for Internet-driven TV. This pillar is for an IPTV or single-pipe triple-play provider to allow us to gain access to their Internet-driven TV service without the need for a set-top box to be supplied by them and for this practice to be seen as becoming mainstream.

Here, people who subscribe to the Livebox service provided by France-Télécom (Orange) and own a recent Samsung smart TV view the baseline TV package for their triple-play service just by using the Samsung TV’s remote control.

This will require the user to perform a firmware update through the TV’s menus. You may have to “press the “Menu” button to bring up the “Assistance” option then bring up the “Firmware update” (Mise à jour de logiciel). Then you have to select the “On-line” (En ligne) option to draw down the firmware via the home network. Here, the set will show up the Orange TV options on its Smart-TV menu when you click the “Smart” diamond on the remote. A question that I would have is whether Samsung is intending to roll this out to the Blu-Ray players and home-theatre systems that have the integrated Internet-TV functionality because these devices would be used to “extend” this functionality to cheaper and older TVs.

At the moment, this will yield the baseline channels but Orange want to take this further with their premium, catch-up and on-demand services. As Orange liaise with other smart-TV platforms to roll this method out to the other platforms, this could become a chance to prove to the IPTV scene whether the smart TV can become the control surface for pay-TV. Here, smart-TV integration only works well with broadcaster-developed video-on-demand front-ends or a smattering of “over-the-top” video-on-demand and subscription-video services which aren’t heavily promoted.

In the US, the FCC could place high value on this concept if all the smart-TV vendors come to the party, as a way of “liberating” the American cable-TV subscriber base from the control of the cable-TV companies. Here, this could be facilitated with a broadcast-LAN gateway for cable-broadcast / satellite-broadcast services as well as this interface for selecting broadcast, recorded-broadcast, online and on-demand material.

Who knows what this could mean for IPTV as the increased number of Smart TVs and video peripherals become increasingly available through the retail channel and the home network becomes a mainstream requirement for the average household.