Free announced at the Free 2015 event at parent company Iliad’s headquarters in Paris that it has nearly completed its migration to VDSL. There are only 300 DSLAMs left to upgrade, which will be done by the end of June. All customers with a line of 1 km or less with a Freebox Revolution or Freebox Mini 4K will be able to benefit from faster speeds. The broadband and mobile operator said it made a fix on 2 June to solve a bandwidth variation problem some customers experienced after switching to VDSL. It also suggested it had come up with new technologies to increase speeds on ADSL.
Xavier Niel confirmed that its FTTH rollout in very dense areas had accelerated. It now has 230 nodes, but not all have been switched on. In less densely populated areas, where Free co-invests with Orange, the first subscribers will be connected “very soon”. These areas will eventually represent 5 million homes. Finally, Niel said that the company would soon announce its FTTH customer figures, “which are starting to be substantial”.
In mobile, Iliad CEO Maxime Lombardini emphasised Free’s rapid network rollout. The company said it has activated 3,700 LTE sites, but had not specific population coverage data. It is somewhere between the 33 percent, as measured by regulator Arcep in December 2014, and 60 percent, its target for the end of the year.
The LTE rollout in the Paris metro has been delayed by several issues, including asbestos removal. Free also said that all of its new Freebox STBs come with a femtocell. Univers Freebox writes that this makes it the world’s biggest femtocell network.
