The department of the Hauts de Seine near Paris, the richest department in France, is in the final stages of choosing the contractor for its FTTH project. According to French newspaper Les Echos (Très Haut Débit: Numéricable, Neuf Cegetel et Eiffage vont câbler les Hauts de Seine), department general assembly president Patrick Devedjian has asked the assembly to vote in favour of a consortium of building company Eiffage, cable operator Numéricable and network layout contractor LD Collectivités (a subsidiary of telecom operator Neuf). The Public Service Delegation covers the connection of 800.000 homes and businesses by 2012 at an equal price for every single connection.
The investment project is 422 million EUR overall with 59 million contributed by the department. According to a study undertaken by the department, without this project, in 2012 only 19,5% of homes and businesses in the Hauts de Seine would have access to fiber services. In excahnge for the buildout, the consortium will benefit from a 25yr concession to manage and resell access to the network. It is, however, a tiered model and the consortium will not be allowed to sell directly to end customers, instead reselling capacity to operators.
The project, however, already faces stiff regulatory challenges since B2B operator Colt has already announced that they will drag the project to Brussels (Colt veut attaquer à Bruxelles le projet très haut débit des Hauts de Seine) accusing it of state aid for the 59 million EUR the department has agreed to contribute to the deployment of the network. Hauts de Seine is the French department with the highest revenues per capita and the highest fiber capacity in the ground already, although the fiber is only deployed to a few select large businesses in areas like La Défense and Issy les Moulineaux. Colt says they have already invested 100 million EUR in deploying fiber in the 92 department and consider the involvement of the department to be evident state aid.
At least one of the other operators with strong presence and ambitions in the Hauts de Seine (Free, Orange or Verizon Business) could follow suit. They may however be content with the fact that someone is challenging the deal without sticking their neck further. Indeed, this project was originally decided by Nicolas Sarkozy (which prompted one of my faithful zirconium-grade readers to call it the Sarko-Fiber) who is not known for being too happy about those who oppose him. Furthermore, Sarkozy is more politically aligned with Brussels than any previous French government in recent history, which may encourage other operators to stay low for the time being and hope that Colt's action will at least delay the project long enough for them to deploy FTTH in the most promising areas of the department.
As an aside, in the documents that have been published, the word subvention (aid) have been changed to investissement public (public investment), an interesting shift only a few days after the Amsterdam decision by the EU I commented on yesterday. I'm not sure if that will be enough to deflect EU ire should the political context not make this whole case irrelevant...
(Incidentally, I think the 92 should prioritise the dynamic city of Colombes for deployment. The fact that I live there has no relation to this suggestion whatsoever... Thanks to mega-titanium reader and Colombes neighbour DV for all the intel on this!)
