Inventel

» see inventel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Very little networking hardware ends up with a name the public knows. The Livebox did. France Télécom put it in millions of French homes from 2004, rented rather than sold, and it became the word for the thing in the hallway the way Minitel had been the word for the thing on the desk. France Télécom did not design it. Inventel did, in an office near the engineering school its founders came from, and within a year of the launch the company had been bought and the name had started its disappearance.

Éric Carreel and Jacques Lewiner were researchers at ESPCI in Paris when they set the company up in 1990, in Suresnes, to make pagers. The mobile phone was already arriving to kill that market. Five years in they had eight employees and ten million francs of revenue, sold through the telephone operators, which is a small business with a very good customer list. In 1997 they moved into DECT cordless engineering. A home gateway carrying voice and data together followed in 1999, then a Bluetooth box called the BlueDSL in 2001. The DWB200 of 2002 was, by the French account, the first serious secure Wi-Fi ADSL access point anyone was supplying in volume.

That sequence matters, because the Livebox was not a lucky contract. By the time France Télécom needed a single box that was an ADSL modem and a Wi-Fi access point at once, Inventel had spent five years building both of those pieces for operators who rented hardware to subscribers.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the box ~

Version 1.0 came out in July 2004 with 802.11g, and the deployment ran ahead of what a company of about seventy-five people could physically supply. Sagem was brought in urgently to cover the volume and went on to build the later revisions. Inventel's hardware also turned up with other operators' logos on it. There was an AOL box in France, and the French account credits the same line with BT's Home Hub, which reached UK living rooms after Thomson already owned the company.

Thomson's annual report puts a number on how well it was going: cumulative sales of the Inventel Livebox passed one million units in October 2005, seven months after Thomson owned it. Inventel and another 2005 acquisition together added €138 million to Thomson's sales that year.

~ what thomson actually bought ~

On 29 March 2005 Thomson acquired 100 percent of Inventel. The total purchase price was €146 million in cash and shares: €81 million of cash at closing, 2,351,648 Thomson shares delivered the same day, further shares deferred across 2006 to 2008, and a small earn-out on top. A retention scheme put up to 1,760,000 more shares at €20.72 in front of the staff, vesting in two halves in 2006 and 2007, which tells you what Thomson thought it was buying. The goodwill booked against the deal was €117 million out of the €146 million paid.

Buried in the same report is the sentence that makes this a death rather than a reorganization. Thomson lists what it acquired in 2005 as the business and the trademarks, Inventel's among them, which puts the name itself on the inventory.

~ the strike-off ~

The French legal entity was struck from the register on 20 January 2006, about ten months after the sale. inventel.fr refuses connections today and inventel.com redirects to Thomson's own consumer site. Thomson later became Technicolor and then Vantiva; the Livebox hardware moved on to Sagemcom and others. Éric Carreel went off and co-founded Withings, which is how most people under forty have heard of him, if they have.

Turkey got the same arrangement a couple of years later and with none of the mythology. ADSL spread here through the incumbent, the box arrived in a branded carton as part of the subscription, and when it stopped working you phoned the operator rather than whoever had built it. Nobody on my street could name the maker of the thing in their own hallway, and nobody had a reason to. In France the answer to that question was Inventel for about a year, and after that it was nobody.

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