Skip to main content

France Telecom Triple-Play Profitability Issue

According to Forrester Research, French consumers are very interested in broadband triple play � and they enjoy the most advanced and competitive xDSL-based triple-play market in Western Europe. But that doesn't mean that incumbent telco France Telecom will make money on its triple-play offering.

Forrester's new, detailed, bottom-up P&L model looks at the profit potential from 15 main revenue categories across 17 countries and concludes that the vendor-recommended solution would be financial suicide for FT.

Forrester predicts a cumulative per-subscriber loss of �4,311 in year 10, thanks to low revenue growth and massive backhaul costs. The key problem is that French consumers want triple play � but they don't want to pay a lot for TV services, thereby limiting revenue growth. What can FT expect if it continues down this path? High investment costs and lots of price and content competition for TV subscribers.

There are significant lessons to be learned by observing the advanced European broadband services market, and attentive North American telcos would be wise to closely follow FT's progress as it continues to be displaced by more innovative and agile competitors.

Popular posts from this blog

Product Design AI to Reach $4.3 Billion by 2035

Artificial intelligence tools for product design have largely been sold to engineering leaders as a productivity story: faster renders, quicker iterations, fewer manual CAD operations. According to the latest market study by ABI Research, the market for artificial intelligence in product design is set to grow from $628 million in 2025 to $4.3 billion by 2035; that's a 21.3 percent compound annual growth rate. The trajectory reflects a market moving past assistive tools and into a phase where AI becomes structurally embedded in how products get engineered, simulated, and validated. For executives overseeing engineering, product development, and R&D organizations, this is no longer a tooling decision. It is a competitive positioning decision, and the window to shape it is narrower than most roadmaps assume. The Ten-Year Growth Outlook Mechanical product design and simulation is the AI beachhead within manufacturing. A full 62 percent of manufacturers are already running AI projec...