France: 3G Entrant Free Disrupting Mobile Market, Pushing Competitors to Accelerate LTE Plans

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Aug 09, 2013, 11:48 ET

BOSTON, Aug. 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- French operator Iliad's entry into the mobile market, under the Free Mobile brand gained 8 percent of the market within five quarters, forcing other players to rethink their positioning, according to a new report from Pyramid Research (www.pyr.com).

France: 3G Entrant Free Disrupting Mobile Market, Pushing Competitors to Accelerate LTE Plans offers a precise profile of the country's telecommunications, media and technology sectors based on proprietary data from Pyramid's research in the market. It provides a detailed competitive analysis of both the fixed and mobile sectors, tracks the market shares of technologies and services and monitors the introduction and spread of new technologies.

Download an excerpt or purchase the report here.

New mobile entrant Free Mobile captured 5.2 million subscriptions by year-end 2012, or 7.3 percent of the market, at the expense of the rest of the players, including third-ranked Bouygues and the MVNOs, notes Ozgur Aytar, Research Director at Pyramid Research and author of the report. By 2018, Free is expected to have a 19.6 percent share. Free's service blends HSPA+, Wi-Fi and an all-fiber backbone to offer unlimited voice, texting and data for a flat fee of $25 in a market where customers would have to pay two to three times that to get something similar. This prompted the incumbent MNOs to introduce simplified plans with SIM-only or handset options. Orange, for example, reduced the number of its plans from 14 to 8, cut pricing by 20-30 percent and added new services, including customized statement, smartphone support, premium services with Internet volume and speed options for 4G access, music through Deezer, unlimited calls and cloud data storage.

France: 3G Entrant Free Disrupting Mobile Market, Pushing Competitors to Accelerate LTE Plans is part of Pyramid Research's Europe Intelligence Report Series and is priced at $990. Download an excerpt or purchase the report here. For more information, contact Jarka Justova (for those in EMEA or Asia-Pacific) or Juan Gobbi (for those in Latin America or North America).

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Pyramid Research (pyramidresearch.com) offers practical solutions to the complex demands our clients face in the global communications industry. Its analysis is uniquely positioned at the intersection of emerging markets, emerging technologies and emerging business models, powered by the bottom-up methodology of our market forecasts for more than 100 countries – a distinction that has remained unmatched for more than 25 years. As a division of UBM Tech (tech.ubm.com), Pyramid Research contributes to the only integrated business information platform serving the global communications industry.

SOURCE Pyramid Research