Summary

  • Arcep has authorised reciprocal frequency rentals for selected sites covered by the operators' 2019 agreement, with the current permission ending on 24 March 2031.
  • Individual licence duties remain intact. The published decision supplies neither an activation count nor measurements showing that customers already receive better service.

Imagine reaching a ticket barrier with the fare paid and the ticket still refusing to load. You refresh the page. The phone remains connected, the screen keeps you waiting, and now other people are waiting behind you. In that moment, a slow connection stops being an inconvenience measured in megabits. It stands between you and something you have already bought.

That hypothetical traveller does not need a bigger national spectrum total. They need enough usable capacity at the place where the phone is trying to connect. Coverage answers one question: can the network reach you? Congestion raises another: can it serve you when others want to use it too?

France's regulator has given four rivals another way to address that second question. Arcep has allowed Bouygues Telecom, Free Mobile, Orange and SFR to rent 1800 MHz frequencies to one another at selected shared sites. Combining their radio resources could ease a local bottleneck without each company duplicating the same investment. Whether it will save anyone a wait at a barrier, or anywhere else, depends on deployment and results that the permission does not yet disclose.

From a shared site to shared frequencies

The four operators already have an agreement dated 26 July 2019. They notified Arcep of its second amendment on 1 June 2026 and made a joint frequency-rental application on 29 June. Decision 2026-1733 followed on 29 September; Arcep announced it on 13 October. The regulator concluded that it did not need to require changes to the amendment under its review of regulatory objectives.

The new arrangement adds 4G radio-access-network sharing that combines 1800 MHz frequencies at selected sites within that agreement, particularly where traffic is heavy. Each operator can transmit using the others' authorised bands alongside its own. Sharing a mast and sharing radio resources are different things: the latter can change the capacity available to serve users, rather than merely where equipment stands.

There is a geographical boundary. The agreement covers sites associated with earlier coverage programmes, including 2G coverage of previously unserved village and town centres, 3G RAN sharing, extensions to the historic coverage programmes, France Mobile and the targeted-coverage scheme. These are not simply city-centre sites. Nor does their presence in the older agreement mean they have all been selected for the new arrangement. Responsibility for deploying sites is unchanged.

The permission specifies four pairs of bands:

  • Bouygues Telecom: 1765–1785 and 1860–1880 MHz.
  • Free Mobile: 1750–1765 and 1845–1860 MHz.
  • Orange: 1710–1730 and 1805–1825 MHz.
  • SFR: 1730–1750 and 1825–1845 MHz.

Those numbers describe the permitted resources, not a claim that every block is running at every site all day. There is no national merger of spectrum licences, no blanket roaming promise and no new 5G rollout hidden in the decision.

The permission is the easy part to count

The attraction is straightforward. Where one operator runs short of radio capacity, access to usable resources held by its neighbours could relieve the bottleneck. A network might add local capacity without every operator making the same separate investment. How much equipment or expenditure that saves depends on implementation; the three-page decision contains no such calculation.

In fact, the public announcement and decision leave the scale of the change open. They give no total of eligible sites, no activation tally, no congestion threshold and no rollout timetable. They disclose neither the spectrum actually combined nor rental payments, integration costs, operating costs or the division of benefits among the four companies.

For a customer, the missing information is more tangible: does a connection hold, and does a busy-hour download finish before it is needed? Our imagined ticket holder would gain little from a network carrying more data overall if their own request still failed. There are no before-and-after series here for speed, failed sessions, coverage or complaints. An activation announcement would establish that something had been switched on; it would not, by itself, establish better service.

Four licences still mean four sets of duties

Arcep expressly leaves each holder's rights and obligations in place, including deployment commitments and spectrum fees. Reciprocal rental does not transfer those duties into a single shared licence. It also does not reveal which operator will bear the net cost of the arrangement: the public documents do not set out maintenance arrangements or the commercial terms between them.

Arcep's broader explanation of network sharing describes the trade-off. Sharing can reduce deployment costs and make coverage more viable. Active sharing can also constrain operators' technical and commercial independence and change incentives to invest in competing infrastructure. Those are reasons to examine this arrangement, not evidence that it has already weakened competition.

The current authorisation ends on 24 March 2031, the earliest expiry among the underlying licences. That is a real legal limit. The documents do not establish whether a successor permission will follow, or how operators would migrate sites if it does not; continued use cannot simply be assumed.

The next useful news would therefore come from the sites themselves: which were activated, what resources they use and what changed for customers. Until then, France's four rivals have another way to tackle a local queue for capacity. The queue on a subscriber's screen remains the test, not the signature on the permission.

Sources