[Foundation-l] New Business Partnership with Orange

[Marcin Cieslak]

> 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 at system.pl >>