This partnership will start in four European territories: France, UK, Poland and Spain. I already notified the chapter reps in Poland, UK, and France (3 of the 4 territories where we have chapters). They've had a couple days to process the info and prepare for any media questions they may come their way.
I have two questions coming from Poland. Poland is a very important market for the FT Group, due to the majority stake that FT owns in the Polish incumbent telecom operator, Telekomunikacja Polska.
1) Does the deal include only Orange mobile platform or will it include also the new Orange Internet brand to be launched soon (at least in Poland)? The difference is huge: while the Orange currently is just one of the four mobile operators competing in the market, the DSL market is based on the incumbent position in the landline connectivity and accounts for 80% of the broadband access in the country.
2) Does the deal potentialy include some arrangements regarding abuse handling with the Orange users? Since most broadband users in .pl come from the FT subsidiary network and are hidden behind the dynamic IP addresses. This leads to numerous issues, like blocking of the whole DSL range in region of Łódź in 2007 (ca. 1 million inhabitants):
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blokada_Neostrady_w_%C5%81odzi (Polish-only)
The telecom responded only after this issue has been prominent in the media, there is a big potential for improvement, for example:
- better cooperation with the abuse team, possibly including - assignement of static, public IP addresses to the troublesome customers so that they can be filtered out.
-- << Marcin Cieslak // saper@system.pl >>