> On one side the company has to operate the network, pay the employees and still generate some profit, so they care about total ROI. While broadband access vi

> On one side the company has to operate the network, pay the employees and still generate some profit, so they care about total ROI. While broadband access via DSL is among the cheapest in France, the historical three physical mobile network owners (SFR, Orange and Bouygues) were (and still are) offering obscure, ridiculously contrived and absurdly priced two year contracts going north of 50€ with 2 hours talk, 1GB data from the phone, unlimited SMS and a free useless option[0], to which you're supposed to add a full 25€ just for tethering. That's after having been struck by justice's mighty hammer for secretly coordinating prices. Then about a year ago, Free Mobile entered the mobile market in France. For a 20€/mo contract you can bail out of anytime, you get unlimited voice, SMS, MMS and HSPA+ (there's virtually no LTE deployed here yet anyway) usable as tethering or with VoIP, downgraded to slower speed past the 3GB/mo barrier. Basically a "just makes sense" contract from a data and a consumer point of view. Earth shaking prices all the while they're investing in infrastructure to build their own network, while at the same time paying a MVNO deal to Orange as a fallback in not yet covered areas. Public reaction from the old guard was ranging from outraged ("they'll destroy the whole market! people will lose their work! frogs will pour down the sky!") to shameless excuses ("no, we did not rip you off for years, we promise!") to bewildered ("how the hell can they be so cheap?") to FUD ("you'll see! it's just a marketing ploy to gather critical mass! prices will rise!") to speechless (""). Curiously, almost 12 month later, all prices have been falling down. The closest to Free right now is Sosh, a MVNO operated by Orange, which started to offer similar contracts. Still subscribable only online (so John Doe really has no clue about it when he goes shopping around the mall, which is what the bulk of customers do) and their marketing used to be misleading in various areas, like they were offering only HSDPA. Just checked and things changed a bit as they now offer 2GB HSDPA for 20€ or 2GB HSPA+ for 25€. Not quite that but getting there. So well, there's ROI, and there's maximizing profits. [0]: useless options as in: - double hours for free between 4PM and 6PM on raising moon days and 2AM to 7AM otherwise. - TV on the phone, via an app that does not work via WiFi (you know, for authentication), offers limited channels at crap quality and constantly tries to upsell you more channels. - GPS navigation on the phone, via a disaster of an app. Think Apple Maps is a failure? You ain't seen nothing. - free youtube and social networks access! OMG lolzor! but through their custom app. With content ads. - five music tracks per month, for free, WMA DRMized via some proprietary auth+download platform of course. Super useful when you bought an iPhone from them with the same contract. - football (== soccer) SMS alerts on goals! Yay, like people interested in this are not watching the games live already.