Freesurf

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

~ the goodbye ~

Free UK Internet Limited was formed in London on 30 December 1998 to sell dial-up access with no subscription, and it left the running of the network to Claranet. Its French subsidiary, a SARL named Freesurf, was registered on 23 March 1999 with the legal minimum of 50,000 francs in capital. To launch it Free UK picked Pierre Mick, who had opened a cybercafe and a small access provider in Perpignan in 1994 under the name La Gare Interactive.

The service opened on 19 April 1999, at first for the Paris region only. That month was when France got its free providers. World Online went first, and Free and Liberty Surf announced the same kind of offer within weeks. "Free" meant the British model: no monthly fee to the provider, while France Télécom went on billing every minute online as a local call. Sign-up asked for no credit card. There were unlimited mailboxes and a support line open around the clock, reachable only by email.

In 1999 I was a teenager on dial-up in Turkey, where the provider charged a subscription and the phone company charged the minutes on top. French users had one of those two bills removed that April. Nobody made me the same offer.

What Freesurf held back at launch was personal web pages, because of the Altern ruling. On 10 February 1999 the Paris court of appeal had held Valentin Lacambre's free host liable for photos that one anonymous member had posted, at a cost of 405,000 francs. Growth was quick regardless. One French history of providers counts 140,000 subscribers in four months. The company announced more than 435,000 in March 2001 and claimed 500,000 that November.

~ the chronicle ~

~ 100 francs, evenings and weekends ~

On 19 April 2000, a year to the day after opening, Freesurf launched a flat rate that included the phone time. It cost 100 francs a month with the first month free, and it applied from 7 p.m. to 8 a.m. on weekdays plus the whole weekend. To keep the lines from choking, every port was blocked except the ones for browsing and messaging, so FTP downloads were out, and so were chat clients like IRC or ICQ. Mick, by then the technical director, said the company did not want a few users overloading the network with video downloads.

Rivals with looser rules collapsed first. OneTel cut off close to 4,000 of its unlimited customers on 21 July 2000, and when its offer ended on 19 August the refugees came to Freesurf. At the end of August Freesurf disconnected about 500 of its 30,000 flat-rate users for breaking the conditions. In early October it suspended sales. In May 2001 the last subscribers got a registered letter saying their plan would not be renewed. The company's explanation was that the offer had attracted the heaviest consumers from the first day and that its forecasts of average use had been, in its own word, pulvérisées. Mick had already left at the start of that year.

~ one symbolic euro ~

Freesurf did sell ADSL. In late October 2001 it offered 768 kbit/s for 295 francs a month, faster than France Télécom's own Netissimo line, but it would not subsidize the modem, which cost the customer another 1,184 francs. By February 2004 its ADSL plans were named after golf scores, from Birdie up to Albatros. None of it bought market share.

In October 2006 Freesurf was counted among eight small providers that together held 1.1 percent of the French access market. On 4 June 2007 Free UK sold all 5,000 shares of the SARL to Claranet's French company for one euro. Claranet Group decided on 15 May 2008 to dissolve it, and the official gazette of 28 September 2008 lists Freesurf as without activity from 16 May. The name lived on as a Claranet trade name until that too was struck from the register on 15 July 2013.

~ which year goes on the stone ~

French Wikipedia says Freesurf disappeared in 2010. The historian at letenneur.com, who dug up the company filings above, calls the end extremely hard to date and settles on 2008, noting that Wikipedia cites nothing for its year. The archive supports Wikipedia here. On 4 March 2010 freesurf.fr still served its portal, with personal pages and a webchat. By 5 April 2010 it showed a nearly empty page under a Claranet copyright line, and from June 2011 the address forwarded to a hosting login. The mailboxes outlasted all of it. Addresses at freesurf.fr carried on as a paid service until Claranet's small-office division withdrew from France, and according to French Wikipedia they were deleted from the servers in May 2019.

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