Consumer ISP Wanadoo and business services division Equant will be subsumed beneath the new corporate identity, with Equant becoming Orange Business Services. The company’s specialist comms provider to the financial trading community, Etrali, also comes in for the Orange rebranding treatment. In France, France Telecom shops, service personnel, and vans will now sport the Orange logo and corporate branding, according to Didier Quillot, CEO of Orange France.
Quillot said Spain represents a more significant branding challenge because Orange is unknown there, and the name will replace Wanadoo in internet access, Amena in mobile, and UniDOS in fixed-line telephony. He said that in Poland the timetable is not fixed, though the idea is for the rebranding to be complete by the end of this year.
Orange’s consumer offerings will center on getting its LiveBox customer premises equipment into homes and, with some alterations, into small businesses. Orange CEO Sanjiv Ahuja said LiveBox is a platform for delivering multiple services and said the company is offering a promotion in the UK whereby any mobile customer with a monthly spend in excess of 30 pounds ($56) can get a free LiveBox installed, with a year’s free subscription to its 8Mbps broadband service bundled in.
Eric Abensur, VP of broadband at Orange UK, said the company already has 200,000 customers with LiveBox installed and will expand that through the free broadband offering. On the back of that user base, in the second half of this year the company will invite all LiveBox users to try a fixed-mobile convergence service called One Phone. This will work on both its fixed (via WiFi) and mobile networks and offer seamless in-call handover between the two, as well as a single address book across mobile and broadband and one email address, with mails delivered to multiple devices. There are also plans for an IPTV service, initially delivered via a set-top box but subsequently also over DSL.
The LiveBox can already connect wirelessly to PCs, gaming stations, and shortly to PDAs using WiFi. Further down the road, Ahuja predicted expansion in the Digital Home market, with connections from the LiveBox to sound systems with embedded WiFi, cameras, and a special WiFi tablet device from Nokia along the lines of its N70 device. Ahuja said there are also plans for a home security offering (the ability to monitor the home remotely via a camera) as well as remote-control services.
As to whether the LiveBox could also serve as the platform for a small-business offering, Bernard Ghillebaert, executive VP of Orange UK, said it would need some adaptation because such environments will typically have several phone fixed and mobile lines running. However, Orange has already launched a fixed-line offering in the UK, and a converged service based on a dedicated piece of CPE is on the roadmap. An Orange spokesperson said enterprise FMC services, where an IP Multimedia Subsystem architecture in the core of its network will come into play, will be unveiled early next year.
But how well will Orange Business Services be accepted as the replacement for Equant? Andrew McFadzen, formerly general manager of Equant for the UK and Ireland, said the move to the new name would bring his area of business within a global brand, though he acknowledged that, at least in North America, Orange enjoys no significant brand recognition. It could be argued that, at least among members of the business community, Equant actually enjoys more awareness, at least in terms of WAN services.
However, the bigger picture is that France Telecom has selected Orange as the brand for its quad-play fixed, mobile, broadband, and entertainment offensive, with the Equant area of activity being tacked on to leverage the same marketing effort. While Orange may also be suitable for a SoHo and SMB offering, it remains to be seen whether it will help the group win more business in enterprise, particularly in the US where it goes up against AT&T and Verizon.
