Bouygues Telecom has installed its first three 700 MHz antennas in Paris and Free Mobile put up three in Tarbes. This follows the auction of spectrum in the 700 MHz band last November and issue of licences in December. Free acquired two blocks in the auction and Bouygues Telecom one 5 MHz block.
The frequencies are coming available as France switches to the MPEG4 standard for digital broadcasting. DTT will progressively vacate the 700 MHz band, which will be made available to operators between April 2016 and June 2019.
French operators will use the 700 MHz band to expand their LTE networks. They are already using the 800 MHz, 1,800 MHz and 2.6 GHz bands for 4G. The operator with the most LTE sites in service is Orange France (8,716), followed by Bouygues Telecom (7,567), Free Mobile (6,134) and Numericable-SFR (5,572).
