Prepaid data/voice SIM for France

[Motel75]

Originally Posted by vegemite

Well makes me glad we're spending the least time in France if this is their attitude. I suspect there is more to it than that. What about 'Orange'? I heard they were ok? Must be some socialist thing they have going on where everything is expensive.

Orange was indeed OK, when it was an innovative British company competing hard against three others - among other things, it was one of the first mobile providers to provide billing by the second, semi-reasonably priced overseas calls, free calls on weekends, etc. It was also perhaps the first provider anywhere to have a "wacky" name and corporate identity - think how boring it would have been to call it its original planned name, MicroTel.

However, in 1999 Mannesmann bought it, which would probably have ruined it by itself, except that Vodafone then felt stabbed in the back by this and bought Mannesmann, and then had to divest Orange, so it chose a) a company that was willing to overpay in cash and b) a company that was likely to be as weak a competitor as possible. Enter France Telecom, which then rebranded everything as Orange (good thing it's a French word, too). And surely enough, the introduction of the Orange brand to replace Itineris was not accompanied by any of the neat innovation that Orange had been responsible for in the UK. So France remains a market dominated by one state-connected provider with two other firms unwilling to jeopardize their "cash cow" operations by, you know, trying to compete on price or services (which would probably be immediately undercut by Orange, so why bother?). It's a shame, because France has long had one of the lowest mobile penetration rates, along with the lowest SMS and data use rates in Europe.

As for "some socialist thing", France also has a "fourth" state-owned network to provide coverage in rural areas, something that the market has had no problem delivering everywhere else.