Orange outlined plans to rollout LTE in its home market of France. An upgrade to HSPA+ has been undertaken in recent months.
In September 2011, ARCEP, the office telecoms regulator in France, awarded LTE licences to four operators to use the 2.6 GHz frequency band. Orange France won a duplex frequency block of 20 MHz, for which the company bid the sum of €287,118,501. The company also holds 800 MHz spectrum. Orange said this position will enable it to deliver rates of up to 150 Mbps downlink.
Marseille has been selected as the first Orange 4G pilot city. After the experimental deployment of 4G in a number of areas of the city, other cities will follow. Orange will be deploying its H+ technology and testing its 4G network in Marseille and the surrounding region with Alcatel-Lucent.
Meanwhile, Orange has tripled the speed of its 3G+ network by upgrading HSPA+ for downlinks of up to 42 Mbps.
More than 50 % of the population has been covered by this new technology since 24 November 2011, including 40 major urban centres such as Paris, Chambéry, Clermont Ferrand, Dijon, Grenoble, Lens, Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Nice, Saint-Etienne, Toulon, Marseille, Montpellier and Perpignan.
By end 2012, Orange HSPA+ coverage this coverage is exptected to reach 60% of the population with the addition of cities such as Bordeaux, Nancy, Metz, Strasbourg, Toulouse and Angoulême.
http://www.orange.com
