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.[3]
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.
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 2GGSM services, which it did on 15 November 1992.
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 competiting 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.
Vodafone had a 44% share in SFR until April 2011, when it sold its entire share back to SFR's founding parent company Vivendi. SFR is a major partner network of Vodafone in France.[4][5]
Vivendi announced in March 2014 that it planned to sell its SFR division.[6] On 14 March, it announced that it would enter exclusive negotiations with Altice/Numericable, to the exclusion of Bouygues and Iliad.[6]Arnaud Montebourg, the French Minister for Industrial Renewal, triggered considerable concern when he stated that the Numericable/SFR deal was a certainty. Iliad lost 7.5% of its market value on that day.[6]
SFR having 28.6 million subscribers versus 1.7 million for Numericable and much more notoriety, Patrick Drahi announced that SFR will replace Numericable. In late 2015, Numericable Outremer became SFR Caraïbe. On 15 February 2016, Numericable was rebranded as SFR in Belgium and Luxembourg, with the launch of new packages and the SVOD service Zive.
In February 2016, Orange, SFR and Free announced the purchase of their competitor Bouygues Telecom. However, negotiations for the purchase agreement fell through a few months later.[7]
In December 2016, Altice sold SFR Belux to Telenet.[8] SFR was merged in Belgium with Telenet on 31 March 2019, and SFR Luxembourg merged with Eltrona on 1 April 2020.
Former 3D logo of SFR from 2014 to 18 October 2022.2022: "Soyez vous" (Translation : "Be you")
RED by SFR was launched on 11 October 2011 as SFR's online-only, lower cost flanker brand, in preparation for the launch of Free Mobile the following year.
