Tag: n-play communications service

Freebox Ultra now the technical hallmark for home broadband routers

Article

Freebox Ultra router and extender press image courtesy of Iliad Free

Freebox Ultra Wi-Fi 7 router being defined as the cutting-edge for carrier-supplied customer-premises equipment for home networks

The Freebox Ultra’s First Test: Wi-Fi 7 Surpasses Expectations – GAMINGDEPUTY

French language / Langue française

Freebox Ultra : pourquoi elle est devenue rapidement une référence technique | Freenews.fr

Test de la Freebox Ultra : notre avis complet sur la box Internet de Free (frandroid.com)

My Comments

The competitive telecommunications and Internet market in France has led towards some exciting equipment being offered has led to the local telecommunications providers offering customer premises equipment way above the average for this class of equipment.

One firm I have given space to a lot on this site is Iliad who run their “Free” Internet service in France as something that raised the bar for value there. They ended up offering a highly capable piece of equipment in the form of the Freebox Révolution with a highly-capable router / NAS unit / DECT cordless-telephone base station in one Phillippe-Starck-designed box and a “décodeur” set-top box with Blu-Ray player in another similarly-designed box. It even ended up with features like “box-to-box” or “client-to-box” VPN support, software-defined Wi-Fi 5 support and a gyroscopic remote control and both devices benefited from continual firmware upgrades that offered new functionality.

Freebox Révolution - courtesy Iliad.fr

Previously, the Freebox Révolution was defined as the cutting edge for this class of hardware

Now Iliad have taken things further with the Freebox Ultra which is usurping the role of the Freebox Révolution. This, like the Freebox Révolution uses fibre optic as the WAN connection but can work at 10 Gigabit speed, allowing for a competitive 10G Internet service courtesy of Free.

There is an extraordinary local network offering with a Wi-Fi 7 4-band access point with two streams for all of the bands. This media network is protected using the latest WPA3 security specification and there is the ability to steer client devices to the best band to work with. As for the wired network, this Freebox is about multi-gigabit Ethernet all the way with a 10 Gigabit SFP connection and four 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet sockets as a switch.

The CPU in this Freebox Ultra is an ARM Cortex A73 RISC CPU, something that wouldn’t look out of place in smartphones, tablets or the connected car. Here it is about using less power to handle a lot of data and offer a rich user interface. A user can install a NVM3 2280 SSD stick in to this router to have this work as a NAS the Freebox way with support for UPnP AV / DLNA, Apple Time Machine and other common standards. The other approach for connecting storage to this device is to use a USB-C socket with 60W PowerDelivery power for a USB hard disk or SSD of some sort.

Like the recent Freebox setups since the Révolution, this unit works on the Freebox OS which has a user interface that wouldn’t look out of place on a recent consumer or small-business network-attached storage device  or a desktop operating system’s GUI. Here, I wouldn’t put it past Free to add more functionality with a Freebox OS firmware update, even have it work with newer Wi-Fi or other network standards.

This device even comes with an extender known as the Freebox Répéteur 7 which works on Wi-Fi 7 to cover larger French homes like the “mas en Provence” so you can have continual Wi-Fi coverage through them. There is even an Ethernet connection so you could connect a wired Ethernet device to the extender or, perhaps, run a wired backhaul to the Ereebox 7.

Due to this connectivity and these capabilities, it bas been realised that the Freebox Ultra is about achieving a future-proof home network for your French home. This device is typically offered for EUR€49.99 per month with a fibre-optic broadband service that offers Internet, TV and fixed-line telephony of the kind expected in a French competitive telecommunications market.

Once you have the French telecommunications providers and AVM continually offering cutting-edge consumer-premises network equipment, it wouldn’t take long for these firms to compete with Silicon Valley and become an “Airbus” or “Arianespace” equivalent.

Raising the bar for triple-play Internet in France

Articles – French language / Langue Française Flag of France

SFR lancera une nouvelle box en septembre… pour contrer Free ? | O1net.com

SFR : une nouvelle box fibre pour septembre ? | ZDNet.fr

SFR annonce une nouvelle box ! | Ere Numérique

From the horse’s mouth

SFR

Product Page (French language / Langue Française)

My Comments

It looks like there will be a tight showdown between two of the French telcos when it comes to the multiple-play “n-box” services.

Freebox Révolution - courtesy Iliad.fr

The Freebox Révolution to be replaced with better-performing equipment soon

Free.fr did a bit of initial murmuring this month (July) about the Freebox v7 that will be surfacing on the French market in September. This is a powerful unit that can handle 4K UHDTV and is intended to replace the Freebox Révolution which was known to set the standard for carrier-supplied routers and set-top boxes.

Now SFR have made mention about a triple-play “n-box” service with hardware that is said to be on a par with, if not better than, Free’s setup. Here, this will be about improved Wi-Fi technology of the 802.11ac order, a new design and, like the Freebox, support for 4K UHDTV. This is in conjunction with more sports content and VoD content being made available to their subscriber base on 4K UHDTV.

It will be released in September, concurrently to when Free will put their new Freebox on the market. SFR want to also allow their existing subscriber base to upgrade to this new service for EUR€49 with a 12 month contract.

In the UK, British Telecom had raised the bar for Wi-Fi performance offered by a carrier-supplied wireless modem router. Could this also mean that the French telcos could join in and offer highly-powerful carrier-supplied wireless modem routers for their services as a way to compete against each other.

What is now happening is that the calibre offered for carrier-supplied home-network equipment could be another way where telcos and ISPs in a highly-competitive market could compete against each other. This is in addition to what you could get for your landline or mobile telephony service, your pay-TV service’s channel lineup or your Internet bandwidth and included services for the monthly charge that you stump up.

Two of the n-box systems in France that answer the Freebox Révolution

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.

"Triple Play Social" now in full deployment in Paris

News Links (French-language sites)

http://www.degroupnews.com/actualite/n3071-hlm-paris-sfr-fibre_optique-haut_debit.html DegroupNews (France)

My commets

Since my earlier article wbich I had moved from my older blog, SFR had taken over Neuf Cegetel. But this universal-acces “single-pipe triple-play” service has continued on and the trucks are now rolling a the HLM estates as this is being written.

Because of the high-throughput technology, companies like SFR are able to provide this kind of acess to the people.  As I mentioned earlier, it is underpinned by the European business culture which is primarily “for the people” rather than for the executives of the big companes which is the primary business culture in the USA.