Erenis

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

~ the last words ~

Erenis was created in Paris in October 2002 to do something no French operator had done: build an access network with no France Télécom copper underneath it anywhere. The method was Fiber To The Building. Fiber went into the basement of an apartment block, and from there the signal climbed to the flats over the telephone wiring that was already in the walls, run as VDSL and later VDSL2.

That choice is why the company existed at all. Pulling fiber into every flat in a Haussmann building is a negotiation with a landlord and a year of work; reusing the risers turns the same building into a customer in weeks. In May 2003 Erenis signed a framework agreement with SAGI, a large Paris social landlord, covering around 40,000 dwellings. By the last day of 2005 it had connected 950 buildings holding 27,000 dwellings in ten arrondissements, and by the end of 2006 it was selling in twelve.

Money arrived in the usual order. A round of 22.5 million euros closed on 9 February 2006, the Caisse des Dépôts put in another 5 million that summer, and the first triple play offer with television went on sale at the end of May. Then the incumbents noticed fiber.

~ the record ~

~ bought for the doorways ~

Neuf Cegetel announced on 20 February 2007 that it had agreed to take control. Erenis offers came off sale immediately and the network was folded into a product called 100% NeufBox fibre optique. The purchase of the whole company completed on 2 April, and Neuf's own release that day is unusually clear about what it valued: the expertise in negotiating with building managers, and in deploying infrastructure inside the buildings themselves.

The sellers were a row of French funds, Iris Capital and Crédit Agricole Private Equity among them, together with the Caisse des Dépôts and Net Partners, which had helped found the company and backed it from 2003. Daniel Caclin, running Erenis at the end, said the sale gave them the means to go faster. Neuf said the combination would take it past 100,000 connected dwellings in Paris and that an offer at 29.90 euros a month was coming in April.

~ the year after ~

The brand went quietly. The Internet Archive has erenis.fr serving its own homepage as late as 6 April 2007 and returning a redirect by 7 July, which matches the French account that the site was switched off in favor of Neuf's fiber page on 1 July. On 12 February 2008 a letter went out to the remaining subscribers telling them that if they did not migrate they would be disconnected on 31 March for technical reasons, which is when the last Erenis customers actually left.

~ what 2006 looked like from here ~

A fiber line reaching into a Paris flat in 2006 was not a thing I could picture from Ankara. The line at home was a few megabits of TTNet ADSL and that already felt like an upgrade worth paying for, measured against the modem years. VDSL over in-building copper was never exotic engineering. The scarce thing was a company willing to spend years talking to building managers, and that work only pays back in a city dense enough to make one basement worth a hundred customers.

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