It will come as no surprise to existing broadband customers of Bouygues Telecom, but the IPTV and triple play system it launched back in October, is almost entirely installed by troubled consumer electronics maker Thomson ‘ home gateways, IPTV middleware, VoIP and systems integration was all done by Thomson.
Bouygues Telecom is one of the major French mobile operators with 9.7 million subscribers and rolled out in October something it calls the ‘Bbox’ gateway, from Thomson and its SmartVision service management platform and video-on-demand servers, as well as IP set-top boxes and its Cirpack VoIP platform. Thomson provided full design, engineering, integration, support and maintenance to the launch as well.
This has led to a cellular operator, and one that has no 3G network at that, offering a fixed line triple play, on lines that we understand are wholesaled ADSL2+ lines from Completel, which it tried to buy last year losing out to Altice and private equity group Cinven, or which it is installing itself from scratch. Bouygues Telecom is part of an overall diversified building and engineering group.
Thomson now owns and supports the SmartVision software which France Telecom uses to manage its MaLigne IPTV service, buying it from Thales in 2005. In 2006 it put it together with VoIP technology from Cirpack and talked about it as the world’s first integrated triple play engine.
SmartVision offers video-on-demand, mobile TV content delivery and management, video-over-IP test and measurement and quality of service (QOS) analysis tools for mobile TV.
Bouygues’s quad play service was launched at just €39.90 a month with 51 TV channels, broadband access and fixed line telephony, plus three hours mobile talk time. According to its web site this has now risen to €44.90. France already has around 16 million ADSL subscribers, and the broadband market close to saturated.