Margrethe Vestager, Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of digital technologies, is reported to have called the European telecoms ministers to order so that the allocation of the 5G spectrum does not fall too far behind schedule.

The EU's current objectives in this area, set for 2016, are to bring 5G to market in at least one major city in each EU country by the end of 2020, as well as in all urban areas and major transport axes by 2025.

The Vice-President's intervention would follow a request from Croatia to review this action plan and timetable.

Many countries, including Spain, Austria, Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic, have still not allocated their first 5G frequencies. Procedures have been postponed due to the pandemic and subsequent containment measures.

In France, auctions are expected to be postponed until September at the latest for a subsequent deployment. Commercialization is therefore possible this fall.

 Read the article

Source : 01net

On May 5th, a massive Internet outage occurred for companies and employees confined to the south of Paris following acts of sabotage on the Orange fibre network. This was a major blow at a time when more than 100,000 of the operator's customers are teleworking.

In addition to teleworkers, entire corporate networks are being badly affected. And this act of sabotage is likely to have a major impact on the services of other operators. A ZDNet reader and system and network administrator for a company operating two data centers in the Paris region, Justin reveals that the incident began yesterday at 9:30 am: "Despite the redundancy of our 10 BGP fibers, we were heavily impacted. At our level, we had 6 fibres out of 8 cut, with the operators Iliad, Zayo, Sypartech and partially Jaguar". At 10:00 am this morning, he reported that he still had "one fiber in default between his two datacenters".

10 cables were severed at the dismantling machine in the communes of Ivry-sur-Seine and Vitry-sur-Seine yesterday. Orange's internet and telephone network is therefore severely disrupted in the Val-de-Marne and part of the city of Paris.

After noting the damage, the operator dispatched technicians to the site to carry out the necessary repairs. Orange estimates that 34,000 Internet customers and 12,000 business customers are potentially affected by the outage. Orange Ile-de-France's communications department said: "The priority customers identified are being restored as a matter of priority, the technicians will be taking turns and work will continue throughout the night for a gradual recovery and an end to the recovery is planned for Thursday night for Ivry-sur-Seine and is currently being assessed for Vitry-sur-Seine".

The operator filed a complaint and the department's judicial police was seized.

According to franceinfo, a note from the territorial intelligence services mentions a clear upsurge in acts of "degradation" and "sabotage" throughout the territory. 27 incidents have been recorded since the end of March. While these facts are not claimed, the majority of territorial intelligence agents favour the ultra-left route.

At the beginning of April, two relay antennae were set fire to in a small commune in the Jura for an estimated loss of one million euros. A fibre-optic cable was cut in the Gard department, depriving more than 23,000 subscribers of telephone and Internet access for 12 hours. Damage to base stations was also reported in Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

According to this note from territorial intelligence, the authors would seek to destabilise economic activities and teleworking through such sabotage.

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

The Urban School of Lyon continues its conferences entitled "The Wednesdays of the Anthropocene". This week's theme: the impact of digital technology on regional planning with Cécile Diguet, urban planner, director of the Urban Planning and Territories Department of the Paris Region Institute and Jean-Vincent Bayarri, architect of Information Systems at the Metropolis of Lyon.

As a partner, Rue89Lyon publishes a podcast of these forums. Jean-Vincent Bayarri, also wrote the text below.

The intelligent city relies on important digital infrastructures, especially data centers. How are these infrastructures deployed on the territory? What issues are raised by their spatial integration? Constraints or opportunities for an ecological factory of the city? Are digital actors the new protagonists of the urban project?

Initially, containment...

Videoconferencing, streaming, telecommuting, e-commerce, online gaming are in this period of confinement even more widely consumed than usual by the French.

Many articles in the press explain how consumption induced on "networks" alone can be problematic, at the risk of "slowing down" or even "paralysing" the Internet.

"The networks"

Above all, the Internet is a set of interconnected machines, i.e. multiple routes, managed by a multitude of actors: operators, public or private structures, associations, large companies. The term "network" is actually vague since it is a multitude of interconnected networks. At the end of the chain is a server infrastructure that must meet the high demand observed in this period of containment.

While it is true that some networks can sometimes be scarce resources, particularly mobile networks, most are well sized in France to carry the traffic.

So when the website of a hypermarket brand, overwhelmed by the requests of confined consumers, displays a message asking to wait, is it the fault of the "network"? Certainly not.

