At the end of 2020, Brussels validated the acquisition of Covage by SFR under certain conditions. Indeed, in order to avoid competition problems, the operator with the red square had to sell part of its networks. Altitude Infra and Axione had expressed their interest and had positioned themselves to acquire all the networks concerned.

In a joint press release, Altitude Infra, which manages 19 RIPs and claims to have deployed 1 million outlets, and Xp Fibre, the entity created by the merger between SFR FTTH and Covage, with 7 million outlets deployed, announced that they had entered into exclusive negotiations for the full acquisition of the assets. The transaction is expected to be finalised in the second half of 2021, following approval by the European Commission.

The 25 networks concerned correspond to Covage's fibre optic local loop activity in the Public Initiative Networks. This represents 95% of the operator's FttO (Fibre to the Office) activity. Among them, 15 Covage subsidiaries active almost exclusively on the wholesale market for capacity services on BLOD (Dedicated Optical Local Loop) and 10 Covage subsidiaries active marginally on the wholesale market for capacity services on BLOD and which also deploy FttH networks.

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Source : Univers Freebox

Last November, the European Commission approved the acquisition of Covage by SFR FttH. The company is now called Xp Fibre and has a portfolio of 7 million fiber optic connections. It includes 24 Public Initiative Networks (PINs), operated under public service delegations (PSDs); five AMEL zones and two proprietary networks; and 2.6 million outlets in AMII zones.

Its role remains broadly the same as that of SFR FttH, i.e., network deployment, operation and marketing of its own outlets, or through public partnerships, depending on the areas to be equipped.

In detail, SFR FttH already had 5.5 million outlets throughout France, notably through 16 public service partnerships, three AMEL zones and the AMII zone. With this acquisition, Xp Fibre now has 8 DSPs and 4 proprietary networks (including two AMEL).

Each of the deployment areas will benefit from a fiber optic network open to all commercial operators, Xp Fibre being an infrastructure operator. The general public, businesses and local authorities will all be able to subscribe to the access provider of their choice.

"The new entity, made up of the assets of SFR FttH and those resulting from the acquisition of Covage, gives rise to a new, even more ambitious player in the field of fiber for territories and a key player for commercial operators," commented Lionel Recorbet, President of Xp Fibre.

The capital of the new entity remains composed of the Canadian fund OMERS (one of the main defined benefit pension plans in Canada), Altice France and the infrastructure funds of the Axa and Allianz groups, as was that of SFR FttH.

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Source : Clubic

In order to make fiber available by 2025 for 100% of premises in France, the government has decided to release an additional 570 million euros.

This sum will notably concern the Réseaux d'Initiatives Publiques (RIP) to offer fiber everywhere in rural areas. An initial budget of 420 million euros will be allocated to 12 RIPs, including those in Auvergne and Brittany. Auvergne alone will be entitled to 123 million euros to create 267,000 fiber outlets, i.e. additional individual connections.

The remaining 150 million euros will arrive a little later. The State has indicated that the details of this sum will be shared during the summer.

Mobile coverage is also being discussed. While three quarters of France is currently covered in 4G by Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free Mobile, 2,000 additional masts will be installed over the next two years. They will join the 580 existing pylons. In total, the operators will install some 10,000 masts.

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Source : KultureGeek

Over the past two or three years, the acceleration in fiber deployment has been clear, but the hardest part remains to be done: connecting the least dense areas of the territory. Despite the government's efforts - generalization of fiber by 2025 by mobilizing nearly 300 million euros to support the latest projects not yet funded - the account is not there. The reason: to serve scattered housing or isolated businesses, the cost of so-called long connections is very high and for some, it may even be prohibitive.

The answer must emerge from "negotiations with the various local authorities on the financing of their projects, with major demands that may not be able to be met exactly," explains Cédric O. Indeed, the Secretary of State wants "to match needs and subsidies to achieve the goal of 100% fiber in 2025. For the specifications, we'll see afterwards".

Non-standard connections are also available in less dense areas of private initiative. The question of the effective availability of fiber arises for homes and businesses that are isolated and/or difficult to serve. This is the case in the AMII zone, where Orange and SFR's commitment was to make 100% of premises connectable by the end of 2020. Including 8% on request because they are considered more complex to serve or not a priority.

If the health crisis has pushed back the deadline for these commitments, they will finally be reached in 2021 according to Nicolas Guérin, Secretary General of the French Federation of Telecoms. For Arcep, it is the responsibility of the State to ensure this. For Sébastien Soriano, President of the Regulatory Authority, "no worries" about SFR's compliance with the deadlines. However, he believes that there is "a landing point to be built with Orange".

