Orange...The French Connection?

I was sitting in the midst of Santo Domingo traffic when I suddenly saw something strangely familiar to me. The logo for the telecommunication company Orange. I had used Orange in France as my cell phone service provider but what was it doing here across the Atlantic in the Dominican Republic?
In major cities in the Dominican Republic there are street vendors, who walk up and down (and sometimes in front of) the cars that are stopped at red lights. The vendors carry everything from bundles of cellphone chargers and sunglasses to candy wrapped in brightly colored packaging. But I was surprised when a man passed my window carrying phone cards for the company Orange.
Orange is headquartered out of Arcueil, France and is used widely throughout Europe. According to the Orange website at the end of September 2009, the company had accumulated more than 189 million customers in 30 different countries.
According to a 2003 article in the Caribbean Update, "Orange Dominicana has signed up nearly 500,000 subscribers in a country of 8.5 million inhabitants". Considering that the article is 7 years old I'm sure that the Orange client base has grown since then. Orange Dominicana now offers extensive coverage to its clients for reasonable rate making it one of the more popular telecommunications companies in the Dominican Republic.
While there are other cellphone service providers, this one stood out to me just because I was familiar with its French roots. I also thought it was kind of funny that a Spanish-speaking country was using a French-based company as their mode of communication.
Photo credit: Orange Communications