The problem can often come from the last link in the chain, the "server" carrying the resource and the content consumed. How do you know when and where to align sufficient resources to meet demand?

Datacenters

This is the importance of data centers, since they allow multiple servers to be quickly assigned to specific tasks.

And this capability also applies to the datacenters themselves! Just as the Internet is meshed and decentralized, the strategy adopted by companies like Netflix is a very wide distribution of data centers: on several continents, in several cities, and even as close as possible to the user, partly at the ISPs themselves. It is also a common practice in most companies to distribute resources across multiple data centers for reasons of security, redundancy and high availability.

Proximity, a technical, economic and strategic asset

Some cities have a considerable asset: a GIX (Global Internet eXchange point), i.e. a local Internet exchange point. In Lyon, this is LyonIX, which is managed by Rezopole. Companies or administrations that wish to do so can connect locally to this GIX and exchange via the Internet "locally".

Thus in the Lyon metropolitan area, a very significant part of Internet traffic is consumed by Google services (Maps in particular). Since Google is present on LyonIX, access is not only instantaneous (very low latency) but also free of charge. The rest of the Internet traffic is sold through the (paying) pipes of a forwarding agent.

Beyond purely telecom costs, the logic of economic development is clear: the more Internet infrastructure is present locally, the more investors are attracted to build local datacenters. This rhymes with more jobs, more value created, and an easier digital transition.

The interest is also strategic, since putting your data in the "cloud" means putting it in someone else's datacenters. A varied and local offer of datacenters therefore makes it possible to keep company data on national soil, in better security conditions (RGPD for example), which represents a certain digital sovereignty.

Digital transition, ecological?

"To save the planet, print this message only if necessary". This maxim could almost sum up the digital transition issue by itself.

Videoconferencing, the development of mobile digital counter applications, these are just a few examples of very concrete applications - made possible by the presence of these infrastructures, these networks, these data centres in the city - which also facilitate the ecological transition.The data centres themselves are working on this with the reduction of the energy efficiency factor or the reuse of heat produced by the district heating of the surrounding area, or even a 100% operation on renewable energies.

The digital revolution has given data centers a now multiple importance (economic, social, ecological) in the city as well as other essential structures. A central link in regional planning and the digital and ecological transitions, which are far from being in opposition, are perfectly complementary.

 Read the article

Source : Rue89Lyon

RIPE, Europe's Internet governance body, opposes a proposal to reshape basic Internet protocols supported by the Chinese government, Chinese telecommunications companies and network equipment provider Huawei.

The proposal, called "New IP", is a reworked version of the TCP/IP standards to support new technologies. It includes a "shutdown protocol" to shut down faulty parts of the Internet and a new governance model that centralizes the Internet and puts it in the hands of a few critical node operators.

Submitted last year to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and published last month by the Financial Times, the new proposal immediately drew criticism. To the general public and privacy advocates, it is an obvious attempt to hide Internet censorship features behind a technical overhaul of the TCP/IP protocol stack.

In short, an attempt by the Chinese government to export and impose its autocratic views on the rest of the Internet and its infrastructure. Especially since several countries such as Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia have given their support.

On its blog, the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, West Asia and the former USSR, RIPE NCC, has officially spoken out against China's new IP proposal.

Marco Hogewoning, acting director of public policy and Internet governance at RIPE NCC, says "Do we need New IP? I don't think we do. [...] Although there are some technical challenges with the current Internet model, I don't think we need a new architecture to solve them."

Any attempt to overhaul Internet protocols should be left to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and not the ITU, where political influence is more important than technically sound arguments, he said. RIPE is also concerned about the desire to change the decentralized nature of the Internet.

The organization expressed its concerns in a paper sent to the ITU in February this year: "RIPE NCC is deeply concerned about what has been proposed here.[...] We are particularly concerned that this proposal represents an opportunity to move away from the traditional 'bottom-up' decision-making model. We also believe that the technical justification presented is flawed and find the alternative designs suggested to be both unrealistic and unproven".

With the new proposal due to enter the test phase in 2021, Hogewoning urges national Internet governance organizations to contact local decision-makers and recommend voting against it as well as a vote at a later date.

