Proximus

Company Overview

Proximus is a telecommunication & ICT company operating in the Belgian and international markets, providing services to residential, enterprise and public customers. Previously known as Belgacom Mobile, the company was founded in 1994 as a joint venture between Belgacom and AirTouch. AirTouch was later merged with Vodafone. In 2006, Belgacom bought the remaining Vodafone shares to become sole owner, and in 2014 rebranded to Proximus. Today the company is the largest of the three Belgium mobile carriers and is publicly traded on the Brussels Stock Exchange.

The company operates 2G GSM services over 900 and 1800 MHz, and 3G services over B1 (2100 MHz) and B8 (900 MHz). In June 2011 Proximus announced 4G LTE plans over B3 (1800 MHz) which went live November 2012. The company has since added B7 (2600 MHz) and B20 (800 MHz), switching on LTE-A 4G+ carrier aggregation in October 2015. Branded as 4.5G, Proximus launched LTE-A Pro in February 2017, adding B1 (2100 MHz) and advertising data rates up to 900 Mbps in selected areas.

Proximus is one of few carriers utilising Multipath-TCP (MPTCP) to aggregate a 4G LTE connection with fixed line DSL services to deliver improved data rates to rural customers.

Proximus IoT

Since 2015 the company had selected LoRa for its nationwide IoT network deployment, until announcing the launch of a complementary national NB-IoT network in May 2018.

Proximus 5G

Early testing in November 2016 conducted in partnership with Huawei achieved data rates in excess of 70 Gbps. In conjunction with Huawei, the company announced the successful testing of n78 (3500 MHz) 5G in April 2018, achieving peak data rates of 2.94 Gbps and an end-to-end latency of 1.81 milliseconds. The company expects to launch its 5G network in 2021.