The French Industry Minister, Eric Besson, welcomed Thursday’s “full success” of the tender for the 4G mobile phone licenses, indicating that the state will pocket a billion euros in additional revenue from the operators, a total of 3.5 billion.

“The result of the tender beyond our expectations,” he told AFP the minister, who was making the morning a visit to the premises of e-commerce website Pixmania.

“This is a complete success as we expect one billion euros in additional revenue compared to 2.5 billion originally planned” for all mobile phone licenses fourth generation (4G), said Besson, as the result of the second round of betting for these new licenses should be known Thursday night.

The Telecom Authority (ARCEP), in charge of the auction and thus their income, would not comment on the statements of Eric Besson.

4G cell phones, expected to gradually replace the current 3G will give us from your mobile throughput equivalent to that currently has a home fixed line internet since its very high speed.

It is therefore vital for large operators to hold these licenses to enable them to move towards the 4G cell phone market and the popularity of smartphones. These phones allow you to surf the internet, play and watch videos. So they lead users to use exponential amounts of “bandwidth”.

A total of 18 batches of frequencies have been marketed by the State, through two separate tenders. These frequencies were mainly “liberated” by the transition from analogue to fully digital systems.

In September, in the first round of bidding for so-called high frequency and located on the 2.6 GHz band, operators Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free had put on the table a total of 0.9 billion euros, while the floor price for these lots was set at $ 0.7 billion.

The other four lots of frequencies, low, located on the 800 MHz band, also called “frequencies or” because of their rarity and therefore their price were priced 1.8 billion euros by the State.

If Mr. Besson said wait a total of one billion of additional revenue, so this is the attribute of “frequencies or” would generate a total of 2.6 billion euros in revenues, against 1.8 billion expected .

Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free, the four major French operators have unsurprisingly announced their candidacy in the second round of bids on December 15.

ARCEP indicated that the results of the tender should be known this week.

Operating licenses are granted for a period of 20 years. No new frequency should be placed on the market until at least 2020, hence the importance of these auctions.

Remains a downside: the use of these frequencies “gold” however, could cause interference problems because it uses a frequency channel very close to that of TNT, and the operators holding could therefore be required to compensate financial issues.