Altice promises to fibre France without public funds

Altice’s French unit SFR is to roll out fibre across the whole of France, promising to cover 80% of the national territory by 2022 and 100% by 2025.

Responding to a request by the French government for operators to make their fibre plans public, Altice-SFR said it would build out a fibre network without any public subsidies.

The group said that its infrastructure arm would begin work to roll out fibre to new areas from September, with the first homes to be connected in the autumn. Altice said it would make its network available to third-party operators under transparent conditions.

Altice said it is able to use its experience of deploying fibre in Portugal, where it has covered 100% of the national territory, and the US, where it has embarked on an aggressive fibre deployment plant, to roll out the network while keeping costs under control. The group has housed its network construction activity in a separate unit, Altice Technical Services.

The operator said it would also publish plans to extend the coverage of its mobile network beyond the target of reaching 90% of the country’s population by the end of this year and 99% by the end of 2018.

“In the face of a system that has become obsolete, Altice-SFR is taking the initiative to fibre the whole of France without any public money. This contribution to the government’s very high-speed networks project represents a major rupture, enabled by the technical competence and the commitment of Altice in financing very high-speed networks in France and in the countries in which we are present. From September we will being to deploy, enabling the achievement of the government’s objective without any supplementary funding,” said SFR CEO Michel Paulin.