Remember when AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile last year for $39 billion, and how it kept insisting that reducing the number of national wireless carriers from 4 to 3 wasn't a problem because the market was just so competitive? If you want to see what real competition looks like, turn to (gasp) France, where the hugely popular Free.fr broadband provider just blew the doors off the mobile marketplace with its €20month unlimited use plan.

This was a story too important to bury beneath the deluge of gadget news pouring forth from CES. Free has long been one of France's most popular Internet providers. When we profiled them back in 2009, the company was offering 20-30Mbps Internet, free landline phone call to 100 nations, and TV service along with an HD DVR for €30 (US$45) a month.

The pioneer of this business model was Free.fr. Led by its maverick CEO Xavier Niel, it introduced the plus simple model in 2002 into what was then considered a lagging broadband market. Now Free is the second largest ISP in the country, it is profitable (with 4 million subscribers), and it boasts extremely low churn rates below 0.01 percent a month. One could almost say that Free’s subscribers only give up their subscription upon death or moving outside of the service area. Of every two new subscribers in the French broadband market, one chooses Free.fr... [An important] element of Free’s strategy is to make good use of open innovation. Most of its internal operations and many of the things it offers are based on open source software and open standards. Apart from the savings in license fees and the possibility for Free to adapt the code to do what it wants, Free also allows its customers to work with the code and build on it. There is an active community of Freenauts (yes that’s what their customers call themselves) developing and improving various bits of the services.

This last week, Free dropped a nuke on the wireless business, too. For €19.99, subscribers can get unlimited calls to mobile and fixed line phones in France (and to fixed line phones in 40 other countries). They get unlimited text messages. They get unlimited 3G data (with a "fair use" policy). They get net neutrality. And they get it all without a contract.

It gets better. If you subscriber to Free broadband, the wireless phone service costs only €15.99 a month.

Finally, light users can have 60 minutes and 60 texts for €2 a month—and Free broadband subscribers get it free.

Will all of these plans, you have to bring your own phone, making them a terrific deal for those who already have a decent handset. For those who don't, the plans aren't as attractive (Free will rent you an iPhone 4S for €29.99 a month, for instance).

I asked Rudolf van der Berg, who wrote our piece on Free and now works as an analyst for the OECD, what the announcement meant for Europe. "How popular is Free?" he said. "Roughly a quarter to half a million people in France watched the live transmission [of the announcement]."

"This type of offer is unheard of in the OECD. Yes there are unlimited options, but not like this. Not everything is perfect, though; international roaming is still expensive."

To understand the attitude behind Free, consider its CEO, Xavier Niel. Om Malik has met Niel several times at his Parisian office; Niel once told him, "We are a broadband service provider. Everything else—from voice to IPTV to storage-is just a feature that rides on this data service." Now try to imagine this attitude from the "innovators" at most massive carriers.