False fiber: SFR ordered to pay 1 million euros to Free – Univers Freebox

In 2015, Free sued SFR for its misuse of the term fiber in its very high speed offers. Almost six years later, the case is now definitely closed.

The epilogue of a case that SFR has been dragging on for years. On October 15, the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed the conviction of the operator at the Red Square for “deceptive marketing practices”Following the legal action against Free in 2015. SFR must therefore pay one million euros in damages to Xavier Niel’s operator.

“The confusion maintained has indisputably led consumers to subscribe to an offer in the belief that their home was connected. [en fibre] end-to-end and that they benefited from the most efficient connectivity on the market”, Explains the court, which goes so far as to mention a practice“indisputably unfair”.

The false fiber of SFR

Very high speed is not achieved by end-to-end fiber alone. Several connection technologies can be used, with on the one hand the FttH, which makes the connection between a connection node and the subscriber’s home only with fiber, but Numéricable (which became SFR in 2014) has to choose from use coaxial. Concretely: the optical fiber was well used for the core network, but a coaxial cable was responsible for terminating the connection over the last few meters (from the last distributor or at the bottom of the building). However, a coaxial cable offers a lower speed than optical fiber and since SFR prided itself on marketing “Fiber Boxes” which were not completely available, Free a decided to sue its competitor.

Free considered that the use of “deceptive terms”In SFR’s communication caused it to lose potential customers, while for its part it was deploying fiber to the subscriber directly. In 2015, at the start of the case, Xavier Niel’s operator claimed nearly 52 million euros in damages from its competitor. A first judgment was rendered in 2018, where the court recognized that “the lack of information retained necessarily resulted in the improvement of SFR’s image to the detriment of other operators“. As the precise impact and the causal link between the lack of information and the damage for Free could not be clearly established, SFR was then ordered to pay one million euros to its competitor. The operator appealed, for the result that we know today.

As for communication to SFR customers, the commercial court then ordered the operator to explicitly specify in its technology where the “fiber” technology stops in the network. In 2020 however, the operator who had not played the game received a new conviction, forcing him to inform his subscribers of the nature of their offer and of their possibility of terminating their subscription without delay. The consumer association UFC-Que Choisir has also strongly criticized the operator who is reluctant to leave his subscribers cancel free of charge, forcing them to go through a specific procedure.

A clarification of the difference between fiber and coaxial in 2016

Following this legal action, a decisive order has been signed so that operators cannot misuse the word “fiber”. In its communication, SFR only specified the coaxial nature of the connection through asterisks that are difficult to read or in obscure sections of its website. The court also considers that “the graphic presentation of all these posters highlights the optical fiber and the speed of the speed, but it does not allow a consumer to appreciate that this offer is based on a connection to the subscriber by a coaxial cable. Indeed, the reference by an asterisk to this information, developed at the bottom of the advertisement in very small, barely legible characters, does not meet the requirement to inform the consumer on the composition of the service provided, when the coaxial termination is undoubtedly one of the substantial qualities of the service, in that it is one of the determining components of the speed and the stability of the flow“.

In short, the confusion was maintained on the side of SFR, giving the consumer the impression of accessing a very high-performance very high speed offer, without realizing that the speed would be less than that obtained via an FttH connection. On March 1, 2016, a decree was put in place to ensure perfect transparency of the offers. In the case of a coaxial cable connection, the use of the term fiber must be accompanied by the words “except home connection”. This clarification had to be visible and therefore could not be relegated to a simple footnote. If SFR tried to oppose it with an appeal to the Council of State for “infringement of freedom of expression”, it was quickly rejected and was changed the names of its offers, moving from “Box Fiber” to “Box THD” and “Box 4K”.

Source: Capital