SFR has proposed its own plan to roll out FTTP across France, potentially saving the government billions of euros on its national broadband plan. In a letter addressed to Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, SFR offered an alternative strategy, claiming that it can afford to bring fibre-to-the-premise connectivity to 80 percent of the country by 2022 and its entirety by 2025, without receiving any state aid.
The fibre deployment would be carried out by a new subsidiary, Altice Infrastructures, which could become operational by September and would give competitors access to its network on a wholesale basis. The proposal follows a recent meeting organised by the minister for territorial cohesion, Jacques Mezard, to discuss with the country’s main telecom players the future direction of the national broadband plan, which was approved by Francois Hollande and is now being reviewed under new French president Emmanuel Macron.
SFR had already revealed its intention to question the status quo in recent months. In May, the company started legal action against Orange over their previous deal which determined their respective fibre deployments in less densely populated areas, in order to avoid duplication in their network footprints.
After this deal was signed in 2011, Altice's subsidiary Numericable acquired SFR and the combined entity has tried to renegotiate the terms of the agreement with Orange for the last two years, demanding a bigger share of the areas earmarked for deployment.
In addition to the dispute with Orange on less densely populated areas, SFR has also expressed its dissatisfaction over the process used to award contracts in rural areas for public initiative networks, known as RIP (Reseaux d'Initiative Publique). In June, Les Echos reported that the operator feared to have lost a tender for a RIP project in the Grand Est region and responded to this potential defeat by threatening to deploy a network in direct competition with the winner of the tender.
