If you have not heard of Free yet, you will do, especially if you are French.

When you are hailed as the French equivalent to Steve Jobs you know you have to be doing something that people take note of. And while I can see that Mr Niel is indeed a self starter and a champion of the people and free market economy, I personally put him down as more of a slightly sleazy Richard Branson than Steve Jobs, but hey who worries about splitting hairs between two well respected pillars of the business world.

In a bid to shake the stagnant and over priced French mobile sector and in typical French style Mr Niel talks of “liberation” of the mobile sector using his Free telecommunication company as the focus.

Jail bird set free:

And with a background in adult chat services I am sure he knows his way around liberal quarters already. Mr Xavier actually got fined some 250,000 Euros and spent two years in jail for laundering money via sex shops.

Mr Niel is not one of the well healed from established universities in the country, he is more your grass roots, at the coal face kind of guy.

Indeed in 2002 he started what was called Freeview, a set-top-box which was offering combined Internet, TV and calls, this concept of bundling was brought to the French market with full intention of bringing down prices all round, which it did.

Talking about his new adventure into shaking up a nascent mobile market that is seen to be ripping off the French public, he states:

“We are sick and tired of being ripped off with the highest prices in Europe,”

Speaking of the plans, Jessica Ekholm an analyst from Gartner said:

“This is some much-needed competition coming in to the French market…. They’re obviously trying to shake things up,”

Mobile phones the target now:

So with a pedigree of aggressively entering established markets and bringing in new pricing models and packages, Mr Neil now wants to enter the French mobile sector to help bring prices in line with the rest if Europe.

French mobile users pay high price for services:

French mobile networks currently charge the most for their mobile services and sees pricing set at much higher levels than European neighbours in per capita average costs.

The package that Mr Xavier currently wants to offer consumers in France looks like this:

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• Unlimited calls, messaging and up to three gigabytes of data for €19.99 euros ($26) per month.
• 60 minutes of calls and 60 text messages for €2 euros per month.

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After this announcement, the Free website was said to have crashed with the deluge of interest.

At an Apple inspired launch event Mr Xavier went on to proclaim:

“Free believes that up until now you have been used as cash cows. We will give the [other operators] a lesson.”

But with Free not expected to have full network coverage until 2018, and already aggressively stepping on bottom lines of the very networks they need to rent from to provide the service free is offering, this move may not be without some pain to the rather shrewd businessman who sold his reverse directory service on France’s Minitel back in 2000 for 40 million euros.

Mr Xavier has now also been found to have jointly bought the French newspaper La Monde, despite President Sarkozy putting in his opposition, he has also paid for 50% of the rights to the song “My Way”, which may well point to his own perception of self in this maddening world!

So while this all sounds fantastic for consumers in France, time will tell where the devil in the detail lies and how long Free can sustain such cut price deals when they do not really have the kind of power in the market when still reliant on rental relationships from competitors to ensure service levels are met.

Users with jailbroken devices in the US who are accessing Verizon’s hotspot network and do not subscribe to a data plan are having their ability to tether their devices blocked.

Verizon and AT&T start to make a stance in order to maximize revue from data and voice plans:

According to ReadWriteWeb, one of their employees was taken to this screen when trying to access a hotspot on a Motorola X jailbroken phone:

AT&T recently started to migrate jailbroken users with no data plan to a tiered pricing structure to access their hotspots.

These will start at $20 per 2GB of data on Verizon when coupled with a data plan of $29.99 or more. For every GB of data consumed after the 2GB allowance users will be charged another $20 per GB.

Data is the new revenue model for networks:

With aggressive pricing to attract users to mobile phone contracts that offer good value for calls and texts creating less and less profit for the networks, the only way that the carriers can start to maximize profits in the medium term is to start being much lees tolerant on data that has been historically used as another means of enticing customers. Similar to the way a stereotyped drug dealer would “hook you in” and then charge more when your addicted, this seems to be pretty much the case with data plans by two of the countries largest mobile carriers.

The Federal Communication Commission was issued with a letter from an Advocacy group in March complaining that Verizon should not be allowed to block tethering access using Long Term Evolution found in the Android Market. Google justly responded to this by blocking tethering applications in the Android marketplace. Though GetJar still allowed tethering apps to be acquired.

At&T to throttle heavy users of data

In news that AT&T will not want to become common knowledge a press release was issued dated Friday 5th August 2011 stating that they will start to throttle heavy users of data.

With data becoming the real gold mine, how long before new companies enter the market offering users other options to consumers?

I wrote about a prediction for the future in relation to mobile devices, one where you simply buy a data plan and use a VOIP service such as Skype or Gmail voice and leave this running in the background so you are always available when needed, and simply email people you want to “text”. Do you think this will be the future of mobile contracts, or is the coverage not good enough, I would argue that it will be perfect when 4G rolls out fully and coverage starts to become no real issue from WiFi hotspots doted around countries such as the US, UK and Europe….Taiwan are already offering tourist and locals the chance to tap into a medium speed Wi-Fi network in TaiPei.

Lets take my own contract on O2 here in the UK: A minimum charge of $80 USD per month with a free Samsung S2 phone, 600 minutes, unlimited texts and I live in a metropolitan area on the outskirts of a big town. My reception = useless. Basically pointless to own as I never ever receive any calls. This is 2011 I expect better.

On the other hand if I wanted to pay for BT’s openworld, I could get access to their Wi-Fi service and be able to utilise calls on VOIP. As it goes I do not need this as I already have Wi-Fi but you seem my point here.

We have more and more options every year, I feel like I have been serioulsy ripped off right up until 2010 for text messages that have been around for 20+ years and cost networks absolutely nothing in terms of data. At one point in the last 18 months I was being charged 10 pence per text after I went over my limit in one strange month before changing my contract to the sum total of around $60 USD extra for text messages alone that totalled around 950 in one month (350 over my limit), ridiculous, and total daylight robbery.

What do you think of your contracts, do you feel we are given good deals for calls, texts and data or are we used to be being ripped off nowadays?