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

In this document, you will find a retrospective of our actions and events in Rezopole over the past year. Among the information to remember: the opening of a new IXP in Annecy, named AnnecIX, with two members already in place; the arrival of new members such as the major content provider Akamai; the achievement of Datadock certification allowing support for the training courses offered by Rezopole; and of course the must-see Aperezo events held in Grenoble last June and November. Much more information is detailed in this new annual report.

We invite you to download it in pdf format from this link.

Have a good reading!

Driven by a booming cloud infrastructure market, hardware and software spending in DataCenters increased by 17% in 2018. A global market dominated by Dell EMC followed by Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Huawei. Investments driven by a "growing demand" for public cloud services and the need for "ever richer" configuration according to Synergy Research Group, which publishes these figures. As a result, the average selling price of enterprise servers has skyrocketed.

In more detail, spending on infrastructure purchases for the public cloud increased by 30% compared to 13% for those directed at equipping enterprise data centers. "Cloud services revenues continue to grow by nearly 50% per year," said John Dinsdale, analyst at Synregy Research Group. "SaaS and e-commerce revenues are each increasing by about 30%. All these factors contribute to a significant increase in spending on public cloud infrastructure," he adds.
The public cloud market is dominated by the MDGs, which account for the largest share of cumulative revenue. On the brand side, Dell EMC is ahead of Cisco, HPE and Huawei. Dell EMC is also a leader in the private cloud market, followed by Microsoft, HPE and Cisco. These four providers are the leaders in the non-Cloud Data Center market, but in a different order.

Total revenue from Data Center equipment, including both cloud and non-cloud hardware and software, is $150 billion in 2018, the analyst said. The Data Center infrastructure market is 96% composed of servers, operating systems, storage, networking and software. Network security and management software represent the rest.
By segment, Dell EMC leads in terms of server and storage revenue. Cisco, on the other hand, overlooks the network segment. Then there are Microsoft, HPE, VMware, Lenovo, Inspur, NetApp and Huawei, which recorded the strongest growth in one year.

"We are also seeing relatively strong growth in infrastructure spending in enterprise data centers, with more complex workloads, hybrid cloud requirements, increased server functionality and higher component costs being the main drivers," concludes Dinsdale.

 Read the article

Source : Le Monde Informatique

According to International Data Corporation, the consumption of suppliers of servers, storage solutions and network equipment and software accounted for 44% of sales in 2018. These investments are expected to increase by an average of 6% per year and represent $426 billion over the next three years. Investments by cloud and digital service providers are expected to grow the most to reach $105 billion (+9% per year on average). Purchases by providers of hosting and colocation services amounted to $67 billion, representing an average annual growth rate of 7%.

However, there is a wide disparity between regions of the world. Indeed, if the share of these investments in the United States should increase to 47% in 2022 (compared to 44% today), Western Europe's share will not change and will remain at 12%.

 Read the article

Source : Le Monde Informatique

Created under the protection of the State following the break-up of the ORTF, the group with 14,000 pylons and flat roofs decided to sell its shares in the telecoms equipment provider. To this end, the group's current shareholders - Brookfield, APG, PSP, Arcus and Crédit Agricole Assurances - have mandated Morgan Stanley and BNP Paribas banks. If in 2014, TDF had been sold for approximately €370 million, its results having stabilised since then, the transaction would now exceed €3.5 billion.

With 13,900 sites, TDF infrastructure funds are keen on this type of long-term asset. Indeed, such opportunities are rather rare " It is an asset for infrastructure funds, family offices and pension funds. Manufacturers in the sector have few synergies to generate from a possible merger. " says one source.

After difficulties in 2008 following the financial crisis, the group has strengthened its financial structure with debt leverage now below 4 times EBITDA. Especially since the most important deadlines are 2022 and 2026.

At the end of 2018, TDF continued its strategy of refocusing with the sale of Médiamobile and by accelerating in optical fibre. The company was entrusted with the installation of several tens of thousands of sockets by the territories. In addition, several hundred new pylons on transport routes and in rural areas were built last year.

 Read the article

Source : Les Echos.fr

AnnecIX welcomes today its 1st member! D-LAKE is a network operator and host of critical data founded by 4 telecom veterans. D-LAKE is above all an infrastructure provider in indirect sales and white label and thus allows resellers, integrators and ESNs to offer a portfolio of Telecom network and hosting services with high added value. The company is located in several Datacenters in the Rhône-Alpes region and is also able to deliver customers anywhere in Europe. D-LAKE offers VPN-MPLS, SD-WAN, LAN 2 LAN, IaaS Premium, Private Cloud, Secure Transit services.


