5G will be available in Paris “in the coming days”, says Orange boss

5G will arrive in Paris “in the next few days”, said Orange boss Stéphane Richard, Thursday March 11. She will start “before the end of March, it’s for the next few days”, declared the leader on Europe 1, the day after the vote by the Council of Paris of a charter framing its deployment in the capital. The right voted for, but the elected ecologists, yet allies of the mayor PS Anne Hidalgo, voted against. Several cities, initially recalcitrant, ended up letting operators turn on their 5G networks, like Strasbourg, Lyon and Bordeaux.

Opponents of 5G are worried about the health risk that the waves would pose to the population and denounce a useless technology that does not meet the real needs of society.

>> Why is the debate on the arrival of 5G in France so heated?

According to Stéphane Richard, Orange has the first positive feedback from consumers switched to 5G. User satisfaction “is on average twice as high on 5G” than on 4G, he said. “All high bandwidth content passes instantly and very easily”, he said.

He admitted, however, that for now, the benefit for the consumer was “significant”, but not “disruptive”, given the low number of applications fully utilizing the potential of 5G. “But we are going to have new uses, new terminals too which will bring about real revolutions”, he said.