March 5th 2020

Orange shines in Tutela’s latest State of Mobile Network report for France, performing better than its competitors in four of the five key metrics. Leading in both Excellent and Core Consistent Quality, Orange provides its customers with an “Excellent” network experience – representative of uses such as streaming 1080p videos and making HD video calls –  87.3% of the time. Orange customers can also expect to use simple applications, like social media, email, and standard definition video streaming, an impressive 98.1% of the time. This is according to a new report on mobile network experience in the country from Tutela, the global crowdsourced mobile data company. 

In this report, Tutela collected and analyzed over 125 million speed tests, 1 billion latency tests, and over 7 billion total mobile records collected between August 1st, 2019 and January 31st, 2020. 

Key findings from the report include: 

• Despite Orange’s lead, Bouygues and SFR were tough contenders in all metrics tested, behind Orange by only 5.6% and 7.2% in Excellent Consistent Quality performance
• Free Mobile had the best latency in the country with 12.7 ms despite coming last in all other metrics. Free Mobile has been on the market for the past 7 years, and was billed as a major disruptor in the industry, but is still struggling to compete in many performance metrics against the more established player
• Mid-band (1800 Mhz) spectrum is the dominant workhorse of French networks, and was the main primary band used for LTE traffic by volume for Bouygues, SFR and Orange. Free Mobile was unique in preferring to rely on higher-band (2600 Mhz) spectrum for the bulk of its LTE data load, which likely offers benefits in terms of its network’s capacity but may struggle to provide reliable connectivity both over a greater distance or inside building

Leandro Demarchi, Sales Director for Tutela in LATAM and Southern Europe, commented: “Although France has the third-largest telecoms market in Europe, operators and regulators are relatively slow to adopt the first phases of 5G – Arcep, the French regulator, only opened up the 5G spectrum auction process in early January 2020. While this means 5G is still a long way off for consumers, this slower approach may prove to be beneficial to operators, gaining knowledge and experience by watching how other nations navigate the early-stage difficulties of 5G adoption. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years as both consumer demands of their mobile networks and 5G device penetration grow.” 

The full report is available here.