Illimythics by SFR

Thomas Husson | November 07, 2007, 04:22 PM

"Illimythics" is the commercial name of a new offering to be launched by Orange France's main competitor on November 14th.

At first take, it seems to be one of the best mobile Internet offering I have ever seen (there are some surprises in fact at second take, see updated comments below***), including X-Series from 3UK launched a year ago.

In short:

1) 3 new pay-monthly bundles from 39€ per month (2 hours on-net voice communications + 2 hours any network operator from 6pm onwards and week-ends), 49€ (3+3 hours) and 69€ (5+5h hours). great, you'll tell me but there are other offerings (NEO from Bouygues) more abundant.

2) UNLIMITED E-MAILS (personal not business) + UNLIMITED SMS / MMS + UNLIMITED INTERNET ACCESS is included, with apparently no restriction on time spent or volume of data exchanged (to be confirmed). This is great news because if you target early adopters with heavy usage patterns, you need to make sure they are satisfied and will become "evangelists / influentials" for you. As per many "all-you-can-eat packages", VoIP, modem use and P2P is forbidden for obvious profitability reasons. I am sure such voice-data bundles will become common in the future, exactly like SMS was progressively packaged with voice a few years ago.

3) Such an offer will be available from 49€ (LG), 99€ (Nokia N95), 199€ (HTC). Not sure about the other devices but that's a significant subsidy effort, necessarily relying on a quite-long customer lifetime value.

4) Illimytichs will benefit from all the existing Internet brand partnerships (Google, YouTube, DailyMotion, E-bay, Windows Live Messenger...) and from the very innovative and fun new advertising campaigns launched earlier this year.

5) Limited to the first 100.000 clients until January 22nd 2008 and based on a 24 months locked-in period. Then I guess lots of detailled analysis on usage and profitability will follow. Remember SFR is the company that was ready to buy back one of its offering to its own customer base for a too generous illimited offering made around 2000...

Anyway, this seems a very clever strategy to attract early adopters and heavy users who could be interested in buying the iPhone from Orange. Still wondering when Orange will announce the details for November 29th. They used to have a good dedicated industry analyst team but news are scarce those days :-(

*** UPDATED ***

Sounds not as good as on the paper:

- it sounds that off-portal browsing is not included. If it is the case, this would significantly lower the benefits and the interest of the offering
- commitment is 2 years and after that you pay an additonal 5/10 euros: a very strange way to reward loyalty
- data volume is capped to 500Mo (this is quite fair but not totally unlimited)

Limiting an unlimited package to 50,000 clients and 50,000 churners might be quite dangerous because you may attract the bad users, those that will use the network quite a lot...

The range of devices also includes: Nokia 6120 for 9 euros, Samsung U700v for 29 euros, LG viewty and KS20 for 20 euros, SE W910 for 49 euros, SE K850i for 199 euros.