France’s telecommunications watchdog, the Autorité de Regulation des Communications Electroniques et des Postes (Arcep), instructed SFR and Free Mobile to improve their respective 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) coverage maps, according to Telegeography.com on July 11, 2014. The announcement follows its recent Quality of Service (QoS) survey, which assessed the performance of France’s four domestic cell companies– Orange, Bouygues Telecom, SFR and Free Mobile – in the mobile retail market. The regulator said that the coverage maps published by Orange and Bouygues had “good level of reliability”, apart from a few “occasional inconsistencies”. Bouygues Telecom leads the pack by covering 70 percent of the population and 22 percent of the territory with 4G coverage, while Orange’s LTE footprint extends to 66 percent of the population and 18 percent of the territory. Meanwhile, Free and SFR were advised to revise their coverage maps due to larger inconsistencies. As of July 10, SFR covered 30 percent of the population with LTE (1.7 percent territorial) while Free provided 4G to24 percent of the population (1.5 percent territorial).