"F - Contact" Network in France

mk6705

Does anyone have any information on the network called "F - Contact" in France? It's a GSM only (no GPRS or EDGE) network and it only seems to appear in areas with really bad coverage from every other network. I was able to roam on it with Vodafone but not with Meteor. Why does this network exist?

blaz

Here is a list of all (real, non-virtual) mobile operators in France:

http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/cou_fr.shtml

It seems that the Contact network is in fact SFR, which is the Vodafone partner in France:

http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/net_frs2.shtml

It looks to be separate to the main SFR network, maybe they bought out a smaller competitor some time ago and haven't fully integrated it yet (i.e. it has a separate MNC). Here is a list of MNCs (mobile network codes) per country:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Network_Code

mk6705

By the looks of what you have just shown me, the relationship between SFR and Contact seems to be the same as between the other operators and Contact. If you go to the one that says Orange with Contact in brackets you'll see the same thing. By the looks of it it looks like every network can roam onto Contact but Contact has no brand of it's own as such.

blaz

Oh you are right, I only noticed Contact in connection with SFR, didn't notice it with the others. It could be that this is a common operator in rural areas that all operators can roam on to? Do you remember where you saw their signal appearing?

blaz

Another useful site that might give some clues is the regulator web page: www.arcep.fr. There is an English version of it, but most links point to French pages. As of yet, was not able to find an official list of mobile network codes on there...

Richard.mas

Hi All

I am new here but be warned Orange UK certainly DOESN'T suopprt roaming to F-Contact. In my area in France F-Contact is the only network that gives me any real coverage and my Orange UK mobile sim says "your sim card does not allow a connection to this network" and when I quizzed Orange about the problem they said that Orange-F is the only network in France they are partnered with! I wonder why!! Result, as we are living in France I need to find a UK network operator that supports roaming to F-Contact. Any clues out there?

SpaceTime

F Contact is a shared mast that's used by three French networks to provide coverage in very remote areas.

Richard.mas

Thank you. Can you tell me which French networks they are?

SpaceTime

Orange, SFR and Bouygues

They're in areas known as "zone blanche" i.e. where there was no coverage from any of the operators before this mutual shared network was setup.

The problem is that it seems to be non-available to roaming customers and to some of the French MVNOs like Free, Virgin, Carrefour Mobile etc etc. Effectively it's a joint-venture entity that the three big network's customers can roam on and it's 2G only and does not support EDGE in most cases either.

Normally, what tends to happen is that in a low population area a "zone blanche" (French comreg terminology) one of the three networks will deploy a transmitter and the others get 2G only access on it.

So you end up with typically Orange, SFR or ByTel (Bouygues) showing up along with F-Contact.

It's not the most wonderful system if you want to use 3G in the countryside that's for sure.

The idea was to provide universal voice and SMS coverage in really rural areas.

Bob24

F-contact is not a network of its own. As mentioned before it is the result of an agreement between Orange, SFR, and Bouygues to better cover areas which are not densely populated.

Each F-contact mast is operated by only one the of thee operators mentioned above (they divided the areas and each took charge of specific zones), but will accept to register mobiles from any of the 3 - some kind of national roaming but I am not sure of the technical details.

This means that as a customer of another network than those 3, you might be able to roam on some of the F-contact masts but not on others. For example I know for sure that customers of Free (France's latest mobile network) have access to F-contacts masts operated by Orange as Free has a national roaming agreement with Orange. But they are not able to register on masts which are operated by the other two.

I assume (but am not sure) that the same thing would happen if you come with an Irish simcard: if you Irish operator has a roaming agreement with Orange and you are trying to register with an F-contact mast operated by Orange it will work. But if you are trying to register with an F-contct mast operated by SFR and you Irish operator don't have a roaming agreement with SFR, you will be rejected.

SpaceTime

Well, you'll see the actual network + F-Contact

So you might see in alternate "zone blanche" areas

Zone 1:
F-Orange
F-Contact

Zone 2:
F-SFR
F-Contact

Zone 3:
F-Bouygues
F-Contact

So, if you've a roaming agreement with one of those networks, you'll connect, if not you won't.

The F-Connect is basically useless for roaming customers and you should only worry about the parent network that's hosting the cell.

It's a pretty bad system tbh, especially as it only supports 2G and often no data.
So if you're a French rural customer you have 3G in 1/3 of cells in some areas i.e. only where your own network is on air and 2G everywhere else.

