70% of Caen la Mer covered by Orange 5G

Interview with Marc Maouche, Orange Normandy regional delegate.

France Bleu: Concretely, what does the arrival of 5G change?

Marc Maouche: For users, it’s a new service, a new bit rate and speed, so digital uses are even easier, smoother and faster. If I give a few figures, it’s seven times faster than 4G which is already a very high speed since we are going with 5G to reach speeds of up to one gigabyte while we were at 150 megabytes with 4G.

5G concerns all equipment that can send information. So you obviously have the smartphone or tablet. For example, you can watch connected TV on vacation in a caravan using your smartphone. But all objects can be connected. We can have water meters connected in 5G. It also works for machines: in the port of Le Havre, a robot is already collecting floating waste. Thousands of devices can connect to 5G and open new services tomorrow, such as the connected car, presumably.

FB: Do we measure the difference on a daily basis?

MM: yes_,_ it’s easy to understand with movie downloads. If I do it with 4G, it will take me 12 to 13 minutes to load a high definition movie. If I do it with 5G, I will take two minutes to download it.

Today on 4G, we are actually more than 99.5% of the population covered. And there, we deploy from the existing 4G antennas the additional 5G network. We started with Caen, then other big cities and now we are going around Caen la Mer where we cover approximately 213,000 inhabitants. We are at a coverage rate that exceeds 70% of the agglomeration.

We also did the beaches of Calvados because the idea is to support the mobility of people who come on vacation or for the weekend. There were a lot of people this summer on our beaches and these people benefited from 5G since we had anticipated the risks of 4G saturation on these sites. And even if we know that 64% of French people want to disconnect during the holidays, 100% continue to connect. It’s the paradox, we disconnect but still want to stay connected. The beaches are therefore a priority. They are all covered except perhaps on the Varaville side where it remains to be done. But today 5G is gradually being deployed throughout the Calvados department.

FB: What about in terms of consumption?

MM: The idea, of course, is to be eco-responsible. So the first thing is not to build new pylons. We put 5G antennas where we already have for 4G. We add a module and we benefit from the existing power supply and Orange fiber.

One of the big advantages of 5G is that we have a technology that will only consume energy if it is requested by equipment, phones, tablets and others. If not, it will remain in standby and all of its power will not be used. Nothing to do with a 4G antenna which will transmit permanently, on the same power, with the same energy consumption pending possible use without changing its consumption. 5G is a consumption that can be divided by ten compared to a 4G antenna.