📲 France Launches Large-Scale 5G Broadcast Trials

The official launch of this new phase took place at an industry event in Paris, where TDF CEO Karim El Naggar, T18 President Christopher Baldelli, and Jacques Donat-Bouillud, Director of Distribution at France Télévisions, unveiled the project’s roadmap. The central challenge the technology aims to address is the rapid migration of video consumption to smartphones. TDF emphasizes that the industry must establish a method to guarantee open, free-to-air, and sovereign access to broadcast content on mobile devices.

For decades, free digital terrestrial television (DTT) has ensured universal, simultaneous access to information with uniform quality for all citizens. 5G Broadcast technology is engineered to translate these core principles to mobile screens. It enables smartphones to receive live broadcasts without a SIM card, a Wi-Fi connection, or cellular data consumption.

The operational architecture of 5G Broadcast differs fundamentally from traditional streaming: a unified signal is transmitted once from a standard broadcast tower and received simultaneously by an unlimited number of users. This completely eliminates the network congestion that frequently plagues OTT streaming platforms during live broadcasts of major sporting or high-profile public and political events. Rather than replacing existing OTT services, the new technology expands the content distribution ecosystem, delivering high energy efficiency and robust connectivity resilience.

To conduct the trials, TDF has leveraged its key high-altitude infrastructure assets, including the Eiffel Tower in Paris, alongside transmission centers in Meudon, Mantes-la-Jolie, Le Havre, Bourges, and Reims. The second phase of the test-bed expansion is scheduled for late 2026, which will see the network deployed across Brittany, eastern France, Lyon, and the southwestern region of the country. Full-scale national commercial rollout of the project is slated for 2027–2028.