Paris, 11 July 2012
During his meeting this morning with the National Assembly Economic Affairs Committee - on all of the outstanding issues in the electronic communications and postal sectors - ARCEP Chairman, Jean-Ludovic Silicani, spoke of the incident that occurred on the Orange mobile network last Friday, and confirmed to the Members of Parliament that preventing the risks of outages on electronic communications networks, and their treatment, indeed falls under the Government's purview and that the Law provides for ARCEP's involvement after the fact - either on its own initiative, or at the request of the minister - to verify that the operator at fault has properly satisfied its obligations.
As a result, since Monday ARCEP has been investigating the incident which called into question the terms of availability and quality of service stipulated in mobile licences. Should it be concluded that the operator failed to meet these obligations, after having issued a notice to comply, the Authority will have the power to impose a penalty.
To complete the information at its disposal, ARCEP will be meeting in the coming days with Stéphane Richard, the President and CEO of Orange. Taking into consideration both the incident report analysis and the outcome of this meeting, the Authority will then take whatever measures it believes are necessary.