All in all it's not a very satisfactory solution, unless you're only interested in texting and making calls.

MVNOs basically can't use F-Contact at all so if you're on a virtual network, you can only use the service when in coverage on the hosting network. If you're on F-Connect with any other operator, you've no connection. That's again pretty bad.

Imagine a situation here where O2, Vodafone and Meteor did that and your mobile only worked in every 3rd cell in rural areas for 3G or in some cases not at all e.g. if you were on Tesco mobile..

It would cause uproar!

It was just a way for the 3 networks to cheap-out and not build their networks properly while still being in technical compliance with their licenses.

In Ireland, there's an increasing move to actual infrastructure sharing so you will get the networks' signals from all the networks sharing the site, not just some kind of makey-upy new network with a roaming agreement.

Surprisingly enough for France ( a country that normally prides itself on having good telecoms infrastructure) , it's one of the worst solutions for low-density rural areas I've ever seen.
A better solution would be to just do what's being increasingly done here and just share the radio infrastructure completely.

Richard.mas

Well thanks SpaceTime & Bob24 that was an incredibly indepth explanation why I should give up trying to get coverage in my very rural area in the Lot (46140 LUZECH) and just accept the hit and miss coverage I get at the moment. Really frustrating as I can see full signal on my Orange UK mobile from F-Contact but am unable to register onto it!

If either of you think there is a solution to this for instance getting myself a different sim from one of the other UK network operators then do please tell me. Other than that I will bother you no more and thanks again for your diligernt replies.

Bob24

While we agree there could be better solutions today SpaceTime, there are 2 things you are missing which make things clearly not as bad as you think

1) Let me put your comment here in perspective:

"Imagine a situation here where O2, Vodafone and Meteor did that and your mobile only worked in every 3rd cell in rural areas for 3G or in some cases not at all e.g. if you were on Tesco mobile."

Without F-contact Orange covers about 96% of the territory. If you add F-contact it goes up to something like 97.7%.

If you look at O2 or Vofafone here, they both cover about 95% of the territory.

So basically when you are on 2G only F-Contat in France, you would likely have no coverage at all in Ireland. And I won't dig up all the numbers, but from my experience when you are on a 2G only mast in the Irish countryside, you would probably be on a 3G mast in France.

So I think what should cause uproar in Ireland is the very poor coverage of rural areas and a number of tourist and leisure location outside of the cities. 2G there would be good to have.

2) This was started a while ago at a time when I don't believe there were talks of infrastructures mutualisation in any country, and 3G was probably not there or just starting. So even if if should clearly evolve to include 3G/LTE and improve roaming, I don't see anything better or even equivalent currently existing in Ireland ...

I guess to judge the infrastructure fairly it would be better to compare it to what is done in the UK and Germany and what percentage of the population/territory is covered there. But my experience tells me that both in terms of 2g and 3G coverage, the French numbers would compare pretty positively.

Bob24

Richard.mas wrote: »

Well thanks SpaceTime & Bob24 that was an incredibly indepth explanation why I should give up trying to get coverage in my very rural area in the Lot (46140 LUZECH) and just accept the hit and miss coverage I get at the moment. Really frustrating as I can see full signal on my Orange UK mobile from F-Contact but am unable to register onto it!

If either of you think there is a solution to this for instance getting myself a different sim from one of the other UK network operators then do please tell me. Other than that I will bother you no more and thanks again for your diligernt replies.

No worries. I don't think it is worth your trouble getting another UK sim. It might work (or not) where are currently, but then it could stop working if you go somewhere else whereas you Orange sim would have worked.

Any reason you don't want to get a French simcard? Even if you are there for a short period, you can get good deals on prepaid ones these days and you could setup calls forwarding from your UK number if you still need it which would cost about the same as roaming if you have good rates for international calls (no solution for text messages though).

Bob24

One more thing Richard.mas: if you go through the list of available networks in your area, is there another one on top of F-contact? If yes this probably is the one which os operating the mast. If you really want a UK simcard you should get one from a company which has a roaming agreement with the network you can see next to F-contact (but again I am not sure of the technicalities here and I don't guarantee it will work).

