The battle around 5G is resuming in earnest this fall with two important announcements. Free took its rivals by surprise yesterday morning by announcing the arrival of 5G SA, enough to claim to be the “1st operator to offer 5G SA on a national scale”Less than 12 hours later, Orange “responds” to Free with the launch of a 5G+ home offer.
Orange confirms the “5G+” designation
The first important fact to remember is that Orange does not use the same name as Free to describe the same thing. Free keeps the term 5G SA, which has the merit of being the real term to refer to 5G standalone to distinguish itself from 5G NSA (non-standalone) that operators have been offering since 2020. A term that is perhaps a little too technical – and not sales-friendly enough? – for Orange, which prefers the term “5G+” to refer to “real” 5G, the one that works without the support of 4G.
Orange explains that it had the opportunity to use this 5G+ network massively during the Olympic Games. According to the historic operator, 5G SA helps to offer “significant and stable flow rates in the upstream direction”facilitating for example the transport of high definition images. Still with the example of images, this technology offers “guaranteed ultra-low latency times for near real-time sending”
And the benefits of superior security intrinsic to the technology. Finally, Orange logically insists on the security benefits that 5G+ brings.
In concrete terms, we simply find the advantages of 5G that operators had already put forward at the time of its deployment. However, 5G NSA, which uses a 4G network core, did not allow these promises to be fully confirmed.
5G+ Home: the operator only targets 5G boxes with 5G SA
If you are already familiar with Orange’s offers, you will have noticed that the operator is exclusively talking about a new “5G+ home” offer. The term “Home” is used by Orange to describe its 4G/5G box packages that the ISP offers instead of a fiber or xDLS connection. In its press release published yesterday evening, Orange does not yet mention the deployment of 5G SA for mobile customers.
A different approach from that of Free which will take shape on October 10. Orange will then offer a new 5G+ Home offer with the promise of using “the largest 5G network in 3.5 GHz in France”or 10,401 operational sites. The operator rightly points out that it has chosen to invest massively in 3.5 GHz since the launch of 5G. It thus stands out from its rival Free and now covers 70% of the metropolitan population.
At the time of writing, the details of the 5G Home offer do not appear on the operator’s website. We can see that the 5G Home subscription is 42.99 euros per month and that it offers a connection of up to 1 Gbit/s in download with the Orange 5G network. On the 4G Home offer side, the download speed climbs to 300 Mbit/s in 4G+. Theupload (upload speed) is not highlighted and we can expect this to be a selling point for the offer with 5G SA. As for mobile customers, they will have to wait a little longer.
Discover Orange’s 5G Home and 4G Home internet offers
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