Ookla’s Tour De France Report: Orange is Ahead of the Pack

The Tour de France is one of the world’s greatest tests of endurance. However, it’s not just the athletes who have to keep up a punishing pace over thousands of miles.

To ensure connectivity for spectators, broadcasters and emergency services, mobile operators have to manage demanding temporary network operations that shift location every day. 

Luke Kehoe, Lead Analyst at Ookla – which has recently been acquired by Accenture – has analysed 2025 Speedtest Intelligence data to gauge how French and Spanish mobile operators are likely to hold up during the three-week stress test created by the 2026 Tour de France and to help them target areas for additional support during the race.

The analysis shows that across the French route, Orange is the most consistent performer, as it leads or co-leads at a majority of French stage start and finish cities from a mobile experience perspective. 

In addition, the operator’s Speedtest Connectivity Score drops below 70 out of 100 at just four of the 33 French stage locations with reportable data. 

Its weakest results are typically in the most remote summit finishes and smaller towns, but even in these locations, Luke says that Orange compares favourably with the competition.

He attributes Orange’s performance to a combination of 40MHz of paired low-band spectrum across the 700 and 800MHz bands – giving it the deepest sub-1GHz coverage layer out of France’s four mobile operators –  along with an extensive site footprint. 

The former is key as low-band spectrum propagates better than mid-band spectrum and is better at penetrating terrain obstructions.

Orange was also the race’s official connectivity partner for 25 consecutive editions through to 2024 and deployed 10Gbps backhaul links at every stage in 2023, together with around 40 temporary mobile sites, 13 of which were later made permanent.

An uphill battle

Luke points out that “providing mobile connectivity for the Tour de France is among the most demanding temporary network operations in European telecom”. 

As shown in the table above, this is due to a combination of:

• The need for linear, moving coverage: coverage requirements can be as much as 205km per stage. 
• Hostile terrain: The route is across five mountain ranges and much of the terrain is hostile to radio propagation and blocks line-of-sight backhaul
• High broadcast and consumer demand: the race attracts around 10 to 12 million roadside spectators
• Backhaul constraints: Rural France has sparse fixed links

Starting strong in Spain

For the first time, the Tour de France will start in Spain – with Barcelona hosting the opening stage. 

Because of the city’s dense urban coverage, mobile connectivity gets off to a strong start with a combined route quality score of 96 reported for Stage 1. However, it drops sharply as the race reaches France. 

Route quality falls to the low 70s by Stage 4 (Carcassonne to Foix) and continues to decline through the French interior, reaching its nadir in the Corrèze highlands.

Forewarned is forearmed

To Luke, the most surprising finding is that the route’s weakest connectivity corridor is the stages through the Dordogne and Corrèze departments rather than the high Alps or Pyrenees. 

He explains that Stages 8 through 14 wind their way through rural southwestern and central France and don’t have the dramatic terrain that lends itself to dedicated cells on wheels at mountain summit finishes. 

Instead, the permanent mobile networks there are “thin enough that spectator demand at start and finish towns, intermediate points, and along the roadside could strain available capacity”. 

Such areas are also far from urban staging areas, potentially making it harder to transport temporary event infrastructure to them.

Going deeper, Luke identifies three priority zones for reinforcement during the race:

• The Dordogne-Corrèze corridor (Stages 8 and 9)
• A set of mountain summit finishes that are new or infrequent Tour venues: Gavarnie-Gèdre (Stage 6), Plateau de Solaison (Stage 15) and Orcières-Merlette (Stage 18)
• The Évian–Thonon time trial (Stage 16)
  

Ookla intends to perform another analysis based on data gathered during this year’s Tour de France, which will run from July 4 to July 26, to understand how the mobile experience is affected by operators’ temporary deployments and the sheer number of spectators.