Free Mobile is over: the operator is putting an end to a company launched 19 years ago

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The announcement goes almost unnoticed. In a box devoted to personal data in the latest mobile bills of its subscribers, which our colleagues at Univers Freebox have spotted, Free informs its customers that “the Free Mobile company is merging with the Free company on December 1, 2026”. Until now, Xavier Niel's operator was based on two separate legal entities, one for landlines, the other for mobiles.

For subscribers, Free promises that “nothing changes” and that no action is necessary. The packages, prices and contractual conditions remain the same, including for rental customers with Free Flex purchase option. The recorded means of payment are retained. The only concrete change: subscriber data will be transferred from Free Mobile to Free.

The Free Mobile company is much older than its plans. Iliad, the parent company of Free, created it in the summer of 2007 to apply for the fourth 3G license. On July 31, 2007, she was even the only candidate. It took a second call for applications, with a batch of frequencies reduced to 5 MHz, for Arcep to select Free Mobile on December 18, 2009, for 240 million euros.

On January 10, 2012, Xavier Niel officially unveiled Free Mobile with a 2 euro plan and an unlimited plan at 19.99 euros per month, without commitment. For 14 years, Free brought together two brands, Free for the Freebox and Free Mobile for the packages. A unique situation in France: Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom sell boxes and packages under the same name, their secondary brands (Sosh, RED, B&You) serving to separate the price ranges rather than fixed from mobile. At Free, the distinction has always been legal: the managers are the same and Free and Free Mobile announcements can take place at the same time.

On a commercial level, the distinction no longer really made sense. Subscribers manage their box and their package in the same Free application and the offers are now called Free 5G or Free Max Package. Separating the two activities made sense in 2007, when mobile represented an expensive and risky bet that was better isolated from the rest of the group, but this is no longer the case in 2026. Nothing says that Free will not continue to talk about Free Mobile during its presentations, even if the two companies merge.

The calendar is probably no coincidence. Free signed a memorandum of understanding on June 6, 2026 with Bouygues Telecom and Orange to buy SFR for 20.35 billion euros. The operation is still subject to the competition authorities, but Free is preparing to welcome millions of fixed and mobile subscribers from SFR. A single company will be easier to manage to migrate them: we can imagine that the acquisition of SFR motivates, at least in part, the end of the Free Mobile company.

Machine-translated from French