So You Want to Be an ISP in the South of France?

(a public service FAQ)

Part 4. France and the Internet

The Internet forces the imagination into places that are rarely visited by ordinary mortals, and yet it was built and prospers solely through the intervention of millions of people who have never met, and who, let's face it, didn't have a clue about what it was all about to become.

That the Net works at all is simply amazing. That it is probably going to change the world indelibly is a thought that I can only approach through the mists of my right brain.

Now you might be thinking that France would be a natural hotbed for Internet activity. After all, the French pioneered massive global networking with their Minitel back in the late 70's, and could be assumed to have a hefty headstart on everybody else in terms of cyber-awareness. Also, they are natural-born software programmers.

And yet, they resist, and today France is well behind the rest of the world in implementing Internet strategies.

The French and the Internet

This might all just be part of the general malaise that hovers over France, but is worth a closer look. In fact, I can come up with several plausible explanations:

• The Internet was not invented by the French.

• You can't eat, drink, soufflé, sauté, chambré, carve, dice, steam, poach, double-boil, caramelize, or béchamel bits and bytes.

• You can't (yet) tax bits or bytes.

• Bits and bytes do not take off the month of August to go to the beach.

• Any so obvious anglo-american plot to further subvert and dilute French culture is certainly worth being wary of (you should have seen what happened in this part of the world when the first few Jean-Claude Van Damme movies hit the silver screen).

• France Telecom, the national telephone monopoly, cannot bear being out of the loop concerning a worldwide phenomenon that is 1/100th the price and 43 times faster than its own Minitel or its other telecom services.

Challenges, challenges...

Starting up in Internet business anywhere in the world is challenging. After all:

• It costs a lot of money, and nobody has a real tried-and-true recipe for spending the money wisely.

• No matter how much you know about computing and communications, you don't know enough.

• The few things you know well are probably obsolete already.

Version Française

Starting an Internet business in France adds a few challenges to the mix:

• The number of modems per inhabitant is near to the lowest in Europe.

• A startup company cannot lease computer equipment for at least one year after its creation. You have to buy the routers, modems, softs, etc.

• France Telecom is the only entity that you are allowed to buy your connectivity from. They charge between 3 and 25 times the price of US telecoms, for instance, for leased lines and local calls.

  You cannot bargain with them. If you are unhappy about the level of service they give you, and choose to talk to them about it, strange things can happen (they forgot to put us in the yellow pages that just came out, 8 months after we opened).

• The major potential clients in any region of France outside of Paris are the various Administrations.

So given all this basic information, the question that needs to be asked is...

Can it be done???

On to Part V