Orange has started to deploy an ‘Internet of Things’ national network in France
HONG KONG – French telecom operator Orange expects to invest 15 billion euros ($16.3 billion) between 2015 and 2018, the company’s SVP of Radio Networks Arnaud Vamparys said during a keynote speech at Huawei’s Global Mobile Broadband Forum 2015, which took place in Hong Kong this week.
The executive said a total of 5 billion euros will be invested in the company’s mobile networks during the period. Vamparys also said that the operator’s goal is to reach coverage of more than 95% in its European operation with LTE services and LTE-Advanced in the main cities. He said LTE-Advanced is currently commercially available in approximately 30 European cities. In Europe, the telco provides services in France, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Switzerland and the United Kingdom among others. Vamparys said Orange is looking to secure LTE frequencies for operations in the Middle East and Africa.
The executive also said the company is currently adding mobile spectrum in the 700 MHz band in some markets. Taking into account Orange’s global operations, the firm owns mobile spectrum in the 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.6 GHz bands.
The executive said Orange is focusing on increasing user throughput by a factor of three.
“LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation is the main tool to achieve this,” he said. “It will be common in our operation to have 100 [megabits per second] mean rates by 2017.”
Orange is in process of deploying voice over LTE and voice over Wi-Fi (VoWiFi) in its operations in Europe, the executive added.
As part of the company’s Essentials2020 strategy, the “Internet of Things” is a focus area for Orange, which plans to generate 600 million euros in revenue by 2018. In September 2015, the telco announced it will deploy an IoT network to cover the whole of metropolitan France.
