France will soon become the last of the major western European economies to hold an auction of 5G spectrum, giving its operators the licenses they need to launch the next-generation mobile technology. That will be a welcome development to Ericsson and Nokia, both of which must be at the front of the queue for contracts with France's biggest telco.
Orange, which has already announced plans to launch commercial 5G services next year, has built the entirety of its existing radio access network (RAN) with the Swedish and Finnish suppliers, relying on their gear for its 2G, 3G and 4G systems. Stephane Richard, its CEO, has also ruled out the use of Huawei as a 5G vendor in France amid security concerns about the Chinese company.
That would also seem to exclude ZTE, a smaller Chinese vendor similarly viewed as a security risk in some government and telco circles. South Korea's Samsung, the other 5G vendor that rounds out the big five, could feasibly play a role. In fact, Richard told Reuters in April that Orange would carry out trials of Samsung's 5G equipment in Saint-Ouen, near Paris, later this year. But Samsung remains focused on specific markets and opportunities, according to experts, and has not previously featured in Orange's French network.
Although Ericsson and Nokia have yet to announce 5G deals with Orange, both companies have been involved in its French trials and will expect to share most of the 5G contracts that come up for grabs. Orange is now in a selection process for suppliers of 5G equipment at "French and global" levels, a spokesperson for Ericsson confirmed, while declining to comment further. Nokia had not sent feedback for this story at the time of publication. But ceding ground to another player would be a surprising upset for either one of the Nordic vendors.
Largely, that is because major telcos nearly always stick with their existing 4G suppliers when upgrading to 5G. With the "non-standalone" version of 5G, which uses the 4G "core" in conjunction with a 5G RAN, using different 4G and 5G radio vendors could lead to interoperability problems, say experts. An operator that moves to a different vendor for its 5G rollout would typically have to replace 4G equipment with gear from that new 5G supplier.
This swap-out would inevitably result in higher costs and slow down the deployment of 5G services, explaining why UK operators heavily dependent on Huawei are resisting calls to ban it from the 5G market.
Switches do happen. Three, the smallest of the UK's four mobile network operators, used Samsung as a 4G RAN supplier but last year picked Huawei to build its 5G network. Under that contract, it is phasing out Samsung and replacing it with Huawei's 4G equipment.
But Orange has no obvious reason to attempt a similar overhaul in France. "Samsung hasn't really committed to Europe and so it was an inevitability that when Three went to tender it would be replaced," said Gabriel Brown, a principal analyst with Light Reading sister company Heavy Reading, in a previous discussion.
"Samsung gear is good, but European operators want local support and supply chains and it didn't get enough scale in 4G to make this investment worthwhile," added Brown on the rationale behind Three's decision. "Also, this equipment has a lifespan and the Samsung gear had more or less come to an end."
light reading |
.jpg)
