France’s 5G Experience Under the Microscope: Bouygues and Orange Leading the quality race
5G is one of the pillars of Europe’s Digital Decade, with targets for widespread, high-quality connectivity by 2030. But as our previous Scope of MedUX’s 5G QoE Crowdsourcing Benchmark in Europe showed, there is still a persistent gap between basic 5G availability and advanced, high-quality 5G that users can truly feel in their everyday lives.
After our first pan-European crowdsourcing report, MedUX is now taking a country-by-country deep dive. France is one of the first markets in focus, reflecting its strategic weight in Europe’s connectivity landscape and the maturity of its 5G deployments.
This article summarises the main results of the MedUX 5G QoE Crowdsourcing Benchmark in France (Q3 2025) – an independent, QoE-centric assessment based on millions of real end-user data points.
QoE Ranking and Mobile Experience Awards: Bouygues on Top, Orange Close Behind
Using our global crowdsourcing platform, MedUX analysed millions of data points and mobile network samples across France to understand how users really experience their mobile networks.
The France benchmark confirms that overall mobile performance is very good, but with clear leaders by category:
- Best Overall Mobile Experience – Bouygues Telecom
Bouygues Telecom delivers the best overall mobile experience in France, earning MedUX’s “Best Mobile Experience in France – Q3 2025” recognition. - Best Reliability – Bouygues Telecom
Bouygues Telecom delivers the most reliable mobile experience in France, due to a consistent performance across all categories. - Best Accessibility - Bouygues Telecom
Bouygues Telecom provides the lowest latency confirming stronger network responsiveness. - Best Data & OTT Experience – Orange
Orange achieves the highest scores in Data & OTT, reflecting strong performance for everyday digital activities such as web browsing, social media and gaming. - Best Value for Speed – Orange
Orange also leads the Value for Speed category, turning network capacity into tangible user value rather than just headline speeds. - Best Streaming Experience – Bouygues Telecom & Orange (Co-leaders)
Bouygues Telecom and Orange share the Streaming Experience Award.
Overall, France presents a highly competitive market: Bouygues offers the most balanced QoE, Orange leads on speeds and data services, and Free and SFR emerge as targeted challengers in advanced 5G.
Measurement Scope, Testing and QoE Benchmarking Methodology
The France 5G QoE Crowdsourcing Benchmark (Q3 2025) is part of MedUX’s broader effort to provide standardised, comparable QoE benchmarks across Europe using the same methodological backbone. In total, the study is based on:
- More than 150 million performance tests
- Over 80.000 million radio samples
- An area covering >550.000 km²
- A population of more than 66 million inhabitants
Download the full report for detailed insights here.
Our innovative crowdsourcing approach combines active and passive data collection across real devices, networks, and locations, enabling a holistic understanding of 5G and 5G Standalone (5G SA) availability, bands usage, Quality of Service and Quality of Experience metrics.
QoE Scorecard and statistical robustness
Results are consolidated using the MedUX QoE Scorecard, a synthetic indicator built on international best practices and ITU-T recommendations:
- Service Availability & Accessibility (time-to-content).
- Network Speed (downlink & uplink).
- File Transfers, Web Browsing, and Streaming Performance.
- Social Media and Gaming Experience.
Key Findings: How France’s 5G Networks Perform in Practice
Beyond awards and deployment metrics, the France benchmark provides a detailed picture of how users experience different services on each network.
Speeds and latency: Orange and Bouygues set the pace
On Quality of Service (QoS), the benchmark confirms strong performance – with clear leaders:
- Download speeds – Orange
Orange leads with an average downlink speed of 105.5 Mbps, comfortably above the 100 Mbps mark and ahead of competitors. - Upload speeds – Orange (Bouygues close behind)
Orange also tops uplink performance with an average of 20.5 Mbps, while Bouygues follows closely at 19.5 Mbps – important for cloud and content-creation use cases. - Latency – Bouygues
Bouygues delivers the lowest average latency at around 28.3 ms, just ahead of SFR, providing more responsive performance, particularly in northern France.
Streaming: Solid HD performance, paving the way for 4K
On the streaming side:
- Overall streaming performance is excellent across all operators, with around 80% of streaming sessions starting under 3 seconds.
- Regarding the video streaming quality, Orange stands out with more than 34 % of sessions performed in Ultra HD.
Gaming: SFR and Bouygues delight gamers
For gaming, latency and jitter are decisive:
- SFR offers the lowest gaming latency of 32.1 ms and jitter stability around 21.5 ms, providing the strongest conditions for fast, interactive applications.
- Bouygues offers a very good gaming experience due to its consistent performance both in latency, packet loss and jitter.
Social media & web: Orange leads, SFR shines on DNS
For everyday digital habits like browsing and social apps, time-to-content defines the experience:
- Orange offers the fastest social media and web performance, with average 2.7 seconds for social media loading and 1.3 seconds for web browsing, outperforming competitors.
- SFR stands out with the best DNS responsiveness, a critical but often invisible layer for quick initial page loads.
France Advancing, But Not Yet “Fully 5G”
5G availability: strong, but far from universal
From a 5G availability perspective, France is clearly progressing – but results differ significantly between operators and geographies:
- Free and Orange lead the transition to 5G, with over 74% of connections from 5G-capable devices already using 5G networks.
- Bouygues and SFR demonstrate positive progress in their 5G rollout, with close to 65% of their 5G-capable device traffic now utilizing 5G, showing improvement in moving away from reliance on older, legacy technologies.
