France: Mobile Data Speed Increased by 50% During 2009

 

ARCEP, the French regulator, published the results of Quality of service of 2G and 3G Mobile Networks survey for 2009.

See the press release - "QUALITY OF SERVICE OF MOBILE NETWORKS"- here and the report (here, French)

Regarding data services, the survey finds that - "File transfer tests were performed in the 12 largest metropolitan areas in France, and in 20 towns and cities with a population of between 50,000 and 400,000, using USB keys or PCMCIA cards plugged into a laptop computer, or directly via the netbooks that telecom carriers sell. The results of these tests reveal average speeds that are more than one and a half times higher than those obtained in 2008: an average download speed of 2.2 Mbit/s and more than 5 Mbit/s for the fastest services and, for sending files, an average upload speed of 1.2 Mbit/s and more than 1.7 Mbit/s for the fastest services. These speeds were achieved using the most high-end solution that each telco markets in its retail outlets. These bitrates are comparable to the access rates supplied by entry-level ADSL fixed network services.

The following tables show the results of uploading a 1MB and downloading a 5 MB files in the top 12 cities of France (map below), by the 3 mobile operators (First line is the % of files received;  next lines are 90, 50  and 10 percentile speeds). The two big players, Orange and SFR,  results are similar, while Bouygues is significantly lower in all categories.