It looks like the fire in French operators about mobile Internet access has pretty much vanished for the moment. Last year at this time, there were posters such as this one everywhere, advertising how one could use a mobile phone to access the Internet. Nothing of the sort can be seen in the streets of Paris this year.
Also, no 3G USB dongle advertisements, most likely due to the lack of interesting pricing compared to those in countries such as Austria, the U.K., Sweden, Italy, Germany, etc. Also, no iPhone advertising, no eeePCs with 3G dongles, just an E71 mobile e-mail advertisement by Bouygues.
Together with Orange's recent announcement that they will hold out on LTE for the moment, quite a bleak picture. But with their current data pricing, it's unlikely they will get any kind of real load on their 3G networks anytime soon anyway. Looks like French operators have gone into some sort of combined hibernation once more while the rest of Europe is moving forward at a rapid pace.
Am I too pesimistic?
“Am I too pessimistic?”
No.
The rest of Europe? Don’t include Belgium, which is stuck in the 1980’s as far as competition goes.
All IP, a la LTE, seems to be the holy grail for operators to save costs at the moment. So you could be right. LTE should come on stream round about the time the recesion starts ending too. Then some might claim that LTE was the saviour of the world economy!