How Free Mobile will improve its 5G speeds

Free Mobile announces a change to its 5G which theoretically makes it possible to obtain +14% in speeds. We explain to you what it is.

There haven’t been any major Free features for a few months, apart from a few optimizations and improvements. They updated their entire box, including the oldest ones like the Freebox Revolution, and they also activated VoLTE on the mobile network. This time around, they just rolled out an update to their 5G network that should improve customer speeds.

If you have followed the history of the deployment of 5G in France, you probably know that it is available across several frequency bands. While waiting for 5G, which uses millimeter waves, or mmWave, we are closely monitoring the 3.5 GHz frequency band, which makes it possible to obtain high speeds. We have also observed download speeds that can go beyond 1 Gbit/s during our first tests on the Orange network. This is called “real” 5G.

It is also the most difficult 5G to deploy, it requires different hardware than 5G which uses the 700 MHz and 2100 MHz bands and is therefore much easier to set up. As a reminder, these frequency bands make 4G and 5G cohabit, in practice we observe an increase of around 15% in speeds more than in 4G+, far from the speeds expected from 5G.

Broader Spectrum for Better Speeds

In short, Free Mobile has just announced a change to its 5G 3.5 GHz. It will now operate 70 MHz instead of 60 MHz of spectrum. This theoretically represents +14% in speeds, which will in any case be visible to customers.

We have upgraded the spectrum from 60 to 70 mhz for the 3.5 Ghz frequencies. The operation is now complete throughout the territory, and allows 14% additional speeds to be obtained on 5G.

— Free 1337 (@Free_1337) May 18, 2022

Note that this is not instantaneous, you have to wait for Free Mobile to send its new data for each 5G smartphone.

which LTE RRC OTA Packet version in LTE signaling messages?
Version :
LTE RRC Release:
NR RRC Release:

For my part, I don’t have the latest version of the oneplus 8 firmware so no:
release: 27
LTE RRC Release: 16.1.0
NR RRC Release: 15.9.0 pic.twitter.com/gOLF6E1XjY

— Cayenne (@cayennne17) May 18, 2022

As a reminder, you can use one of the tools or maps to identify the antennas around you and check which frequency bands are used. At the moment, 5G is activated mainly in large cities. Note that the Arcep map is not up to date with the latest data, which explains the differences that can be observed during real tests.

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