It is clear that white areas are not limited to rural deserts. They also concern tourist areas that are very popular in the summer with cyclists, hikers and coastal travellers.

In the Luberon, if optical fibre has arrived in Isle sur la Sorgue or Maubec, ADSL is particularly anaemic in Gordes, and 4G is almost absent. The various local players are suffering from the disinvestment of the main operators and the public authorities. The latter are struggling to impose a minimum service for services that are now essential at a time when administrative procedures are being dematerialised.

If digital technology is on everyone's lips today, once you leave the urban areas, you are in digital poverty with a two-speed France.

In a report published on 16 January 2020, the former rights defender Jacques Toubon stated that "in municipalities with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, more than a third of the inhabitants do not have access to quality Internet, which represents nearly 75% of municipalities in France and 15% of the population". Fortunately, alternative Internet service providers and digital development companies are helping rural communities. They are setting up small-scale radio networks accessible to individuals and small businesses. These are essential local initiatives, as the France Très Haut Débit plan, launched in 2013, and the New Deal Mobile, launched in 2018, are struggling to eradicate the digital divide and ensure equal access to the Internet for all French people.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

Although the launch of the France Très Haut Débit plan in 2013 was slow, its acceleration has finally produced good results. Metropolitan France will not be covered by 2022, as was initially planned, and it will take until 2025 - or even 2030 - for some regions to be fully covered. However, the investments made in deployment work have enabled the country to make a good comeback in the European rankings. France is now ahead of the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy with an average speed of over 50 Mb/s.

These efforts have resulted in a significant increase in subscriptions, as France now has more than 14 million fibre-optic customers. The country will soon have more fibre subscribers than xDSL Internet customers.

Orange is by far the leading fibre optic Internet provider with over 5.2 million customers, ahead of SFR (3.6 million), Free (3.3 million) and Bouygues Telecom (1.9 million).

Moreover, the health crisis has only accentuated the need for the French to be able to rely on a reliable and efficient Internet connection. So much so that in the real estate sector, the connection of properties to the fibre optic network is becoming an increasingly important criterion for buyers.

The current challenge is in rural areas, where fibre optics are more expensive to deploy and less profitable. This is why the State and local authorities are obliged to get involved through the RIPs (public initiative networks) to accompany the rollouts carried out by the operators. This is why the recovery plan decreed to revive the economy after the stoppage linked to Covid-19 provides for some 570 million euros for the deployment of optical fibre.

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Source : Les Numériques

The results published by Orange and Bouygues Telecom confirm the French people's enthusiasm for Very High Speed Internet. Both operators saw their number of FttH subscribers explode in the 4th quarter of 2020 with gains of 9% for the former and 16% for the latter.

The end of the year 2020 has never been so successful for the incumbent operator. With 388,000 additional fiber customers in the last three months of the year, Orange had 4.5 million FttH Internet subscribers. This also enables it to consolidate its number one position on fiber even though its runner-up, Free, has not yet published its results.

Act 2 of the confinement has finally convinced many French people of the need for a very high-speed Internet line to cope with the repetition of this type of situation. In this context, Orange fiber being the most available, with 22.9 million eligible premises at the end of the year, was unsurprisingly in great demand.

Bouygues Telecom remains one notch behind Orange, but also Free, in terms of the number of premises eligible for its FttH offers: 17.7 million at the end of 2020. That's still 6 million more in one year, which, combined with the containment effect and the fact that it is moving further afield, is no stranger to the impressive growth posted by the operator.

Indeed, the Bouygues group's telecom brand has grown from 1 million to 1.6 million fiber optic Internet customers in just one year. This represents a jump of 60%, to which the fourth quarter made a major contribution, with 226,000 FttH subscribers joining the ranks over the period.

In total, nearly 40% of the 4.2 million households that surf at Bouygues have optical fiber, a penetration rate similar to that of Orange and Free. With such a buoyant context for fiber, Iliad's brand should undoubtedly break records in the fourth quarter, and approach the symbolic milestone of 3 million fiber subscribers. Answer during its 2020 review, scheduled for next month.

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Source : DegroupTest