Orange and Free will reduce their roaming agreement in 2017 – L’Express

The Termination Agreement for the provision of roaming plans “ progressive limitation by Free Mobile in January 2017, services for its customers roaming on the Orange network. This agreement is his term at the end of 2020 , “said the incumbent, while the previous contract was due to end in 2018.

Specifically, Iliad, the parent of Free, will have to accelerate the deployment of its own network to compensate for the limitation of the maximum speed for its customers since early 2017 when they are roaming on the Orange network.

But Free, last in the sector, and leases part of the Orange network, gets two years to develop its own infrastructure and do not end up starting in 2018 in a situation of denial of service .

Orange and should see the benefits of this highly lucrative contract to extend a little longer.

The incumbent had fired in 2015 some 700 million euros of the roaming contract, a source close to the case, indicating that Free was then still very dependent on the Orange network.

Iliad stressed in turn that Free Mobile “ met the first two requirements of deployment of its license and acquired a significant portfolio of frequency ” and now covers through investments “ 84.5% of the population in 3G and 4G 68.3% .”

The text must now be communicated to the ARCEP, the telecoms regulator, which will decide on its compliance with the guidelines it published on 25 May.

The Authority was then given until June 15 to four French telecom operators to submit new contracts on their roaming agreements and sharing networks.

SFR and Bouygues operators are also in the viewfinder ARCEP who requested new proposals on their agreement to pool 2G-3G-4G networks.

As part of the Macron law, ARCEP has new powers for the sharing of mobile networks.

The regulator believes that if homelessness “ can have beneficial effects and can be justified under the regulatory objectives “, it “ can only be transient or limited in terms of scope “because it could encourage operators to invest less.

The pooling of network can, according to her, explain “ on the less dense part of the territory ” and is acceptable “ except that the negative impacts, including competitive, could be offset by the positive impacts, particularly improving the coverage and quality of mobile service . ”

As of 2013, the Competition Authority had called for the gradual extinction of homelessness. It believed that competition would be through infrastructure, which means that each operator uses its own network.