The France-based group is now offering dedicated 5G SA bandwidth to enterprises following the launch of the residential 5G+ Home service last year.
Orange France is already using its 5G standalone (SA) network to underpin a fixed wireless access (FWA) service for residential customers called 5G+ Home, and recently indicated it is preparing further 5G SA offers for the consumer and enterprise markets in 2025.
True to its word, the operator has now unveiled the latest offer on its 5G+-branded 5G SA network: dedicated bandwidth for SME and enterprise customers for a monthly fee of €79 (US$82), including 350 GB of data. This means business customers will get access to features such as voice over new radio (VoNR) technology for voice communication over a 5G network, enhanced SIM card security, reduced latency and network slicing.
Like its rivals in France, Orange is making use of 3.5GHz frequencies awarded in October 2020 for its 5G+ services, and said it had 11,330 operational 5G sites on this band at the beginning of 2025. The operator has commented that it made "extensive use" of its 5G SA network during the Olympic Games in Paris last summer and is now able to build on this experience.
Speaking at the OSS/BSS Summit 2024, Laurent Leboucher, group chief technology officer and executive vice president of innovation networks at Orange, also noted that while the operator started by provisioning static slices, such as with 5G+ Home, he stressed that this capability "needs to be dynamic, because spectrum is scarce."
Slowly does it
The former incumbent certainly seems to be erring on the side of caution with 5G SA deployments in its domestic market, launching specific and targeted services with SA functionality rather than rolling out an SA network for the mass market.
Altice-owned SFR has taken a similar approach, recently introducing two new slicing services on its 5G SA core network: 'Slice Entreprise,' described as a "privileged access service" that provides a new 5G SA SIM cards with enhanced security; and 'Slice Plus,' which is a tailor-made "slicing" service that also provides guaranteed access to the 5G SA network
In contrast, last September, Iliad-owned Free proclaimed itself the first operator in France to offer 5G SA on its public network on a national scale, including VoNR. Bouygues Telecom launched standalone services for enterprise customers in February 2024 and, along with SFR, has previously indicated it will soon launch 5G SA for the general public.
Orange Group deployed its first commercial 5G SA network in Spain in February 2023, and has also been marketing 5G SA services to enterprises in Belgium since 2019. Local publication Zive.sk recently reported that Slovakia would be the next Orange market to launch 5G SA.
Orange is certainly not an outlier by taking a slow but steady approach to 5G SA deployments. On a worldwide level, the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) said in its January update that at least 67 operators in 35 markets are now understood to have launched or deployed public 5G SA networks, two of which have only soft launched the network. That compares to 344 operators in 127 countries that have launched commercial 5G services.
Dell'Oro also recently remarked that the slow migration to 5G SA is one of the factors that continues to plague the mobile core network market.
Research Director Dave Bolan noted that 5G SA, "which is the growth driver for the market, has had difficulty finding the right path to scale the market dramatically upward. New hope is being promoted with 5G-Advanced networks, common application programmable interfaces (APIs), non-terrestrial networks (NTN), artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and the newest Generative AI and Agentic AI."
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