France Telecom sold his italian VoIP company

Yesterday France Telecom announced to have sold Parla.it, the italian VoIP company belonging to its group. The new owner is Digital Television, an IP-TV provider in Italy (they are a start-up and their service is still under testing).
The objective of Parla.it was to compete with Telecom Italia in Italy, as Telecom Italia Sparkle (the international branch) is already doing in France. On the other hand, Digital Television is aiming to offer a triple play service to their customers.

Parla.it service is nothing more than a Vonage-like service. They offered a H323-based CPE from Sagem where the user could connect their “standard” telephone device.
This CPE also acts as a modem/router. In the last months they began to offer a PC based solution as well, Parlacom, that is a re-branded french service. But, at the end, no more than 5K users.

I know very well these guys from Parla.it and I also know that it was very hard for them to deal with post-paid customers, offerings etc. etc. Moreover, it seems that they totally depended from France Telecom, so they didn’t have any independence to choose their suppliers for their VoIP and so on. I think this was a big point for them.
In addition, they are offering an H323-based service. Why? In my opinion, France Telecom had agreements with Sagem (french company again) so they had to get rid of thousand of H323-CPEs they previously bought.

I really hope they can now make their own choices, choosing the right vendors as well as designing a look-ahead strategy but, above all, proposing real value-added services to their users.

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