A common ground could be found on the launch of offers for premises that can be connected on demand. This would enable a little over one million homes and businesses "set aside" during the initial deployment schedule to be connected within six months of the order being placed with an access provider. Nicolas Guérin, also Orange's General Secretary, explains that after having made massive deployment, the incumbent operator is now able to "move to a more qualitative deployment".

On the Arcep side, where "procedures are under way" to gauge operators' compliance with completeness rules, we are waiting to see if these offers will enable us to respond to the problems identified. In any case, Sébastien Soriano considers it desirable that these on-demand connection offers should first arrive in areas that have been scheduled for more than five years - and sometimes much longer - and where 100% of the premises are not yet connectable.

The question of the durability of the FttH networks also arises, particularly concerning the connection in Stoc mode. Access providers want to connect their customers themselves. While network operators are not against this, they are concerned about connection failures and the damage this causes. Both parties are not desperate to find new agreements before the end of the year, in order to clarify the responsibilities of each party.

All of this is under the watchful eye of the communities that own the public-initiative networks. If it is not surprising to hear elected officials thundering against the Stoc mode; it is more surprising to see a member of the government raising his voice on this very operational issue. "It's not possible," Cédric O. hammered out, "We are in the process of ruining what we are achieving" by strongly encouraging those concerned to solve the problem: "Either we know how to solve it intelligently between people of good will, or the State will have to make more complicated decisions, even if it means causing inconveniences in the system".

Stakeholders therefore no longer seem to have much leeway to save the Stoc mode. And to achieve this, the representative federations - InfraNum for the networks, the FTT for the operators - need to get around the table, thus pleading the case of several players in the ecosystem. This is also the opinion of Benoît Loutrel, commissioned by the French Secretary of State for the Digital Economy to study "securing the deployment and operating conditions for FttH networks". His task will be to re-examine the France THD program. The report he will produce in a year's time will "not be intended to put pressure on this or that actor, but rather to problematize and find a method", warns the interested party. It will propose ways to "transfer learning feedback" between territories, to "organize the interplay between public authorities and industry", and finally to "anticipate the resilience of networks".

On this last point, while burying is a common sense choice in the West Indies, it is no less relevant in metropolitan France.Climate risks also weigh on an air deployment that is anything but marginal, argues the Bank of the Territories. As part of its recovery plan, it plans to allocate additional resources to support local authorities in their landfill projects and secure access to major network sites. To this end, a call for projects will be launched in 2021.

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Source : DegroupTest

To ensure the quality of fiber deployment, the government will launch a mission to monitor FttH deployments.

The most visible aspect of the degradation of the state of fiber networks is in some street cabinets. The model of entrusting the connection of subscribers to Internet service providers, in a relationship of subcontracting to network operators, is regularly blamed for these setbacks. And the various protagonists are still struggling to come to an agreement to put an end to the mess.

Some observers also point to the original choice to move the points of pooling as close as possible to residential or professional premises, to the detriment of a more centralized and therefore more secure architecture.

But beyond the state of the cabinets, the upstream part is also in the sights of this major control operation that the government intends to launch.

Indeed, the initiative is based on a set of alerts, notably concerning the undersizing of transport cables. In some places, the amount of lightpaths available would be insufficient to serve all users.

There are also concerns about imported fibre optics, which do not appear to be fully satisfactory.

The vulnerability of fibre networks to climatic hazards also explains this renewed vigilance.

The objective stated in the mission letter of this monitoring operation: "to better secure deployments and operating conditions on public-initiative networks" (RIP). And to find "remedies" for potential problems identified.

Fiber networks deployed by operators using their own funds, in very dense areas or in less dense areas of private initiative (AMII in particular), would therefore be excluded from the scope of this monitoring mission.

Will it be a matter of leaving it up to the operators to ensure the proper functioning of their own network, while the State would only do so on RIPs, where public funds have been committed?

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Source : DegroupTest

Organized by Mon Territoire Numérique every year in March in Deauville, the RIP Estates General finally took place in video format. The meeting of public initiative networks made it possible to gauge the impact of the health crisis on the very high-speed broadband projects carried by local authorities.

At the end of March, InfraNum warned that a complete halt to the fibre optic deployment projects would be a "catastrophe" likely to cause 12 months of inertia. Today, the Federation of Digital Infrastructure Industrialists is breathing - a little. Its president, Étienne Dugas, says "We have worked on the ordinances, on the various decrees with more or less success" in order to "avoid the complete shutdown of the industrial tool, which is done".

Overall, activity fell, on average, to around 30% of nominal production during containment. This made it possible to keep the industrial facilities in operation, although the situation varied greatly from one region to another.

