For years now, Orange’s main competitors on the wholesale business market have accused the incumbent of abusing its dominant position on this market. Although Arcep has tried to further regulate this market – significantly dominated by Orange and, to a lesser extent, SFR – this unfortunately does not seem to be enough.
As proof, the tone went up a notch again on March 10, the date chosen by the Competition Authority to carry out a search of the premises of Orange, as part of an investigation into suspicions of abuse. dominant position revealed by the magazine Capital.
That’s not all: the operator headed for a few days by Christel Heydemann is also being sued by the Caribbean operator Dauphin Telecom. The latter criticizes Orange for having favored the return to normal of its own services well before its own after the passage of cyclone Irma in Saint-Barthélemy and Saint-Martin, which occurred in 2017.
Orange fights back
If the two cases are now following their course, Orange has however decided to counter-attack on the legal ground. The incumbent operator indeed indicated on Tuesday that it had appealed against the seizures made in early March. The Orange staff notably disputes the scope of this search, considered too broad and including, according to the operator, cases that are sometimes old and unrelated to each other. It now remains to be seen whether his arguments will be heard.
If necessary, this will not put an end to the criticisms against the incumbent operator, whose weight is considered disproportionate on the wholesale market. Especially since the initiative taken by the authorities to open up the active wholesale market to competition via the emergence of a new player – in this case Kosc – ended in bitter failure. According to figures delivered by Arcep in 2020, Orange held a year earlier 63% of the market share for VSEs, 62% of that of SMEs and 55% of that of ETIs.
Enough to lead the competition policeman to crack down by announcing his intention to open an exploratory investigation into the business telecoms market linked to fiber optics.
For the current three-year regulatory cycle, the Authority, now chaired by Laure de la Raudière, is pushing to change Orange’s obligations in order to provide stronger guarantees in terms of non-discrimination. The telecoms policeman intends in particular to rely on “the introduction of an obligation for Orange to ensure (outside an area where competition is deemed sufficient), a priori and on the basis of access actually marketed, the reproducibility of the prices of its retail offers on dedicated optical local loop (BLOD) from those of its only wholesale offers activated on BLOD”.