French operator launched ‘4G+’ in Lyon
French telecom operator Bouygues Telecom said it added 208,000 new mobile customers in the third quarter of the year, reaching a total of 11.6 million customers on its network at the end of the quarter. The company ended Q3 with 4.6 million LTE subscribers, representing 46% of the mobile base excluding machine-to-machine connections, compared with 26% at the end of Q3 last year.
In the fixed broadband market, Bouygues Telecom said it added 94,000 new customers in Q3 and 268,000 connections during the first nine months of the year, hitting 2.7 million total segment customers at the end of the period.
The firm’s network sales reached 978 million euros ($1.05 billion) in Q3, a slight increase from the 975 million euros posted in the year-ago quarter. The operator’s total sales in the latest quarter totaled 1.16 billion euros, climbing 4% compared to the same period the previous year.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in Q3 increased by 21 million euros year-over-year to 242 million euros, and EBITDA margins increased 2 percentage points over the third quarter of 2014 to 24.7%.
In a recent presentation during the company’s capital markets day, Bouygues Telecom said its LTE network currently covers 72% of the French population. The company also said 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.
The French telco reported its LTE-Advanced service was available in Lyon. The service, which is designed to offer peak data speeds up to 300 megabits per second, is offered through the aggregation of spectrum in the 800 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2.1 GHz bands. The telco said the service is soon set to expand into Marseille and certain areas of Paris, and next year into Nice, Toulon, Grenoble, Avignon, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and Rouen.
