INTERVIEW
The Secretary of State at the Ministry of Economy and Finance Agnès Pannier-Runacher qualifies the amount of "reasonable". On Sunday, on the website of the Echoes , the government member announced that the minimum price that operators will pay to obtain the frequencies used in the deployment of 5G will be 2.17 billion euros. A price that remains too high, however, for Arthur Dreyfuss, president of the French Telecom Federation, invited to Europe 1, which calls for clarifications on the issue of equipment manufacturers.
Specifically, the four operators with a network of their own, Bouygues Telecom, Free, Orange and SFR, will initially pay 350 million euros each to benefit from a first block of 50 megahertz (MHz) of frequencies, or a first return of 1.4 billion euros for the state. In a second step, the rest of the available frequencies will be auctioned between the four contenders, for a minimum amount of 70 million euros per block of 10 MHz, for a total of 110 MHz available. "The process is built in such a way that the four operators, if they apply, are certain to have a minimum of frequency", confirms Arthur Dreyfuss.
"We are worried on the eve of the auction launch"
Are the prices announced by Agnès Pannier-Runacher "reasonable"? "Not really," says the president of the French Federation of Telecoms, according to which "we have entered a process a little inconsistent, see unreasonable". And develop: "incoherent because it's not really in line with everything that could have been announced to us", and "unreasonable because we are in an equation where, for the first time, we have never had so much obligations, deployment in progress for 4G and Fiber, tomorrow on 5G, with such a high bid start price. "
"As we are very pleased that the process is moving forward, we are a little worried just before the launch of these auctions", continues Arthur Dreyfuss, for whom "a certain number of points remain to be clarified, especially on the subject of the equipment manufacturers ". On this subject, "we have a compelling need for clarification," he says, denouncing "a great vagueness around the choice we can make in terms of equipment".
Citing the case of the Chinese manufacturer Huawei, against which the American president Donald Trump had taken economic sanctions, Arthur Dreyfuss explains that "if tomorrow, an equipment manufacturer was brought to be prohibited on the territory, we would take even more delay". Also, "we are asking the government and the regulators to clarify this topic before the auction starts," he concludes.