It won’t return soon. This is France, which has a record of clinging to its own technology and missing the boat on the next wave. In 1991, France fell in love with the Bibop, a cheap, uniquely French mobile phone, and as a result was relatively slow to take up the modern cell phone. In 1983, France rolled out the Minitel, a gizmo that attached to the phone and allowed for online text searches, communication and purchases, but its domestic success became a serious drag on innovation. When the Internet began to catch fire in the early ’90s, France stuck to the online device it knew, dropping protections for the Minitel only in 1998. Today France remains perhaps five years behind in the Internet revolution, and appears poised for a similarly delayed entry into the Wi-Fi age. “We sometimes have a hard time imagining that things can be done differently,” says Philippe Montubert, founder of the Internet think tank Cyberple Lyon. “And when we invest a lot we don’t want to say that we were mistaken. Abroad they call this ‘arrogance.’ I am French, so I won’t say that.” France already appears to have fallen behind the Wi-Fi leaders. The International Telecommunication Union’s digital access index (measuring variables like education and affordability) says that France is on a par with Slovenia. Companies are in the process of planting Wi-Fi antennas around Europe, so an exact count is difficult, but a new Wi-Fi hotspot guide places France ninth in the world with just over 305 hotspots–behind the U.K. (2,342), Germany (683), Sweden (435) and even tiny Austria (328).
France is an also-ran despite advantages that should put Paris in the Wi-Fi vanguard. Paris Metro tunnels are laced with fiber-optic cable, which can be hooked up to Wi-Fi antennas. The city is small–one third the size of London–with scores of subway stations snuggled close together; that solves one shortcoming of current Wi-Fi antennas: limited reach. The centralized French state also owns numerous buildings on which Wi-Fi antennas can be perched, eliminating the cost of renting space for them. Jean-Paul Figer, chief technology officer at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, which put on the summer test with France’s subway authority, says that a nearly continuous citywide hotspot might therefore cost as little as $10 million.
Yet, as of this summer, France had the most expensive one-hour access prices in Europe, according to a Broadgroup report. Even now, to log on through the increasing number of Wi-Fi antennas planted at Paris’s Metro-station entrances, atop phone booths on the Champs-Elyses and in luxury hotels, people must fork out 4.30 euros for an hour or 7 euros for one day.
The reason for the high costs lies in France’s centralized government and its relations to major telecom companies. Three French telecom companies–Orange (France Telecom), SFR (Vivendi) and Bouygues Telecom–borrowed heavily and paid billions of euros in state auctions for licenses on the third-generation mobile-phone technology known as 3G, which is a direct commercial rival of Wi-Fi. When it became clear the companies might be crushed by 3G debt, the government forgave most of it in exchange for a smaller cash payment and a share of future revenue. In essence, the government took a direct stake in the success of 3G. That, critics say, is why the state has been slow to promote Wi-Fi, which can theoretically carry voice calls free of charge–a direct threat to all the big telecom companies. Montubert says, “They are counting on the direct revenue from 3G’s being more than the indirect revenue from Wi-Fi.”
French mobile-phone companies deny that there is any tacit conspiracy to slow the advance of Wi-Fi. They say the technology is limited by its own shortcomings–for example, that one must be sitting near a hotspot to use it. They also doubt it will ever offer clear mobile-phone connections. At best, they say Wi-Fi will compliment 3G, which is theoretically much more mobile, and they aim to profit from both. The large operators led by Orange are investing in Wi-Fi–but won’t say how much. In June, the big operators signed an agreement on opening access to hotspots, for a fee. They also say that smaller new rivals, of which there are more than a dozen in Paris–are welcome to take part in the deal.
It may well take a giant like France Telecom, with all the contacts of a former state monopoly, to finesse the obstacles to building a broad Wi-Fi network. It takes some doing, for example, to install antennas at Paris’s classic Metro entrances, which are defined as national monuments.
The government is only slowly removing itself as an obstacle. Last summer it dropped the demand that municipalities receive special federal permission to install Wi-Fi antennas. In the fall the government put forward its first relatively meek plans to set up Wi-Fi hotspots at universities–two years after Germany launched a far more ambitious program. And until November 2002, the government had a ban on the use of Wi-Fi frequencies outdoors, arguing that the military needed time to vacate the necessary radio frequencies. Wi-Fi hookups couldn’t even be considered until after that date. “It was a strange logic,” says Figer. “We had to ask, ‘How do we stop the band waves at the window?’ " In recent months, the falling government barriers have sucked more than a dozen new companies into the Wi-Fi market. Telecom entrepreneur Rafi Haladjian set up a company called Ozone and is now testing Metropolitan Area Network connections in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, offering free wireless service through large antennas. When the system is perfected, Ozone will charge between euro 12 and euro 15 for unlimited monthly access, he says. “When you see all of the advantages of Wi-Fi, it is hard to imagine how 3G can survive,” he says, noting the possibilities of interlinking telephones, cameras, MP3s, Walkmans. “They can delay things, but that is all. Globalization is a big factor. France can’t be the only country that doesn’t have Wi-Fi.”
Haladjian, too, harks back to the precedent of the Internet in the early 1990s, when he made his fortune in France. “We took a system that wasn’t made for voices, or transferring photos or video, but people figured out how to do it. The same thing is happening with Wi-Fi. And when everyone uses it, it will be cheap.” Still, that moment is likely to come in many other capitals before it arrives in Paris.
