Investments made for the deployment of fiber in France have decreased significantly this last year. Millions of French people will not be connected for years.
The deployment of fiber in France is not at all up to the initial ambitions. The country is a good European student in the action carried out in recent years, with more than 36 million French people eligible for this very high-speed network and 83% of households already connected as of June 30, 2023. But for 18 months, the authorities observed very clear slowdowns, or even a halt in deployments in certain areas.
Ariel Turpin, the general delegate of Avicca, an association of communities engaged in digital technology, even speaks of a “collapse” of this deployment. What is it concretely? In one year, 4.1 million additional premises were made connectable to fiber compared to 5 million a year earlier: the rate was therefore reduced by 18% in one year, according to Arcep.
In the 106 largest cities in France, 92% of households are eligible for fiber, but the rate of new connections has been halved over one year. In the 3,600 municipalities located outside large cities, fiber deployment stands at 88% and the slowdown is of the same order. In less dense areas of public initiative, the RIP zones, where fiber is less profitable and therefore deployed with the support of local authorities, the connection rate is only 74%.
The telecoms regulatory authority (Arcep) considers the breach to be serious. Ella imposed a fine of 26 million euros on the operator Orange on Wednesday, November 8, due to non-compliance with its commitments in the deployment of fiber in medium-dense areas of the territory. Orange has contacted the Council of State to contest this sanction, which the group’s management considers “totally disproportionate”. This fine could even “reduce by the same amount the amount of investments made in the deployment of fiber, to the detriment of households waiting for connection”, judges Orange.
The authorities now consider that “generalization” of internet access via fiber is possible by 2025, not before. Which means that millions of people will not have access to very high speed before this date. It must be said that the historic copper network of the operator Orange is the only source of access to the telephone network for several million French people. And the latter must be closed by 2030, with the end of ADSL!
An agreement was signed with Orange to move forward. By 2025, the operator is committed to connecting between 96% and 98.5% of homes in the most remote areas. For the remaining hundreds of thousands of people, it is possible that the operations will not be completed, the connections remaining to be made promise to be very complex to carry out in isolated countryside and therefore extremely expensive. People living there may therefore be deprived of optical fiber.
Reaching 100% seems an unattainable goal, so the authorities have agreed on an alternative. Orange has accepted the principle of a right to connection on demand: a customer not connected after expiry will be able to personally ask Orange to be connected to fiber within six months.