Totem puts Orange in pole position for sovereign services

• Totem chief explains why Orange plans to maintain ownership of its towerco
• Controlling infrastructure is part of Orange’s DNA
• Totem looking beyond MNO relationships with F1 upgrade and drone initiative

With demand for sovereign services growing across Europe, Orange has made no secret of its desire to put “trust” at the centre of its strategy: Indeed earlier this year, the giant French telco  dubbed its new three-year strategy Trust the Future.

Much of the conversation about sovereign services has centred on AI, datacentres and the ownership and control of critical digital infrastructure. Yet in recent years a number of European telecom operators have given up control of key infrastructure assets, including their tower businesses. For example, in 2023, Deutsche Telekom completed the sale of a 51% stake in its tower business, GD towers, to a consortium consisting of DigitalBridge and Brookfield. And in 2024, Telecom Italia (TIM) agreed to sell its remaining stake in towers business INWIT to equity firm Ardian.

Orange, however, has maintained control of its tower business through wholly owned subsidiary Totem, which next month will celebrate its fifth year as an independent operation that, via its 27,000 sites across France and Spain, offers wholesale, neutral host services to mobile operators as well as companies in other industrial sectors. 

Orange CEO Christel Heydemann has previously been clear about the value she places on the business. When asked in 2024 about Deutsche Telekom’s tower strategy, she said: “As you know, we continue to drive Totem focusing on value – increasing the tenancy ratio. As we’ve always said, we truly value infrastructure. So we like having infrastructure business. We’re not interested in pure financial engineering options.”

But given the shifting market patterns, is Orange still as committed now to its towerco division? TelecomTV put the question to Totem CEO Emmanuel Rochas, who is celebrating a year in charge of operation.

“It isn’t part of Orange’s strategy to separate Totem,” he explains, pointing to Orange’s February strategy, in which the towerco’s importance was reiterated. “Clearly, infrastructure – and controlling infrastructure – remains something that is in the DNA of Orange, and we believe that there is a lot of value for the operator to keep this type of control.

“When you control the access to the sites, you control the way you monitor, you control the energy supply,” he noted. “That’s a way to reduce the dependency on external providers.”

The ability to control its towers is even more important to Orange as governments and businesses in Europe put increasing value on sovereignty. It has empowered the French telco to launch several projects, notably Drone Guardian, for which Totem collaborated with Orange Business.

Unveiled at the 2026 Orange Business Summit, Orange Drone Guardian detects, identifies and classifies intrusive drones in low-altitude airspace across France, with the ability to extend coverage to other European countries. It addresses the security needs of operators of vital importance (OIV), operators of essential services (OES), major event organisers, and public institutions responsible for protecting critical infrastructure.

“Totem plays a central role in this deployment by providing its infrastructure network to host the connected equipment required for this cutting-edge solution,” explains Rochas.

Driving B2B opportunities

Totem has a solid business selling capacity to mobile operators, with its parent company, Orange, as its anchor customer in both France and Spain, though it also counts France’s other three mobile network operators – Iliad’s Free, Altice France’s SFR, and Bouygues Telecom – as customers, while in Spain both Telefónica’s Movistar and Zegona Communications-owned Vodafone Spain are clients. 

Looking beyond the mobile operator space, Totem also has around 150 enterprise customers that use its infrastructure. These customers include public administrations and security organisations, energy companies and businesses that use its sites for internet of things (IoT) operations and other connected applications.

Those projects range from smart metering and other IoT deployments to centimetre-level GPS correction, drone detection and systems designed to identify wildfires at an early stage.

The strategy is not, however, to turn Totem into a huge business-to-business (B2B) sales operation: Rochas said the company intends to work with partners that can incorporate its hosting capabilities into services targeted at particular industries.

“We don’t have plans to address the B2B market directly,” he explains. We find the right partners to address the needs across different verticals which are a natural fit for us. And that way we can remain a lean organisation.”

One recent project saw Totem adapting its infrastructure in Madrid to support connectivity at the 2026 Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix, which took place at the Madring racing circuit in September.

Totem’s technical plan for the Madrid-based circuit rested on two core pillars. Firstly, predictive management and real-time monitoring, enabled by the integration of base stations covering the circuit into Totem’s Smart Sites platform. This, in turn, enabled remote, intelligent monitoring of infrastructure health, climate control, site access and network parameters, ensuring that potential issues were detected and resolved predictively before affecting hosted operators’ services, explains Rochas.

The second was a focus on resilience and service continuity. To prevent power fluctuations or outages that could compromise live broadcasting or communications during the Grand Prix, Totem equipped these critical power supply nodes with advanced resilience systems, including high-capacity battery backup solutions.

Totem is also playing a role in cross-border collaboration as the European Union pushes to improve connectivity across the continent. The towerco is working alongside parent company Orange, Vantage Towers, Germany’s O2 Telefónica and the Saarland University of Applied Sciences to develop a 5G corridor as part of a project known as 5G Autobahn to Autoroute (5G A2A), which will connect the cities of Metz in France to Saarbrücken in Germany, covering a 60km stretch.

“There are still challenges in bringing coverage to uncovered areas, and we work with our partners to determine if a new site is needed, or if we can co-locate on existing sites,” he adds.

“We have worked on a cross-border project funded by the European Commission to build a 5G corridor running alongside major roads to identify the costs and use cases we can develop around a fully financially covered communication access.”

- James Pearce, Editor, TelecomTV