The studious road trip to Silicon Valley yielded nothing.
Surrounded by his close collaborators, Xavier Niel thought he would find in Californian tech companies the means to manufacture the Internet box that he had been imagining for months.
The box does not exist across the Atlantic either.
The day before returning to Paris, on the imposing escalator at Universal Studios in Los Angeles where the small group is taking a day off, the boss of Iliad says to his colleagues: “And if we did it ourselves, this box?
You just need to find competent guys and soldering irons…” Free’s fate was sealed that summer, in 2000.
It's already been a year since Xavier Niel founded Free - a subsidiary of the French group Iliad, created eight years earlier - to embark on the telecoms adventure.
On February 18, 1999 — just twenty-five years ago this Sunday — the young thirty-year-old rolled out, like other small operators, a free and unlimited low-speed Internet access offer.
At this time, you have to plug the modem into the telephone jack, wait for the dialing before you have a thin line of connection.
But the computer genius is already thinking about the next step, when ADSL will allow Internet users to connect at high speed.
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