France says goodbye to the landline. To be precise, it says goodbye to the old wall plug for hooking up the home telephone: in the not so distant future, the device will be connected directly to the Internet line. Indeed, from 15 November Orange, the former France Telecom which manages the fixed network in the country, will no longer sell subscriptions to the fixed telephone, the one that is analogical and not connected to the Internet, so to speak. For those who still use that service, i.e. about half of those who have a home line (9,4 million users out of 20 million), there will still be time before having to adapt: until 2023, according to Orange projects. For new customers, and for all customers who will change domicile, on the other hand, from 15 November this year, the fixed network via the Internet will already be the only option.
The novelty is especially important for companies: to date, 70% of legal entities have an old-fashioned landline telephone network and connect various services to it, from fax to payment systems, alarm systems and even elevators. This is why the transition will be very gradual, to give everyone the opportunity and time to adapt. Meanwhile, Orange is carrying out a test on a representative sample of the population, for which 14 municipalities in Brittany, a deliberately rural area, have been chosen to prevent this transition from rewarding the most technologically advanced metropolitan areas and leaving part of the country behind.
However, there is no shortage of controversy in the French newspapers, above all by collecting the testimonies of older people, who would thus be forced to subscribe to an Internet subscription in which they may not be interested: if in fact the new mechanism appears even logical and intuitive to young people, who prefer the use of the network to that of the telephone, the impact (including economic) that this could have on sections of the population less interested and less inclined to use the Internet and change their habits is quite different
