citéFibre

» see citefibre.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

citéFibre was founded on 12 October 2004 by Dominique Lancrenon and Arnaud Debains, with Stéphane Goerlinger running the technical side, and it got its telecom operator license from ARCEP that December. The plan was fiber to the apartment in Paris at a time when the incumbent was still selling ADSL as the future, and the hard part of that plan was never the electronics. It was the ground.

Digging up a Paris street is expensive before it is anything else, and political immediately after. citéFibre did not do it. In February 2005 it signed an agreement with the city for use of the non-road public domain, which in practice meant the sewers, and it rented the metro network from Telcité. The fiber went in through tunnels that already existed, and the first customers were connected that April at 10 Mb/s symmetric with a telephone line on top.

July 2005 brought television, which made it the first triple play over fiber sold to households in France. In October the speed went to 20 Mb/s in both directions, at a moment when a good ADSL line in Europe gave you a fat download and an upload you apologized for. The offer launched officially on 8 November 2005, and on 30 November the company announced an initial public offering on the Marché Libre.

~ the dossier ~

~ the arithmetic of five hundred subscribers ~

The peak was about five hundred subscribers, in a few dozen buildings of the fifteenth arrondissement. For twenty-five staff running their own infrastructure and a television platform on top of it, that is not a number that works. The French article puts it plainly: by the accounts, the company was not far from filing.

Iliad bought it on 20 October 2006 for 2.9 million euros in cash plus close to two million in assumed debt, against 325,000 euros of cash on hand. Iliad was building Free's own fiber network at the time and wanted the Paris civil engineering rights more than it wanted the customers. Commercial sales stopped two months later.

~ the slow unplugging ~

What followed was documented in a way that wind-downs usually are not, because the subscriber count was tracked publicly the whole way. There were about 460 internet subscribers in February 2007, and 190 of them two years later. The shop closed in June 2007 and the staff contracts ended in the same half-year, which Les Échos reported under a headline about Free quietly parting with the citéFibre teams.

The television service was switched off on 30 January 2009 and the shares were struck from the Marché Libre that April. What remained in operation by then amounted to some equipment in a room and a contract with Axione, the ETDE subsidiary that ran the active kit and supplied the IP transit.

~ the last fifty ~

On 24 January 2010 an optical node failed and a quarter of the remaining customers had no service for three days. Three days after that, Free wrote to everyone left to say citéFibre would end in April, with two free months of Freebox ADSL as the consolation. The website stopped answering at the beginning of April, the server holding the billing system was powered down on 25 June, and on 28 June Axione cut the last fifty subscribers off the fiber.

Those fifty people had the best domestic internet connection in France for five years and then went back to copper. In 2005, when citéFibre was selling symmetric 20 Mb/s into Paris apartments, the question in Ankara was whether ADSL reached your building at all and at what contention ratio, and nobody was discussing upload speeds because there was nothing to discuss. The gap did close later. It just closed from the other direction, through mobile, and not for the reasons citéFibre bet on.

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