Cellphone calling over WiFi - France edition

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GigaOm and Verge are running stories on Free.fr - a remarkably disruptive broadband service in France which, for ~$40/month provides a 30MB broadband connection, IPTV (w/ set-top box), wi-fi, and free calling to a passel of countries. (There is a good description of Free.fr here, for those who care)

Free.fr has been singly responsible for a dramatic reduction in cost (and improvement in services!) for all triple-play services in France.  Their main competition has been the recent surge in quad-play - mobile, along with the triple-play of broadband, voice and video, and they've just announced their response in this space.  For 19.99€ they will provide, well, Unlimited everything (text, mms, calling, internet, etc.).

Their approach is somewhat the same as what T-Mobile, Republic, and others are doing in the U.S., viz. leveraging wi-fi connectivity to route calls/data over the internet whenever possible.  In this vein, one huge advantage they have is their existing broadband network.  Virtually every subscriber has a wi-fi hub at their home, and every wi-fi hub has a portion of its bandwidth dedicated for other Free.fr customers.  Just picture it, there is a wi-fi cloud that roughly parallels the entire Free.fr network across all of France - and at ~5 million subscribers, its a big one - which means that more often than not, a Free.fr mobile phone is going to be on wi-fi even when the user isn't near their home.  The icing on the cake - its BYOP (Bring Your Own Phone), which means this will work with pretty much any phone (which is a huge advantage over the Republic model).

Competition - Its a Good Thing....

Update:  Free has updated their infrastructure, and their cell-phones will now automagically off-load data traffic onto Wi-Fi if they are in range - and given their distribution pattern, odds are that they will be in range.  More here...

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