Freebox France offers VoIP, HD TV, and Internet for just 29.99 €/month

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Freebox France offers VoIP, HD TV, and Internet for just 29.99 €/month

I just happened to be checking out our firewall logs and noticed traffic coming from 88.160.222.185. Curious, I did a whois and figured out it was coming from http://www.proxad.net/ which redirects to http://www.free.fr/adsl/.

The first thing I noticed other than the fact that website is in French,-- which I can't read -- is that they offer Internet + Telephone + Television for 29.99 €/month. I was able to figure that out since apparently Internet, Telephone, and Television don't translate at all in French. They're the same words except for some accent letters, as seen here from a website screen grab I did:
freebox-france.jpg
What I can gather is that they offer 250 channels, ADSL (ADSL2+?), Freebox HD receiver, unlimited phone calls to 70 destinations, and even a WiFi-MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) router. MIMO (pronounced mee-moh or my-moh), is the use of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to improve communication performance. Their Internet speed says 28 Mega- whatever that means. 28Mbit/s? Although, ADSL2+, which is faster than ADSL, maxes out at 24Mbits/s. Hmmm. Are the French inventing some proprietary ADSL spec that is faster?

Also, if I read their website correctly, they give you 10GB of storage space - mostly likely talking about the Freebox receiver. Seems a bit low to me if doing any sort of Tivo-like functionality (pause Live TV, recordings, etc.) The 29.99 €/month translates into $46.99 U.S. dollars which seems like a pretty sweet deal for a triple-play package!

Any French readers want to translate exactly what this products' feature-set is? Post a comment...

Update: 5 min after post Found some more info on Wikipedia

The box, designed by Free, uses a 32 bits RC32355 processor and is managed by an operating system using a derivative of the Linux kernel. It has many interfaces:

  • An Ethernet port 10/100 Mbit/s full/half duplex;
  • A USB2 port;
  • An HDMI port;
  • An RJ11 jack for the ADSL connection;
  • An RJ11 jack for phone equipment (two jacks on versions 1 & 2 but only one active);
  • A SCART (Péritel) socket
  • An digital audio output RCA, or optical SPDIF starting from version 3;
  • An extension port of the Serial ATA standard on versions 3 and 4 and Parallel ATA standard on versions 1 and 2;
  • A host USB port on version 4;
One cool feature is that it supports a Videolan client in order to get the movies (in any format read by VLC) stored on the computer and watchable on TV through a playlist selector using Freeplayer. See my VideoLan post for more on this free streaming client.

Freebox is indeed an ADSL2+ modem that the French ISP called Free provides to its ADSL subscribers at a cost of around 190 Euros.

It can not only be uses as a high-end wireless modem (802.11g MIMO), but it also enbles Free to offer value-add services such as HD television (1080p), video recording with timeshifting capabilities, digital radio and analog telephony via one or more RJ11 ports.


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