From Sotires Eleftheriou in Paris

Pierre Danon, the brand new head of French cable operator Numericable, announced a new policy of disclosing key figures to the Pierre Danon, the brand new head of French cable operator Numericable, announced a new policy of disclosing key figures to the press. Numericable is the outcome of the recent merger of all the major French cable operators, plus the telco Completel.
Danon announced the enlarged group has 9.6 million cable outlets in homes, 8.3 million of which are enabled for triple play. 3.4 million are FTTH. 2.7 million of these outlets were active as of 31 August. It now has 104,000 optical fibre subscribers with a bandwidth of 100 Mb/s â€" well ahead of the country’s leading triple play operator Orange, which has only 42,000 optical fibre subscribers.
Its total TV subscribers number 3.5 million, 930,000 broadband Internet and 650,000 telephone (VOIP). The number of digital TV subscribers is over a million.
 
Numericable also disclosed its financial performance: turnover in the first six months of this year was E 640 million, and Capex E 170 million. The group has also just created a broadband operators division, based on its acquisition of Completel, to provide DSL and optical fibre services for other operators.
 
A new double play entry level service for E19.90 a month has been introduced, providing broadband and unlimited telephone calls to 45 countries. The speed will be up to 100 Mb/s, where this is available.
Numericable made a soft entry into quad play earlier this year, by introducing a mobile telephone service. This offers a competitive rate, plus unlimited calls to the subscribers home number. Danon said that the group was not interested in a mobile operators licence, but could not exclude it for the future.
 
Finally, Danon stated that a considerable improvement was to continue being made in the group’s customer services, which have been its bugbear over the last few years.

Categories: Articles, Broadband, Cable