News and rumours on Free's rollout

Avid and attentive Free fanatics (on the Journal du Freenaute, an independant website managed by Free subscribers on Free) have found some information as to the rollout of Free's FTTH network.

• First of all, Free's first CO (called NRO - Noeud de Raccordement Optique) has opened. It's located in the heart of the 15th arrondissement of Paris, and the reporters have even extrapolated a coverage area and projected it on a map. One can anticipate that the first new customers will be connected soon, most likely in June 07.
• Free announced in March that 1000km of fiber had been deployed in Paris, mostly in the South and East of the city, passing 350.000 homes (although vertical connexions are not necessarily done yet - in fact they most likely aren't, see below)
• Free has registered a number of trademarks for its set-top boxes, including Gigabox. This has a number of current customers all excited, speculating that the box will be compatible with 1Gb/s download speeds from the get-go. This could be confirmed by an analysis of unofficial photos of the future box's motherboard that seem to implly that the chipset is compatible with such speeds. At this stage however (and supposing these pictures are authentic) it's unknown whether the box would be fully 1Gb/s from the start or upgradeable at a cost. What is also unknown, of course, is how much such a subscription would cost. Just for the record, Neuf is currently distributing its service with a non-dedicated box which is therefore not optimised for speeds above 100Mb/s.
• Actual building penetration is turning out to be a nightmare for Free, Orange and Neuf, mostly because they all propose different technological solutions and, so far, no concertation. Owner syndicates tend to turn down any proposal to pop the buildings until the operators can guarantee that all competitors will be able to penetrate without additional works or technical space requirements. This has been mentioned in yesterday's article on fiber in La Tribune (La fibre optique fait une arrivée timide dans les foyers français).

Finally, for those who want to learn more about Free itself, I found out that they had published their 2006 annual report in English on their website. Enjoy!