SpaceTime

Bob24:

I agree it gives some extra coverage, but what I don't like about it is that instead of sharing the network sites and providing individual networks from the same equipment (which is now done between networks in Ireland and in the UK) France has opted to create an extra national roaming network which is just adding a layer of complications and keeping MVNOs and international roaming customers in the dark.

In a properly shared network, you'd have common radio infrastructure so all 3 / 4 networks and MVNOs would be available everwhere, not an extra network to roam on.

Bob24

Yes we agree from a customer and network architecture perspective it is better and simpler to have each network actually present in the mast.

From a maintenance point of view it might be a bit of a nuisance for the networks though as they don't have full control over it anymore.

Things are evolving that way though and SFR/Bouygues have recently signed an agreement to do this I believe.

Also the other point is that F-contact was a government initiative to force networks to cover areas where they couldn't be bothered otherwise. Even with 2 networks sharing a mast I think for most of these areas they still wouldn't be bothered as the cost would out-weight the benefit (it would be interesting to see if infrastructure sharing actually increased the coverage in the UK, I would guess maybe it did a little bit but one big point for networks was to save money by mutualising infrastructure in areas which were already covered but by with very low traffic).

SpaceTime

It's done in Ireland already (although the O2/3 merger may complicate things).

O2 and Eircom (Meteor) share infrastructure and Vodafone and Three share too.

It's more than just location sharing. The radio gear's shared and the mast is effectively providing multiple networks from the same equipment.

I think realistically, it's the only way that you'll ever get decent coverage in low population areas and networks can then spend money on extra cells in areas that are high density.

They just setup joint-venture entities to run the masts e.g. O2 and Meteor have an entity called Mosaic that runs the joint venture bits of their coverage.

The biggest issue with F-Contact is that it hampers competition from MVNOs that have had pretty serious impact in urban France, Free in particular.

If you're in rural France though, I would suggest that you actually get a local SIM if possible.

Orange (France Telecom) and SFR are the two old networks and tend to have the best 3G coverage while Bouygues is a little more like Meteor in terms of being the youngest of the three infrastructure-owning networks.

If you're getting F-Connect a lot in the areas you're living, perhaps avoid MVNOs like Free, Virgin, Carrefour etc etc even though they're *much* cheaper in most cases.

To get a prepay SIM in France you'll usually just need ID (e.g. your passport) and a French address (not necessarily proof of it though). Just bear in mind that when you go into a mobile shop over there you can be waiting a LONG time in some cases. They're really bureaucratic and slow. I know I've had cases where I've walked into SFR and had to basically make an appointment to speak to a rep!

Unlike Ireland, you can't just walk in say "Bonjour I'd like a SIM" pay your €20 and walk out. They'll want to take all your details as they're legally forbidden from selling anonymous SIMs.

Basically, if you're heading into a major mobile store in a large town/city, don't expect to do it in less than 30 minutes. So, park the car and bring a book

Bob24

SpaceTime wrote: »

The biggest issue with F-Contact is that it hampers competition from MVNOs that have had pretty serious impact in urban France, Free in particular.

I guess we have a different opinion of what networks' plans are for infrastructure sharing and I won't debate more, but let me clarify the point you mentioned here.

Free is not an MVNO but a full scale operator which has a national roaming agreement on the Orange network to cover areas where they don't have masts deployed yet. They are not able to join the F-contact group because they have chosen not to deploy a 2G network and as F-contact is 2G only it is a no-go for them. However there are currently talks about a 3G version of F-contact and Free is included in these talks.

As for MVNOs, you have 2 cases:
- Historically most French MVNOs don't have there own core network infrastructure and are renting in from one of the big 3 as an all included service. To my knowledge these have access to F-contact as their customers are actually customers of one of the big 3 by proxy.
- The largest MVNOs are now becoming what is known in France as "full-MVNOs". What this means is they are deploying their own core network infrastructure and are only renting masts from the big networks. For example Virgin Mobile will be renting masts from both Orange and SFR and plugging these into their own core network (potentially giving them the best coverage in the country if you exclude F-contact). To date this type of architecture does not give access to F-contact, but there are plans to change this in the medium term.

SpaceTime

For data get a French card tho. Really wouldn't bother with roaming if avoidable.

That's not a bad option if you're visiting france : http://boutique.orange.fr/ESHOP_mx_orange/?tp=F&ref=54848&IDCible=1&type=11&donnee_appel=ORESH