[3] In metropolitan France, intense competition between Internet service providers has led to the introduction of moderately-priced high speed ADSL up to 28 Mbit/s (ATM), VDSL2 up to 100 Mbit/s, and FTTX up to 1 Gbit/s from €26 per month.
[4] They often include other services such as unlimited free VoIP telephone communications to land lines, and digital television.
The PTT pioneered the virtual circuit variant of packet switching beginning in 1971 through the work of Rémi Després at CNET.
[10] During the summer of 1988, the INRIA connected its Sophia-Antipolis unit to the NSFNet via Princeton using a satellite link leased to France Telecom and MCI.
The first real public Internet service provider (ISP) was WorldNet which opened in February 1994 at the Computer Associates Expo.
To reduce the digital divide, many departments have chosen either to subsidize [18] Internet access via satellite, or to deploy radio networks, such as WiMax.
Consumer access to digital networks started in France earlier than in other countries with the Minitel, a pre-World Wide Web online service invented by the PTT (Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones).
In June 2009 France occupied the third place in the number of households in European connected to Internet, behind Germany and the United Kingdom.
[22] Those prices are being attained with complete unbundling, saving the monthly €15 for the POTS subscription while retaining the triple play services.
Experiments are not any more the Iliad/Free trademark: they recently demonstrated an aggregated 174 Mbit/s link,[25] while Telecom Italia innovates on the service with a free hotline and Orange is pushing VDSL.
In December 2005, Free enabled a TV multicasting service on the customer's local network, an open solution based on RTSP.
[27] They launched in April 2006 a new Freebox divided in two devices with DVB-T and HDTV capabilities and a Mimo WiFi network.
They are partly publicly funded, with the French Future Investments Programme, through the Agence Nationale de la Recherche.