More than half of Bouygues Telecom phone connections running on LTE network at end of Q1
French telecom operator Bouygues Telecom said it added 240,000 new mobile connections in the first quarter of 2016, reaching 12.1 million total connections on its network at the end of March. Of that total, 5.6 million were LTE subscribers, representing 55% of the mobile base excluding machine-to-machine connections, compared with 36% at the end of Q1 last year.
The French telco said LTE customers consumed an average of 2.7 gigabytes of data per month in Q1, compared with 2.2 GB in the first quarter of 2015.
In the fixed broadband market, Bouygues Telecom said it added 71,000 new subscribers during the first three months of the year, hitting 2.9 million total segment customers at the end of the period.
The firm’s overall sales reached 1.13 billion euros ($1.27 billion) in the first quarter, up 6% vs. Q1 2015. The operator’s network sales in the latest quarter totaled 971 million euros, climbing 4% compared to the same period the previous year. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in Q1 increased by 28 million euros year-over-year to 146 million euros.
The company said it expects total capital expenditures of between 750 million and 800 million euros for 2016.
In a previous presentation during the company’s capital markets day, Bouygues Telecom said its LTE network covered approximately 72% of the French population. The company added that due to network sharing in “non-dense” areas, LTE coverage was set to reach 99% of the population by 2018, via an extension of the network from 15,000 to 20,000 base stations.
Proximus to launch VoLTE in Belgium later this year
In other EMEA news, Belgian fixed and mobile operator Proximus (formerly Belgacom) said it plans to launch voice-over-LTE services later this year.
The operator said it has achieved speeds of up to 1.1 gigabits per second during trials of “4.5G” technology. The firm launched its LTE network in 2012, and currently offers LTE-Advanced network speeds up to 225 Mbps in 20 cities. Proximus said the 1.1 Gbps test speeds were achieved using carrier aggregation technology and spectrum in the 800 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.6 GHz bands.
