SFR
French telecommunication company
SFR S.A. (or Altice France S.A. for the group) (French: [ɛsɛfɛʁ]; in full: Société française du radiotéléphone [sɔsjete fʁɑ̃sɛːz dy ʁadjotelefɔn]) is a French telecommunications company. It is both the second-oldest mobile network operator and the second largest telecommunications company in France, after Orange.
The group, Altice France S.A. (formerly Numericable Group, then SFR Group), has been 55% owned since 2025 by Franco-Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi via Altice Group Lux, and 45% by various creditors such as BlackRock, Fidelity and PIMCO.
As of December 2015, SFR had 21.9 million customers in Metropolitan France for mobile services and it provided 6.35 million households with high-speed internet access.
SFR also offers services in the overseas departments of France, in the Caribbean Islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and in Guyane through SFR Caraïbe, and in the Indian Ocean, in Mayotte and the Réunion islands through SRR (Société Réunionnaise du Radiotéléphone; also branded as SFR Réunion). SFR Belux operated in Belgium as a cable operator and MVNO in some communes of Brussels Region, and in some areas of Luxembourg (as SFR Luxembourg). The division was sold to rival Telenet (owned by Liberty Global) in December 2016.
Although Vodafone sold its 44% stake in the operator in April 2011, SFR has remained Vodafone's local partner ever since.
History
Origins
SFR was founded in 1987 in order for its then-parent company Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE) to start offering a 1G mobile phone service using the modified Nordic telecommunications standard NMT-F, to be operated in competition with the then-telephony incumbent France Télécom's Radiocom 2000 network. SFR also became the second French mobile network operator (after France Télécom) to launch 2G GSM services, which it did on 15 November 1992.
SFR-Cegetel (1996–2005), then SFR (2005–2014)
In 1996, CGE spun off SFR and all its other telecommunications activities into a new holding company called SFR-Cegetel (later just Cegetel), which also became a competing provider of fixed-line telecommunication services, as well as a major ISP and a shareholder of the French operations of America Online (AOL), as part of AOL's European operations which AOL of the United States ran as a joint venture with the German conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “SFR” is french telecommunication company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through French, telecommunication and company, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “french telecommunication company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q218765. VIAF identifies the subject as 149922910. The Library of Congress control number is nb2006007511. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2015, 2016 and 2011.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “SFR” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.