Summary

  • Arcep’s consultation closes on 10 November at 18:00 Paris time. Its draft updates France’s short-range radio table to implement two 2025 EU decisions.
  • At 916.1–919.4 MHz, the French draft says “radio-determination applications”; the EU decision says “non-specific short-range devices.” Security scanners, meanwhile, are explicitly indoor-only.

France’s short-range radio table is getting new rows. One of them arrives with a small but consequential paperwork mystery: the same 916.1–919.4 MHz band has one category name in Arcep’s draft and another in the EU decision it is meant to implement.

Arcep calls the French row “radio-determination applications.” Commission Implementing Decision 2025/650 calls the matching EU row “non-specific short-range devices.” France’s 2023 table used that latter category for 917.4–919.4 MHz. The 2026 draft extends the lower edge to 916.1 MHz and changes the label. The published consultation gives no reason for the switch.

That is not a typographical curiosity for people who collect frequency tables as a hobby. The category sits beside the band, power ceiling and airtime rules; together, those fields tell equipment teams which operating lane a device has been given. Arcep’s proposed 916.1–919.4 MHz row allows 25 mW EIRP, channels up to 600 kHz and a 1% duty cycle. The adjacent wideband-data row covers 916.4–919.4 MHz, permits channels above 600 kHz and up to 1 MHz, and caps airtime at 10% for network access points and 2.8% elsewhere. A master access point controls mobile and nomadic devices.

The draft has other excellent examples of regulators making “short range” sound less like a free-for-all. Its active-implant entries at 315–600 kHz and 12.5–20 MHz are restricted to animal medical implants; the second is indoor-only and capped at a 10% duty cycle. Security scanners get 69.8–79.9 GHz at 7 dBm EIRP, plus a 76.5–80.5 GHz entry at 19 dBm peak EIRP with at least 23 dB of out-of-band attenuation. Both scanner entries are for indoor use. The spectrum table has, in effect, assigned the scanner a permanent indoor voice.

Arcep opened the consultation on 11 September. Comments are due by 10 November at 18:00 Paris time. The regulator proposes to amend decision 2014-1263 to implement EU decisions 2025/105 and 2025/650; the current French decision was last modified in 2023. After consultation, ministerial homologation comes before publication in the Journal officiel.

The useful question for the consultation is sitting in plain sight: why does the French draft give the 916.1–919.4 MHz row a different device-class label from the EU table? A clean answer would make the operating lane easier to read for radio designers, test labs and anyone buying devices that need to stay inside it.

Primary documents: Arcep consultation; draft and frequency table; EU Decision 2025/105; EU Decision 2025/650; France’s 2023 decision.