Bonjour VoIP!

French regulator Arcep (Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques et des postes) issued its analysis of the fixed telephony market in France and has launched a public consultation until July 11th (via ZDnet France). As Steve Martin once noted, "Those French have a different word for everything!" - so "all IP" becomes "tout IP", Voice over IP "Voix sur IP" and Voice over Broadband "Voice sur large bande", and Arcep has decided that VoIP is to be considered as a part of the traditional fixed market, as it represents a substitute for the traditional PSTN service, so the argument goes:

La démarche de l’Autorité est technologiquement neutre, elle intègre donc les services utilisant la technologie " voix sur IP " dès lors qu’ils sont substituables aux services classiques.

By being "technologiquement neutre" which I would also translate as "bearer-agnostic", Arcep considers VoIP providers as telecommunication providers in the classic sense if they also control the underlying network service, which in France is almost exclusively ADSL (cable's share of broadband penetration is well below 10 %, the main cable provider I know is Numericable). France Télécom's voice over ADSL product eXtense would therefore fall into this category.

Au contraire to the bundled broadband/VoIP services - voix sure large bande - pure-plays such as Skype or French new kid on the block Wengo (launched in January 2005) are exempted, Arcep refuses to regulate such services: in an earlier analysis in December 2004, Arcep (back then called ART) exluded regulation since they don't claim to offer any QoS and are therefore not to be considered as a substitute for PSTN services.

In the current consultation, Arcep also states that there will be no intervention from their side in terms of tariff control on "voix sur large bande", but this may well be the case if they have the impression that France Télécom is abusing its market power, so any intervention would directly regard FT:

En conséquence, l’Autorité considère qu’une extension du périmètre du contrôle tarifaire aux offres de " voix sur large bande " n’est pas justifiée à ce stade. L’Autorité suivra néanmoins attentivement le jeu concurrentiel sur ce segment de marché et pourra décider, le cas échéant d’imposer des obligations complémentaires à France Télécom.

I believe this is a good point to start from - "good" because we have seen worse. It has been recognized that the incumbent can price other providers out of the market by bundling VoIP with a broadband line. What makes me less positive is the fact that since there is no naked ADSL in France, at least not to my knowledge, the customer is required to also subscribe to a copper line with a geographical phone number, which gets us close to the emergency number issue (which, by the way, in France is 17).