Mangoosta

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

~ the goodbye ~

France had one company selling ADSL at the end of 2000 and it was France Telecom. Mangoosta was the outfit that decided to sell it anyway. It was set up on the initiative of Alain Nicolazzi through his fund Nicom Investissement, with NetCréation holding a smaller slice, and run by Marie-Eve Schauber. It started offering ADSL in November 2000 and went at the incumbent directly, on price and on the idea that a subscriber ought to be able to buy a line from somebody other than the company that laid it.

The prices were real money. The entry offer was 512 kbit/s for 330 francs a month, with 500 francs to install. A megabit for one machine cost 789.36 francs a month, and the multi-machine version of the same megabit cost the same monthly with nearly twice the installation fee. In March 2001 the 330 franc tier went up to 390 francs for new subscribers, which in a price war is the sound of someone running out of room.

The company did not have long. France had only just begun to open the local loop, and an operator trying to sell a line it did not own spends its first year negotiating with the owner. By July 2001 the press was describing Mangoosta as one of the three French DSL musketeers and noting that this one was in receivership. On 2 August 2001 the commercial court in Nanterre ordered its liquidation. Nerim, a small broadband provider, bought the business that same month and told Mangoosta subscribers they would keep their access at the same price.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the offer ~

Mangoosta sold to households and then, in its last months, moved toward professional customers, which is the direction a consumer ISP drifts when the consumer price is no longer covering the line. By the time Nerim arrived the recentering had already happened, and it is the reason the takeover worked at all: the remaining subscribers were worth keeping.

What gave the company its reputation was less the product than the claim around it. French accounts credit Mangoosta with building the first original model for an ADSL operator working nationally, and with being first to partial unbundling in November 2000. Free is said to have taken up the same model two years later with considerably more money behind it. The French Wikipedia flags that one as unsourced and nobody has fixed it since, so treat it as the folklore of a scene that watched a small company do something first and then watched somebody large do it profitably.

~ seven months with a license ~

The paperwork is the clearest record of how short this was. An arrêté of 3 January 2001 authorized Mangoosta to establish and operate a public telecommunications network and to provide telephone service. The Nanterre judgment liquidating the company is dated 2 August 2001. The regulator then issued decision 01-901 on 10 October 2001, which proposed revoking the authorizations of eight companies in liquidation, Mangoosta listed between Facilicom International and Mobicom. Seven months separate the license from the judgment, and the registration number on both documents is the same: RCS Nanterre B 430 065 326.

The dial-up to broadband handover was running on roughly the same clock everywhere and finishing at wildly different times. My own connection that year was dial-up on a Turkish line, and broadband at home was another five years off. What France had in that window was a market with exactly one broadband seller and a handful of companies trying to become the second. Mangoosta is what it looks like when one of them gets the license and then runs out of money before the regulator has finished processing the application.

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