Today, the time has come for a return to load: 50% activity last week, 70% this week. At any rate, these are the figures announced by Julien Denormandie, the French Minister for Urban Affairs and Housing, who has been in charge of HSBB issues since 2017. But Etienne Dugas warns that they should be taken with caution: "In terms of productivity, we are still far from the rates we could have had previously".

This observation is corroborated by Lionel Recorbet for SFR FttH: "We are going to have a lot, a lot of difficulties to get back to 100%". Cyril Luneau, Director of Community Relations at Orange, also warns that a return to pre-crisis fibre deployment levels "is not for now". The Covid episode will have "a serious and profound impact on the calendars and milestones for the end of this year, and no doubt for 2022", i.e. the deadlines for the operator's commitment in the AMII zone.

The operators therefore warn that at this stage it is difficult to quantify the additional delays. Pascal Rialland, President of Covage, nevertheless risks predicting a postponement of deployment of "4 to 6 months in 2021" for the 75,000 fibre optic lines that Covage was to deploy in 2020 in Calvados.

Schedule slippages will be inevitable and consequently delays in commercialization could ultimately weigh on the economy of the projects carried by the communities. As will the more immediate additional costs associated with health precautions.

It is not possible at this stage to put a figure on these additional costs. InfraNum has also commissioned an impact study for the end of the month. The Federation of Industrialists intends to use this work as a basis for the recovery plan promised by the government for next September.

While waiting for a clearer picture of the impact of the health crisis, the participants in the Estates General of the RIPs preferred to insist on other levers for accelerating deployment in order to respond to the digital impatience.

On the industrial side, the immediate cash needs of companies in the sector were highlighted in order to be able to continue their activity. At the height of the crisis, infrastructure operators have multiplied initiatives to relieve the cash flow of their subcontractors (reductions in payment deadlines, advances and other subsidies). Now, the idea is to "put more agility" in the payments of France THD subsidies to local authorities, Julien Denormandie announces.

But the President of the French Telecoms Federation, Arthur Dreyfuss, tempers "the answer cannot only be public money". Beyond new financial help, the Secretary General of Altice France is waiting for "all those little everyday obstacles" to the deployment of fibre to be lifted. Many grievances have been voiced for years that many HSBB actors would like to see finally heard. In this exceptional situation, "we have to beat the iron", Patrick Chaize sums up. By making, for example, digital infrastructures an essential asset, argues the Senator of Ain and President of Avicca. An approach allowing the deployment to overcome some of these obstacles, also believes Arthur Dreyfuss, deploring that "we do not benefit from the right that gas or electricity enjoy.

An idea that does not convince Julien Denormandie, for whom such a status could be misunderstood by the French deprived of a good connection. The minister prefers to go through other texts for certain operational advances to which he says he is "open". On the other hand, concerning the very pressing question of co-ownership, the minister kicks the ball, referring to the "balances" of the Elan law. Operators and local authorities have therefore not finished with this painstaking work.

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Source : DegroupNews

The government has announced new funding for public fibre optic networks. For the past two years, local authorities and fibre manufacturers have been calling for the reopening of the subsidy window for Public Initiative Networks. However, this will be done in a piecemeal fashion, with only €140 million allocated in 2020. A sum resulting from savings made on previously launched programmes, thanks to economies of scale on deployment work but also from the growing appetite of private investors for these highly profitable projects.

However, funds remain far from the estimated needs to complete, or almost complete, the deployment of optical fibre in some 25 departments by 2025. Among those who do not benefit from it, the National Federation of Licensing Authorities and Authorities. Jean-Luc Sallabery, in charge of the FNCCR's digital department, reacted and said that the envelope announced by the government was not "up to the challenge". Only a few days ago, the Federation demanded a contribution of one billion euros from the counter.

This should cover about 20% of the amount needed for the remaining 3 million fibre optic lines to be deployed. This is relatively small compared to the 36 million French premises, but "they are the most complicated, with a projected cost of 1,500 - 1,600 euros per take. That is a total cost of 4.5 to 5 billion euros," Jean-Luc Sallabery calculates. He thus regrets the "double penalty" imposed on the territories: deployments on private funds in AMEL, which he doubts will really be completed, and reduced funding for local authorities that have chosen to keep the RIP model.

Government arithmetic raises even more questions because it does not fit in with the dynamics of ongoing projects. Thus, if Avicca, the association of local authorities for Digital, is screaming "victory" following this announcement, it is in reality to better point out the efforts that will have to be made immediately. "It will be essential for parliamentarians to mobilize within the framework of the finance bill to enable all first applications, ready to be submitted, to be accompanied," she stressed. Estimated cost: an additional €322 million.

