TOTEM Brand Guidelines: Orange’s Tower Company for France and Spain, Launched in 2021

Announced in February, live in November 2021.

TOTEM is the tower company of the French telecoms group Orange. Orange announced its creation on 18 February 2021, as part of its Engage 2025 plan, saying the new “TowerCo” would be run by a dedicated management team and would start operating by the end of that year. The company would sit in a separate legal structure owned directly by Orange SA, with two independent board members and no board member drawn from Orange’s retail business, Orange said at the time.

It went live on 1 November 2021. Advanced Television reported on 2 November 2021 that TOTEM, “wholly owned by Orange,” was operational, with a portfolio of more than 26,000 sites in France and Spain, the two largest countries in which Orange operates. Orange transferred the key passive assets — the sites, land, leases and contracts with third-party tenants — so that TOTEM could run them itself. In France it took over 18,500 macro sites, 58 per cent of them towers, 30 per cent flat roofs and 12 per cent other locations; in Spain, 7,900 sites split equally between towers and rooftops. At launch it had around a hundred staff in France, in seven cities from Lille to Marseille, about fifty in eight Spanish cities and some twenty at group level. Its first chief executive was Nicolas Roy.

The Spanish arm, Totem Towerco Spain, was set up in September 2021 to receive Orange Spain’s tower business, Xataka Móvil reported in April 2022, citing Cinco Días; about 7,900 sites moved across, which kept the towers outside the joint venture Orange was then planning with MásMóvil in Spain.

The company’s own website now describes it as having split off from Orange in 2021, and lists offices in seven French and nine Spanish cities.

Towers, rooftops and indoor networks.

TOTEM’s business is renting space on masts and rooftops to anyone who needs to put radio equipment high up. Orange is its anchor tenant in both countries, but it also hosts the other French mobile operators — Free, SFR and Bouygues Telecom — and, in Spain, Movistar and Vodafone Spain, TelecomTV reported in October 2026. The same report put its portfolio at about 27,000 sites across the two countries and counted some 150 business customers, from public bodies and energy companies to firms running Internet of Things networks, smart meters and wildfire-detection systems. French Wikipedia gives a figure of more than 27,300 sites at the end of 2023: 19,700 in France and 7,600 in Spain.

Its second line of work is coverage inside buildings and venues. In 2023, French Wikipedia records, TOTEM won contracts to equip the Orange Vélodrome stadium in Marseille with a shared distributed antenna system for all four French operators, and to provide mobile coverage on line 15 South of the Grand Paris Express metro, which it is due to run until 2035. The company says its 2025 projects included the Bollaert-Delelis stadium in Lens, Lille Grand Palais and the stadium in Strasbourg, alongside small cells in Spanish cities such as Madrid and Barcelona.

In Spain, TelecomTV reported, TOTEM adapted its Madrid sites for the Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix at the new Madring circuit in September 2026. It also works with Orange, Vantage Towers and O2 Telefónica on a cross-border 5G road corridor between Metz and Saarbrücken, a project part-funded by the European Commission, according to the same report. With Orange Business it supports Orange Drone Guardian, a drone-detection service unveiled at the 2026 Orange Business Summit, by hosting the equipment on its masts.

The company also describes smaller, local work: upgrading a 45-metre tower on the island of Ushant, off Brittany, and partnerships for digital models of its rooftops, solar panels on roofs and the reuse of old equipment in Spain. These are its own accounts.

Design and documentation.

Tower companies sell something most people never notice: space on a mast. A mobile operator rents a slot on a tower, a rooftop or a small cell, and several rivals can share the same steel. That makes the business hard to picture, so the companies that run it tend to lean on a small set of images to explain what they do.

The most common is the structure itself. A steel lattice mast against a wide sky, a slim monopole beside a motorway, a cluster of antennas over a city skyline at dusk, or a lone rural tower at sunset all stand in for coverage that cannot be seen. People appear too, usually climbers in harnesses and helmets working high on a tower, a reminder that the sites are built and maintained by hand.

The second register is the map. Annual reports and investor pages often show a country or a continent dotted with sites, because the number and spread of locations is the product. Site counts, country lists and phrases such as “neutral host” or “shared infrastructure” do much of the talking.

The industry also meets in public. Trade shows such as Connect (X) in the United States and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona put tower companies beside the operators they serve, with stands, renderings of towers and maps of networks. For a design guide, the interest lies in how a business made of steel, leases and coordinates turns that into a calm, legible identity.

A name chosen as a landmark.

The name was chosen as an image. When it announced the launch, Orange said TOTEM had picked “a strong brand representing its vision: mobile infrastructure is a totem of our digital civilization,” offering connectivity “for all, everywhere,” in rural and urban areas. The company writes its name in capitals throughout, and French Wikipedia lists the French arm as Totem France.

Ownership has not changed. Orange said in 2021 that it wished to keep control of TOTEM; TelecomTV noted in October 2026 that Deutsche Telekom and TIM had since sold stakes in their own tower businesses. Asked in 2026 whether that still held, the chief executive Emmanuel Rochas, who was appointed on 2 June 2025 after running Orange Wholesale International, the company says,, told TelecomTV: “It isn’t part of Orange’s strategy to separate Totem.” He linked the decision to control over site access and energy supply.

That makes TOTEM different from many of its competitors. French Wikipedia names TDF, Phoenix Tower, American Tower, Cellnex, Vantage Towers and INWIT among them. TOTEM remains a subsidiary of a single operator that also rents space to that operator’s rivals. Its website calls it “a neutral & independent towerco” and stresses that its management is separate from any operator.

For a design guide, TOTEM shows how a carved-out infrastructure business can be given a name and voice of its own while staying inside its parent. Compare Cellnex, a Spanish towerco that grew by buying operators’ sites, and American Tower, which also operates in Spain and France. For this guide we use a graphite and an ember with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep TOTEM’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.