"Due to its local dimension, AnnecIX perfectly meets D-LAKE's desire to provide better network connectivity in Haute Savoie. Connectivity to the various content providers connected to Rezopole's various IXPs will improve access latency to these sites for D-LAKE customers."

ASN: AS49028

The session on November 21st was full! The meeting is scheduled with our network expert for this morning dedicated to improving Internet exchanges thanks to LyonIX infrastructures.

As a reminder, the program:

9h00 – 9h30 : Welcome over a coffee

9h30 – 10h30 : Presentation of LyonIX :

                         - Economic and technical advantages

                         - Connection solutions

                         - Questions and Answers

10h30 – 11h30 : Visit to a LyonIX Point of Presence

For those who couldn't register, don't panic!

Another session is already scheduled for December 13rd.

Copper has long been overtaken by optical fibre, both in terms of throughput and bandwidth. And it is not about to stop there since the fiber will no longer be mono but multi-core! "Tomorrow, it will be possible to accommodate up to seven cores in the same fiber," explains Aurélien Bergonzo, Acome's Director of Technology, Research, Engineering and Prospective. It can even have up to 19 cores and reach throughputs of several hundred Gigabits per second.

The multiplication of the number of cores will have several impacts. This will significantly increase the capacity of a single cable but also reduce the deployment cost. This multi-core technology opens new horizons both from a technical and commercial point of view, especially for operators. Indeed, they will be able to offer companies new services adapted to demand such as QoS and speed.

Read the article

Source : ZDnet

The dependence on digital and its infrastructures is increasing every day. To ensure their independence, the majors of the sector therefore invest in the network (Internet). Sophy Caulier reveals, in an article in Le Monde Économie on June 24, the battle that is being played out between the various players on this gigantic network.

Composed of three main elements: data centres, networks and interconnection points, the Internet is indeed a physical network. The cumulative length of the submarine cables is thirty times around the Earth, or 1.2 million kilometres. However, even though this infrastructure was built to be resilient, it is on the verge of overdose. For information, Netflix occupied one third of the bandwidth in the United States during peak hours in 2016. Another example: in 2018, companies are increasingly storing their data on the cloud with more than 20% growth for the French market. But the risk of overloading the network does not really worry.

The main threat is actually the breakage of submarine or land cables that can cause an Internet outage for several days. This was the case at the beginning of the year in about ten countries on the west coast of Africa. The infrastructure therefore remains fragile despite the redundancy of cables. Companies like OVH, InterCloud or Colt choose to build their own network to protect themselves but also to reduce costs and guarantee quality services to their customers.

GAFAM, which has had data centres for a long time, is also investing heavily in cables. "They deploy their own cables to interconnect their data centers on all continents without going through telecom operators. The challenge for these actors is to set the costs. In other words, they'd rather own than rent! "says Jean-Luc Lemmens, director of Idate DigiWorld's Media-Telecom division.

But when it comes to developing countries or certain geographical areas too far from cables, Internet giants deploy networks via satellites, UAVs or balloons. Amazon, Facebook, Virgin or SoftBank also have great satellite ambitions. Nothing seems to be able to stop the almighty GAFAM in their race to control the armature of the Net.

Click here to read an extract of the article (full article if you subscribe to Le Monde).


Source: Le Monde Économie

This completely free event allows you to discover the many advantages, for your structure, of being connected to the IXP/NAP of Lyon.

See you on May 17th, 2018 at the premises of Rezopole (16, rue de la Thibaudière - 69007 Lyon).

More details on this morning here.

 

Registration opens next week!

This completely free event allows you to discover the many advantages, for your structure, of being connected to the IXP/NAP of Lyon.

See you on April 11th, 2018 at the premises of Rezopole (16, rue de la Thibaudière - 69007 Lyon).

More details on this morning here.

 

Registration opens next week!

We invite you to discover LyonIX, the IXP/NAP of Lyon on December 13th, from 9:30 am.

This completely free event, called IXPloration, allows you to discover all the advantages to be connected on our network infrastructures.

Meet us at the Rezopole office: 16, rue de la Thibaudière - 69007 LYON

Attention: limited space.