An additional envelope that MPs will have to unblock or risk attending a "clash of hands" between territories that, to launch their projects, will not have the time to wait for hypothetical savings, warns Ariel Turpin. The State intends to achieve these savings as they occur by recycling unused credits in order to raise the 4 to 500 million it considers necessary. This mechanism should enable the government to remain within the budget initially allocated to the France THD counter, i.e. 3.3 billion. But for its part, the association of local authorities for Digital continues to consider it undervalued in order to bring optical fibre to the whole territory.

On the other hand, for InfraNum it works. "I agree with the government's speech. There are savings being made in deployments, and the 3.3 billion envelope should indeed be enough to meet all the demands of local authorities," says Étienne Dugas, President of the Federation of Very High Speed Industrialists.

The relative modesty of the 140 million euros initially promised does not move him beyond measure. "It's not a money issue. For the remaining catches, all you have to do is launch them in a concession and the demand for subsidies will be almost nil," he says.

"What was important was to reopen the counter so that the files could be processed," concludes the InfraNum boss. In addition, we are satisfied with another announcement, namely the signature of the strategic contract for the digital infrastructure sector "by the end of the year".

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Source : DegroupNews

With the objective of 3 million eligible fibre sockets by the end of the year in these Public Initiative Networks located mainly in rural areas, the operator announced on Tuesday the finalisation of an agreement for the marketing of its fibre offers on the RIPs allocated to Covage.

At the end of this agreement, Orange will be able to roll out its services on certain FTTH networks in Covage: Calvados, Essonne, Haute-Savoie, Hérault, Seine-et-Marne, Somme, Lille and the Dunkirk Urban Community.

Last March, Orange's management claimed a 30% market share in RIPs but is now aiming to take the lion's share on these networks. This approach will necessarily involve partnerships with infrastructure operators specialising in the deployment of these RIPs, such as Covage. The company operates 46 public or private networks and currently covers 2.3 million sockets.

Orange had 350,000 own catches this winter in sparsely populated areas. To reach its target of 900,000 own-access catches in RIPs by the end of the year, the future will therefore depend on partnerships. The incumbent operator wishes to increase the share of catches purchased from partners in these areas to 2 million by the end of 2019. The issue is well understood by Orange, as evidenced by the conclusion of this partnership with Covage.

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Source : ZDNet

After Altice at the end of November, it is Cube Infrastructure's turn to put its shares up for sale according to several sources. Covage's 50% shareholder paid 66 million euros in 2012 to buy back its shares from Vinci. However, Morgan Stanley Bank was mandated to find a buyer on the basis of a valuation of €1 billion.

The group's EBITDA would now reach €35 million for a turnover of around €100 million. "These ratios are not relevant. We are talking about an activity in full explosion with a very low maturity. In reality, the main driver is rarity," points out a good connoisseur of the file.
Charged by several departments with deploying optical fibre, Covage has already connected 630,000 of the planned 2.2 million households. The company still hopes to win a few more contracts to reach 3 million catches, which would represent just under 10% of French households.
When all the cables are pulled, Covage will be one of the few players to have such a digital infrastructure in a significant portion of the country. Indeed, once this task is completed, operators will have to pay a fee to use their networks.

€1.8 billion to acquire half of the optical lines that SFR must deploy outside major cities. But this deal is criticized in the industry because many believe that the infrastructure has been oversold. Indeed, the line rental prices highlighted could not be applied.

On paper, there are many candidates for the acquisition of Covage: investment funds, other RIP players, in particular Altitude or major operators...

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Source : Les Echos.fr

It took a year and a half of volunteer work to publish this study on the conditions of access to the Public Initiative Networks (PINs) deployed in France.

This tool is intended for the FFDN's associative ISPs but also for other operators of similar size. Two steps were necessary to achieve it: first, to collect information such as contracts and service catalogues, and then to analyse and present the information obtained. The objectives of this approach are to show the difficulty of associative ISPs to operate on certain networks, but also that it is possible to create conditions that allow them to operate since some RIPs bring them together.

In order to facilitate the visualization of the information collected from each public service delegate, the FFDN has set up a scoring system. Each service offer of a RIP was therefore evaluated using the same methodology containing objective criteria such as the amortisation period of the investments, the minimum number of subscribers and the price for the end user. The conditions proposed by each RIP were then summarized by assigning a score. From A to D, for the networks on which it would be possible to operate. And Z for networks where no activated offer is available in the catalogue or another equally blocking point.

On the map below, taken from the FTTH barometer, we can see that more than a third of the French departments have obtained a Z score. This means that no offer is adapted to the needs of associative ISPs.

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Source : FFDN