The French reputation for broadband superiority rests mainly on a start-up company called Iliad. This provides more than a million French subscribers with a "triple play" package called Free, which includes 81 TV channels, unlimited phone calls within France and to other 14 countries, plus 24 megabits internet for just €29.99 (£20) a month.

Free's Freebox was the system demonstrated on last week's BBC 2 Money Programme, The Broadband Boom and You (http://tinyurl.com/), where the British guinea pigs were taken across the channel and given a real taste of the inferiority of the services available in the UK.

So how was it done? The foundation was laid by the French government which, in a spirit of deregulation, brought in what we call LLU - Local Loop Unbundling- in 2000. This enabled rival firms to install equipment in France Telecom's exchanges in order to provide an independent service. LLU is what has tempted TalkTalk into the UK broadband market.

But then Iliad's young, entrepreneurial founder, Xavier Niel, decided he didn't want to use the usual ADSL equipment supplied by big companies such as Alcatel. Instead, Iliad designed and made its own Freebox terminal, to deliver TV, internet and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone calls. Even more unusually, Iliad also developed its own Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (DSLAM), the complicated exchange equipment that bundles up all the local traffic from separate lines and feeds it into the backbone network.

You would not expect a start-up to introduce new technologies and pick up more than a million customers in less than three years without some teething problems. For example, Wikipeida describes Freebox as "a rather erratic ADSL modem" and at least some users have had problems getting the things working, or working consistently.

On the other hand, that's also true in the UK, where some broadband providers have generated customer hatred for their inability to deliver a reliable service in a reasonable time.

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