SFR France

Details

Published on Tuesday, 01 December 2009

Written by David Chambers

SFR France, is jointly owned by Vivendi (56%) and the Vodafone group (44%). For some years, there has been ongoing discussion and debate about one or other party buying the whole business, but no agreement has been reached. In March 2011,the Vivendi boss says he wants full control - but only if the price is right.

History

Vodafone has been able to bring its expertise from other regional businesses, but where most subsiduaries have followed Vodafone UK and bought Alcatel-Lucent equipment, SFR chose instead to work with NEC and Ubiquisys.

It launched their domestic femtocell service in November 2010 with a blaze of publicity. Read our views on the SFR femtocell launch at that time.

Product Features

Based on NEC/Ubiquisys femtocell solution

• One-off price 99 Euros with no ongoing fees
• A charge of 6 Euros applies each time you want to change any existing entries in the white list of permitted phones (adding new numbers is free).

• Small, high performance, low power unit
• Works with broadband from any supplier at speeds as low at 512kbit/s
• You are not allowed to move it (say to a second home)
• Several broadband internet modems and specific 3G phone models are declared incompatible with the femtocell, suggesting there has been extensive field testing
• They make a big deal of not co-locating the femtocell within 1.5 metres of a WiFi access point.

SFR 3G Femtocell website