Orange plans to invest EUR 110mln this year and EUR 500-600mln by 2015

Orange Romania announced it plans to invest EUR 110 million this year into network expansion, increasing coverage of the rural areas, the launch of new products and the simplification of customer experience.

“The EUR 110 million we will invest this year represent more than we invested in Romania in 2009 and 2010,” said Thierry Millet, CEO of Orange Romania, during a press conference.

Millet also announced that Orange will invest between EUR 500 million and EUR 600 million in Romania by 2015, but the exact volume of investments will depend on how the company is affected by external factors such as the erosion of financial indicators of the telecom market, the lack of balance on the market, and most of all by regulations and other decisions made by authorities.

The company will modernise the existent network of communications in rural areas as well as supply broadband services to customers living in these areas.

“This project will start in June this year in the Ardeal area and it will be completed at the end of 2012. The total investment in this project alone will be EUR 100 million and will consist in changing all the network elements in the respective areas. We will work with our partners Huawei, Alcatel and Cisco who will help us implement the internet speed which will be 14.4 Mbps. What’s more, the technology we will implement in this project is LTE ready,” said Madalina Suceveanu, Chief Technology Officer of Orange Romania.

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The company also aims to reduce its energy consumption by 20 percent. Suceveanu also said that for efficiency purposes, Orange will make use of the possibility to share infrastructure with other operators.

The Orange Romania CTO also said Orange Romania covers 88.8 percent of the country’s surface and 99.5 percent of the population, being market leader in the coverage with voice services.

Orange also announced the launch of two new products on the market.

Thus, Orange introduced for the first time in Romania the HD Voice product, available to all Orange customers free of charge for national and local calls between two compatible handsets in the 3G coverage area (The 3G platform is available in several thousand localities while the 3G+ service (14.4 Mbps) is available in 119 cities.) The company has in its portfolio 3 handsets compatible with the HD Voice service, Samsung Galaxy mini, Nokia E5 and Nokia N8. The range of terminals will be expanded over the next months.

The other service launched by Orange is the Extra Signal solution that targets companies, a solution based on Femtocell technology that ensures better quality of voice and mobile data at the office by improving the 3G/3G+ coverage inside the building.

 Otilia Haraga