SFR to invest €1.5bn each year to update network

The French mobile operator SFR has confirmed that it would continue to invest $1.5 billion each year to expand and improve its mobile and broadband networks.

The company, which is owned by the French media giant Vivendi, stated that the continued investment in its network was designed to handle the increase in data traffic being generated by smartphones.

The company said that the additional 3G spectrum it acquired earlier this year would be used to provide better coverage and network capacity, albeit that SFR already has nearly 90 per cent coverage--ahead of the 84 per cent required by the telecoms regulator Arcep. 

In addition, SFR stated that it would plough around €150 million into deploying ultra-high speed fibre-optic networks to boost its backhaul infrastructure.

Last month SFR agreed a deal with HP for the IT company to build a complete cloud services platform. When deployed, the cloud-based platform will enable SFR customers to access facilities such as IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS), communications as a service (CaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), all with guaranteed quality network bandwidth.

SFR said that the business benefits to its commercial users would include predictable operating costs, less capital investment and decreased risk in new technology adoption.

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