French consumer association UFC-Que Choisir has published a report demonstrating the wide divergence between mobile operators’ marketing messages about LTE speeds and the real throughput experienced by customers. Calling the difference “an intolerable discrepancy”, UFC writes that a testing programme it commissioned covering 80 percent of Paris streets found that Orange France’s 4G service is available in 79.3 percent of the city, with part of the southwest unserved. As for SFR, the operator covers under 75 percent of the capital, leaving many pockets without 4G service. Bouygues Telecom tested better, with 99.4 percent coverage. As the three incumbent MNOs used Paris as a showcase for their national LTE rollout, UFC expects coverage to not be as good in the other cities of France.
Given the fierce competition in the national mobile market, operators say their 4G networks offer velocities of between 115 Mbps and 150 Mbps, when in fact many customers with LTE phones cannot achieve this. Only 2.6GHz base stations can deliver such a throughput, but this type of equipment is, by its very nature, unsuitable for big cities. For people living in areas of less population density, the 800Mhz cells used can only provide between a third and half of the speeds promised to consumers. UFC sees this as a recipe for the emergence of a new digital divide and notes that operators’ LTE coverage maps make no mention of the dichotomy.
The association also takes issue with operators’ lack of distinction between “Dual Carrier” and “H+” from LTE when they refer to “mobile broadband”, when they are under a regulatory obligation to use the expression "mobile broadband" only for LTE.
Based on its findings, UFC has taken legal action against Orange France and SFR, accusing them both of misleading advertising. It has also called on the telecom regulator, ARCEP, to establish a 4G Observatory to monitor the LTE rollout in real time and to vouch for operators’ coverage and speed claims. Moreover, it wants the authority to require that operators explicitly demarcate service areas based on theoretical peak speeds on the maps they produce for consumers.
