Ray Van Eng (07/18/97)
To the French, Minitel is very much part of their daily lives. While famous for using the network to send love notes and naughty remarks to each other, they also use it to look up businesses via the online yellow pages directory, book train tickets, plan vacations etc. And as a result of all that electronic commerce activities, Minitel has been profitable for France Telecom, the system operator. Every year, France Telecom stands to make about three billion francs (about $516 million) in transactions fees from about 25,000 service providers on the network. In many ways, the Minitel can be viewed upon as a nation-wide intranet that is centrally managed and admission is by membership only. This presents an interesting advantage for handling electronic commerce services. Since all users are subscribers, charges incurred through the network could be aggregated in one monthly billing to be distributed to the individual accounts. Minitel sees itself as a financial intermediary who provides collection services for the various service providers on the network. But these days, France Telecom is facing challenges from the Internet and an imminent industry deregulation that would open up the residential phone market for competition next year. Upgrading the telephone network with routers and switches for France Telecom to become an Internet service provider is the easy part. The tougher and more complicated aspect is how to migrate the Minitel service to accommodate the Internet platform. What France Telecom has done so far proved to be illuminating. It shed some light on how network computing technology as championed by Oracle, IBM and others can be implemented in a consumer marketplace and how a closed network such as the Minitel can expand itself successfully onto the open networking environment symbolized by the Internet. Essentially, the Minitel customer premise equipment is a teletext terminal with a 9.6 bps modem attached to it. The slow data transmission speed works fine for the mostly text based Minitel network with an odd photo or two, but not the ideal equipment to access the multimedia and graphical web pages from the Internet. Minitel says that they are in negotiation with more than a dozen network computer, set-top and screen phone vendors to define a minimum hardware standard for a new generation of low cost Minitel terminals which may offer a color or black display, a V.34 or faster modem, with rich graphics and audio support. The concept is derived from the network computer technology which allows anyone to access the Internet with non-PC devices. Customers will be able to choose from a full range of products that suit their needs. France Telecom is also reputed to be testing cable TV-based high speed Internet access solutions. Since the Minitel units introduced after 1992 already have a smart card reader built-in for home banking services, user authentication for network access is a natural progression and the newer Minitel units such as the Magis line have this capability. Although wide spread deployment of actual production samples won't be available for at least another year, Minitel is busy enhancing its network to provide more Internet oriented services. First up, France Telecom is offering a new e-mail service, the 3615 Minitelnet, which requires no subscription fee but is charged on a per use basis (under 10 cents a minute). Minitel users are able to check for e-mail messages (a e-mail address is provided when they sign up) on any Minitel terminal as long as they are inside the country. Introduced in March, the service has already attracted 16,000 users. Leveraging off the huge online content that Minitel has amassed over the years, France Telecom has launched the Wanadoo commercial online service that has proven to be quite popular among 35,000 subscribers. Like other online services such as America Online, MSNBC and others, this French language only service also acts as a gateway to both the Internet and the Minitel network. One special feature of the Wanadoo service is "Zoom Pages" which allows anyone to quickly locate any shop or business in even the tiniest region of France. A bilingual (English and French) version of this online directory is being made available to a worldwide audience on the Internet. This could be another way the France Telecom could launch an electronic shopping mall service in the future. The Internet certainly presents some interesting opportunities for France Telecom who has taken the initiative to provide new services that build on the strong foundation and strength of the Minitel network. France Telecom which is international in scope has moved successfully away from a proprietary network to embracing the open networking world for a new generation of wired consumers. |