Orange France

Company Overview

Orange is a multinational telecommunications company and mobile network operator servicing France. The company was founded in 1988 as France Télécom S.A., formerly known as the direction générale des Télécommunications, a state-run division of the French Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. The company was mostly privatised in 1990, with the French government maintaining a significant shareholding (approx. 27%). France Télécom was floated on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in April 1996, and later on Euronext and New York Stock Exchanges. France Télécom began the mammoth effort to rebrand and unite all of its business operations under the Orange brand in June 2006, completing in 2013.

The company provides 2G GSM services over the 900 and 1800 MHz bands, and in September 2006 launched 3G UMTS over the B1 (2100 MHz) band. The network modernised to DC-HSPA+ in April 2012, and a B8 (900 MHz) service added in 2013.

Orange (then France Télécom) began a 4G LTE pilot in June 2012, with a full commercial launch taking place late 2012 / early 2013. The network began on B7 (2600 MHz) and B20 (800 MHz) bands, and despite trials with 3500 MHz LTE added a B3 (1800 MHz) service in May 2016. The network was upgraded to LTE-A with 2C aggregation in October 2014 and adding 3C aggregation with its B3 network activation.

While the company secured 700 MHz spectrum back in Arcep's November 2015 auction, B28 (700 MHz) deployments only began in April 2016 (Ile-de-France), with full rollout possible from between October 2017 and June 2019. B1 (2100 MHz) LTE began in September 2017.

3C network performance was substantially improved with the implementation of LTE-A Pro, with Orange using 4X4 MIMO and 256QAM to deliver peak data rates of 680 Mbps in July 2017.

Orange Mayotte & Reunion

Orange extends its network to the overseas departments of Mayotte and Reunion using its existing ARCEP licence conditions.

Orange's IoT Network

Orange began trialling a range of IoT technologies as early as February 2016 when it tested EC-GSM-IoT in partnership with Ericsson. Early / mid 2016 Orange made the determination to deploy a LoRa network over the EU868 ISM band, icing its initial plans to deploy NB-IoT. The company has also spoken of its intentions to implement a second IoT network using LTE-M (eMTC), and began trials in mid 2017 with a target of a 2018 deployment. Orange France's LTE-M network was officially activated in November 2018.