Siris

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

~ the last words ~

Siris was registered in France on 13 April 1995 and licensed by decree on 18 December 1997, in the first wave of operators allowed to compete with France Télécom. It sold to businesses: voice, leased lines, frame relay, hosting, the connections that run a company rather than a household. Its registered office was at 54 place de l'Ellipse in La Défense, and by 1999 the French press was calling it the country's third fixed-line operator.

Its real asset was a number. France handed each competing operator a carrier-selection prefix, a digit you dialed ahead of the number you actually wanted, and Siris was given the single digit 2 in January 1998. Dial 2 and then the number, and the long-distance leg of the call left the incumbent's network for somebody else's. Owning a one-digit prefix meant you were one of a handful of companies that mattered, and it is the thing Siris is still identified by in the regulator's files.

Ownership kept changing above it. The company began life as a joint venture of the Unisource consortium and the French utility group CGE, with CGE holding a little over half before Unisource bought it out. Deutsche Telekom then bought the whole thing in November 1999 for a reported five billion francs, put at about 732 million euros in the trade press, as a way back into France after its alliance with France Télécom fell apart. Louis Dreyfus Communications bought it from Deutsche Telekom in March 2003 for 25 million euros in cash.

~ the record ~

~ seven hundred million for a beachhead ~

The numbers behind that sale are brutal and they are not in dispute. Siris accumulated 476 million euros of losses over the three years to the end of 2002, on 2002 revenue of 230 million euros with about 500 people on the payroll. Deutsche Telekom wrote 473 million euros off the asset in the third quarter of 2002. Analysts at the time expected the sale to fetch around 300 million. It fetched 25, roughly three percent of the purchase price, and a Deutsche Telekom spokesman gave the whole episode its epitaph: Siris had a small market share in a very competitive market.

The structural problem is visible in the regulator's paperwork rather than the accounts. ARCEP decision 99-987 is Siris formally asking the state to declare that commercial negotiations with France Télécom had failed, after its letters of 25 June and 13 July 1999 went unanswered. A carrier-selection operator does not own the local loop. It buys access to the incumbent's customers from the incumbent, and when the incumbent does not reply to letters, the regulator is the only lever there is.

~ the rebrand that happened in place ~

Louis Dreyfus was building a roll-up out of French alternative operators and Siris became its large-accounts arm. It kept the name for about a year. Then in February 2004 the group renamed itself Neuf Telecom and erased every legacy brand it had collected at once, and you can watch it happen on Siris's own website. The capture of 29 January 2004 is titled "SIRIS, partenaire télécoms des grandes entreprises" with a right-click notice reading "Site sous copyright © SIRIS Groupe LDCOM". The capture of 4 April has the same stylesheet and the same scripts, with the title changed to "neuf grande entreprise" and the copyright line changed to neuf telecom. Nobody rebuilt the site. They swapped the words inside it.

On 13 May 2004 siris.fr itself started answering with a redirect to the Neuf large-accounts pages, and on 30 June 2004 the French statistical register recorded the enterprise as ceased, absorbed into Neuf Telecom. The digit went last. Holding two one-digit prefixes was not permitted, and Neuf already had the 9, so ARCEP gave customers until 30 June 2005 to move off the 2 before it was switched off for good.

~ paper that outlived the company ~

France granted the 1997 license for fifteen years, and the licensing regime itself was abolished in 2004, the same year the company disappeared. The decree is still on Légifrance marked as in force, because nobody repealed a document whose subject had stopped existing. Its fifteen-year term ran out in 2012 in any case, eight years after the company did.

I have no personal distance to close here, because there was never anything a person could buy. Turkish long distance in those years was Türk Telekom and then whatever your workplace had negotiated, and carrier pre-selection for ordinary consumers arrived late and quietly. Siris was a company that existed in the space between two other companies' invoices, and the clearest surviving trace of it is a regulator's sentence explaining why its digit had to be handed back.

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