French telco Orange has signed a five-year fibre agreement with housing provider Angers Loire Habitat, which will see 11,000 social housing units in Angers Loire connected to the telco’s fibre network. Under the deployment plans, around 600 homes will be connected in early 2015, with an additional 1,500 homes to be passed every six months for five years. Orange will deploy fibre to every building, with residents given the option to select their service provider.
TeleGeography notes that under a national fibre agreement, Orange is responsible for deploying fibre-optic networks in the Maine-et-Loire Departement; the deployment of cable in the area started in earnest in July 2013, with the network currently passing 40% of all homes in Angers Loire. The telco plans to reach 60% of households (i.e. 15 million homes) in France with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) technology by 2020, with an interim target of ten million households set for 2015.
