Internet in France: Year Zero
by Lionel
Lumbroso, Rheingoldian reporter in Paris
Back in 1981
I'd almost given up on electronic communications. In
retrospect, launching Calvados in France in 1981 with two American partners
seemed bound to failure. Connecting for $80/mo. to an online service that
offered timesharing (Try our great RPG & Cobol compilers! Run APL on
your Apple ][!), crude email and prehistoric, user-unfriendly forums
through a $800 300 bps modem? You gotta be kidding, it will never sell! It
didn't. Oh, we got better, modems got cheaper and faster and it was certainly
exciting to pioneer the field, but this was no successful business, believe me.
From doing it all to wanting none
I'd been an evangelizer, a salesman,
a PR guy, a programmer of services, a proto-sysop, a chief sysop, I'd written
thousands of forum contributions, moderated hundreds of flaming events and by
1992, I'd had enough of it all. Give me nice, personal, face to face, flesh to
flesh, mouth to ear contact with my fellow beings was what I thought.
Global village? That sure sounds like a BIG village!
I'd spent hours
reaching out on CompuServe, discussing Macintosh in 1984-5, MIDI in 1986-7,
translation in 1988-90; and now I'd almost forgotten I had a CompuServe account.
I used my AppleLink account for purely professional reasons (in my new trade as
a self-employed translator/copywriter). The Minitel came in handy with its
Electronic Phone Directory and some other utilitarian services, but that was
just about it.
Mr. Painted Shoes saves the jaded Prince
It was around that time that I
met Howard (aka HLR, aka Pollenator). In a way, I must've been like a somewhat
wilted flower waiting for the right kind of pollenating bee. It did take some
incubation (or am I mixing my biological metaphors?! %-), on my part and on
France's, but around the Fall of 1994, after having read and translated Howard's
"The Virtual Community" ("Les Communautés
Virtuelles"),I felt ready and eager to take a new plunge in the e-ocean.
From $20/hour to $0.20/hour in just a few weeks!
Several companies had
started offering Internet accesses in France, including CalvaCom, but initial
prices were steep (around $20/hour). That's the trouble with the French: They
usually want to make too much of a buck at first and it takes them a while to
get realistic. In this case the while lasted a good 7-8 months. And then the
price war was raging! When CalvaNet (the Internet offer from CalvaCom) lowered
its price to $6/hour, at the beginning of April 95, that was the signal I'd been
waiting for: I got on. One week later, CompuServe France relayed the new CIS
offer at $2.50/hour. Can't beat that!, I thought, and proceeded to change
CalvaNet's IP number in Mac TCP to theirs. In a matter of days, another French
access provider, Planète, offered unlimited access for $33/month and CalvaNet
countered with a deal of up to 100 hours for $20/month. Man, these guys slash
each other *hard* for a piece of the action!
French Internet access for your gallic friends
I'll provide more input
from the French Internet scene soon. For now, here's a sample of French Internet
access providers. Most of them have English pages as well as French. If you're
trying to get a friend of yours living in France to get wired, here's all the
info you'll need to give them. If on the other hand you don't know anybody
there, why don't you look around, it's just a mouse click away.
CalvaCom : 100 Francs/month for 100 hours
EUnet : A still too expensive pan-European
provider (80 Francs/hour)
FDN : Non-profit org. 180 F/mo. (50 F for
scholars) for 30 hours
FranceNet : nice logo, still a bit expensive
at 38 F/hour
Internet Way : Classy design, pro operation, ISDN
access, rather expensive
ImagiNet : 150 Francs/mo. for 50 hours, neat
Gainsbourg pages...
Planète : 165 Francs/mo. for unlimited access
Adresse d'origine de cette page :
www.well.com/user/hlr/roadshows/lionel/lionel1.html
Page Web actuelle d'Howard :
www.rheingold.com