Geographically, 5G availability is widespread in urban areas, but coverage weakens noticeably in suburban and rural zones, especially in the east and centre of the country. Despite considerable network rollout, 4G remains the predominant radio access technology in many regions, meaning 5G is not yet the default experience for most users.
5G Standalone: early stage, with Free again ahead
Across Europe, 5G Standalone (SA) adoption remains limited; France is no exception. Most 5G traffic still runs on Non-Standalone (NSA) architecture.
- Over 95% of 5G usage in France remains NSA for all major operators.
- Free leads in 5G SA deployments, with over 8% of its 5G samples running in SA mode – more than double the percentage observed for other French operators, which remain below 4%.
Download the full report for detailed insights here.
Free is therefore taking the first steps towards advanced 5G capabilities such as network slicing and ultra-low-latency services, even if the full benefits for end-users and enterprises will materialise gradually over the coming years.
How France Compares with the Rest of Europe – and the Key Takeaways
The France crowdsourcing deep dive is part of MedUX’s pan-European 5G QoE Crowdsourcing Benchmark, which tracks how countries are progressing towards Europe’s Digital Decade ambitions.
France vs. Europe: ahead on some fronts, still work to do
France's 5G networks demonstrate strong performance across Europe but still face clear areas for development.
Key Strengths:
- Throughput: Average Download speeds are strong at nearly 90 Mbps, with Upload speeds around 20 Mbps, placing France near the top of European performance.
- 5G Adoption and Technology Usage: France leads the European average in several key areas. Operators like Free and Orange exhibit over 74% 5G usage among 5G-capable devices.
Areas for Improvement:
- Network Responsiveness (Latency): With latencies near 30 ms, there is significant room for improvement, as the best European operators already achieve values below 20ms.
- Quality of Experience (QoE): France shows a clear gap across key QoE metrics (UHD video playback, web browsing, and social media sessions). For example, its 4K video playback rate of 30% is well below the top-performing European countries.
- 5G Standalone (SA) Adoption: Mirroring a wider European issue, 5G SA adoption remains low, accounting for less than 10% of 5G traffic, meaning 4G still carries a substantial portion of the network load.
What this means for operators, regulators and users
- Bouygues Telecom should capitalise on its Best Overall Mobile Experience leadership while accelerating SA deployment to keep its edge as the market evolves.
- Orange can build on its strengths in speed, Data & OTT and Value for Speed, reinforcing its position as a premium performance provider, while further optimising latency and jitter for advanced use cases like gaming.
- Free is well-positioned as the innovation-driven challenger, thanks to SA leadership and good gaming metrics, but should focus on DNS and time-to-content to ensure that innovation translates into uniformly excellent QoE.
- SFR shows strong potential on DNS and latency, and can significantly improve its competitive stance by accelerating 5G usage and 5G SA deployments beyond urban cores.
For regulators and policymakers, France’s case illustrates a wider European reality: meeting Digital Decade targets will require not only coverage expansion, but also a firm focus on QoE, high-quality spectrum usage and SA adoption.
At MedUX, we will continue to support operators, regulators and digital enterprises with independent, QoE-driven benchmarks based on real-world user experience, helping them prioritise network improvements where they matter most: in the hands of end-users.
If you’d like to explore the full France Q3 2025 5G QoE Crowdsourcing Report or understand how MedUX Crowdsourcing, Robots, Apps & SDK and our QoE Scorecard can support your competitive intelligence, regulatory reporting and marketing claims
Download the full report for detailed insights here.
Discover more about our methodologies, insights, and how MedUX is shaping the future of 5G connectivity.
To learn more about our 5G use cases on competitive intelligence, pre- and post-rollout analytics, and basic troubleshooting, and how they can benefit your business, please visit our website at www.medux.com .
For detailed country, region and operator specific insights and comprehensive data from our 5G QoE performance crowdsourcing studies, contact us at hello@medux.com.
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Methodology
The crowdsourcing campaign collects real-time mobile network data via a Software Development Kit (SDK) embedded into real mobile applications used by millions. MedUX’s global panel of millions of devices enables a robust and statistically representative view of mobile network performance at national, regional, and operator-specific levels, capturing unmatched granularity of the end-user experience.
Data is collected from a wide array of real-world conditions, covering urban and rural areas, indoor and outdoor environments, and users in motion or stationery. Detection and exclusion of anomalous or corrupted samples, followed by the removal of duplicate entries, identifying and filtering extreme values in both signal metrics and active test results, which may result from atypical environmental or device-specific anomalies.
More than 100 KPIs are collected, covering from device and connection data to performance metrics such as download and upload speeds, latency, video streaming and VoIP performance.
For each country analysed, MedUX ensures that the number of samples and users meets the statistical conditions necessary to report with confidence. Specifically, key performance indicators (KPIs) are calculated with a 95% confidence level and a maximum margin of error of ±5%, derived from the national-level sample size and distribution.
For more details on the methodology please see the report.
About MedUX
MedUX is the leading Quality of Experience (QoE) company, providing comprehensive and innovative solutions for measuring the performance of fixed, mobile, and TV telecommunications networks for telecom operators, governments, and digital enterprises. With a focus on delivering grand scale, end-to-end network, and service visibility, MedUX leverages real-time customer perspective data and advanced analytics to ensure quality and regulatory compliance, while also offering valuable insights for optimizing networks and improving customer experiences. With a presence in over 25 countries across Europe, America, Africa, and the Middle East, and monitoring over 60 operators worldwide, MedUX’s patented technology and expertise make it a trusted partner for improving the digital experiences of customers everywhere.