The French 5G rollout is the closest thing my old blog had to a recurring sitcom. While the chips were ready and half of Europe was lighting up networks, France spent the better part of two years arguing over auction dates, refarming, and who would pocket the spectrum money. I covered it as it happened, in French, with steadily less patience. This is that running commentary, le grand nawak in chronological order.

2019: the year of arguing about frequencies

It started, as these things do, with the spectrum itself. The plan to refarm the old 4G frequencies for 5G set the tone, and by July I had run out of polite words for the way ARCEP and the government were taking everyone for fools on the auction. I kept a running recap thread just to track the mess, because the announcements were piling up faster than the network. Then the operators started freelancing: Orange decided it needed its own 5G smartphone, which told you everything about how confident anyone was in the timeline.

By late autumn, I gave up on diplomacy entirely and called France the land of the grand nawak when it came to telecoms. I did try to be useful in between the venting, with a sober status check on where the 5G frequencies actually stood, and the small mercy at the end of the year was that the government finally set a date to auction the Sub-6GHz spectrum. A date. In 2019. For a technology that the chips had been ready for since the summer.

2020 to 2021: everyone else goes first

The most French moment of the whole saga came in March 2020, when Belgium leapfrogged France and Proximus switched on 5G on a Wednesday like it was nothing. By spring, I was reduced to dark jokes about whether the slow trickle was, in fact, the biggest 5G advance we were going to get. Even into 2021, the questions had not stopped, so I opened the floor again with a come-one-come-all post for whatever people still did not understand about 5G, because by then the confusion was the only thing shipping on schedule.

The full thread

Looking back, none of the delay was about engineering. The silicon was done, the masts were buildable, and the neighbors proved it could ship. France treated 5G spectrum as a budget line and a political bargaining chip first and a network second, and the rollout moved at exactly the speed that priority implied. The grand nawak line was a joke when I wrote it. It held up better than the timeline did.