The annual report on the quality of experience of the services offered by mobile operators in mainland France has just been published by the specialized firm Qosi. This document is intended to report on user experience on 2G, 3G and 4G networks marketed by operators during the year 2020.

This study is based on feedback from 42,000 contributors spread across 20,000 municipalities in France. And the results reflect a growing disparity of situations, whether in the countryside or in the city. By 2020, 23% of metropolitan municipalities will have a low-quality 4G network, with the vast majority of flows below 10 Mb/s. Worse still, 3% of the municipalities surveyed do not have any usable data network... 95% of these municipalities are located in rural areas.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the quality of service of mobile networks is constantly improving, both in the city and in the countryside. In terms of downstream speeds, for example, Orange is one step ahead of its competitors in 2020, with the best average speed at national level. The incumbent operator is followed by SFR, then Bouygues and finally Free.
Despite widespread improvement, this is still not enough to widen the yawning gap that now separates rural and urban connections.

Take the case of Orange. Even by improving its downstream speeds by 10 Mb/s in all geographical areas, this is still not enough to close the gap between the quality of service observed in rural and urban areas. The operator is thus the one with the greatest disparity in speeds between the different strata of the population.

Conversely, Free is progressing uniformly throughout the country, making it the operator offering the most consistent quality of service.

The same applies to upload speeds. Orange has the best average upload speed in France. But the difference in treatment will remain significant depending on whether users are in urban or rural areas. In spite of this, the incumbent operator has established itself as the operator offering the best speeds for all population strata. Next comes Bouygues Telecom, followed by SFR and then Free.

This territorial divide is logically reflected in the results of the quality of service offered by operators on web browsing. At the national level, the proportion of pages displayed in less than 10 seconds is 92% for Orange, 89% for Bouygues Telecom and SFR and 86% for Free. Here again, rural areas are down 5 to 10 points compared to urban areas. This is enough to push operators to redouble their efforts to finally hope to bridge the digital divide in 2021.

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Source : ZDNet

Spanish company Cellnex has just acquired the entire portfolio of 10,500 French mobile sites from Hivory, SFR's TowerCo. Effective by the second half of 2021 and subject to approval by the authorities, the transaction was valued at 5.2 billion euros for Cellnex. It will also include an additional investment program of 900 million euros to deploy 2,500 new sites by 2029.

With this transaction, Cellnex is at the forefront of the mobile infrastructure market in France. Present in France since 2016 through its local branch, the group had more than 9,000 mobile sites throughout the country by 2020. The acquisition of Hivory puts Cellnex in the shoes of the sector leader, with nearly 20,000 mobile sites (antennas and rooftop terraces) across the country.

As under the agreements entered into by Bouygues Telecom and then Free with Cellnex, SFR is expected to remain the tenant of its former mobile infrastructure network for a period of at least 18 years, renewable for periods of 5 years.

The agreement signed with SFR illustrates the Group's strong ambitions in France and Europe. The Spanish mobile infrastructure champion has therefore just acquired one of its main competitors on the French market.

Now only TDF and the future TowerCo of Orange France remain on the French market to face the Spanish giant. This puts the latter in a comfortable position, before its new capital increase. This should enable it to finance a portfolio of acquisition projects, part of which has already been committed for the acquisition of Hivory in France and the integration of Deutsche Telekom's sites in the Netherlands.

For fiscal year 2019, the Group recorded a 15% increase in total revenues for the year and a 16% increase in EBITDA compared to the previous fiscal year. With operations in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, Denmark and Sweden, the Spanish ogre now has a fleet of 120,000 sites, 75,000 of which are operational, with the remainder being acquired or deployed by 2028.

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Source : ZDNet