SNCF Réseau's new subsidiary, Terralpha, has arrived to market the bandwidth offered by the more than 20,000 km of fibre that snake through mainland France under the train tracks. As the fibres are pulled from town to town, they do not suffer from the slowdowns caused by the connections that operators put on each branch line.

In addition, this fibre network provides a national alternative to the network of the four major operators. The 2,000 alternative operators will now be able to interconnect a head office in Lille with its branch in Marseille, without having to wait for weeks for authorisation, without having to pay the high price imposed by their national competitor. And, above all, with better latency.

These more than 20,000 kilometres of fibre were already available for hire. But it was a case-by-case process: Since SNCF Réseau only provides 100 Gbit/s links, it was up to its customer to install a router at each end to carry its traffic. And apart from the major operators, no one knew how to install a router on these fibres.

To connect, Terralpha chose to partner with the Telehouse chain of colocation data centres. "Our strategy is to be present in the telecom marketplaces. That is to say, in the rooms reserved for the interconnections of operators in the data centres. The most important ones are on the TH2 campus of Telehouse in Paris, which brings together 300 telecom operators," argues Gabriel Chenevoy, Terralpha's CEO.

Especially since TH2 has a state-of-the-art computer system that monitors the 50,000 fibres running through its operator rooms one by one. The curvature and path of each fibre would be carefully studied.

Apart from Orange and SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Iliad are also starting to sell bandwidth on their national networks to alternative operators. Kosc was previously the only independent infrastructure operator through which local providers could offer national connectivity to their customers. It is therefore the one that Terralpha is now competing with. After financial setbacks, Kosc was finally bought out a year ago by Altitude Infrastructure, an ex-alternative operator that has refocused its activity on fibre installation.

Although Altitude Infrastructure enjoys a good image with local authorities, its challenge remains to link together fibre segments scattered over the territory. This is where Terralpha claims to have a head start.

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Source : Le Mag IT

On March 30th, the European Union's telecoms regulatory agency (ORECE) said that no major Internet congestion problems had occurred since the start of the Covid-19 health crisis: "Network operators have been able to cope with this additional traffic load". While overall traffic on fixed and mobile networks has increased significantly, there has been no major downtime across Europe due to possible over-consumption of bandwidth, she explained.

The statement comes after worrying predictions by several experts that the Internet infrastructure may not be able to cope with the increase in traffic.

Although some Internet access problems were "observed and mitigated," they were deemed "local and temporary." No unusual incidents were observed by the agency, which also commended the telecom operators in some member countries for implementing specific measures.

In some EU Member States, the ORECE noted "a stabilisation of traffic", but also "a decrease in peak traffic". This decrease is attributed to "traffic reduction measures" put in place by "some of the largest CAPs", a term used to refer to Internet content and service providers.

Indeed, two weeks ago, the agency formally requested video streaming services to reduce the quality of service for European users in order to avoid overloading the EU's Internet architecture. The first to agree were Netflix and YouTube and have started to provide SD streams. Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Facebook responded later and also capped the quality of video streaming for the EU.

Although not approached by the ORECE officials, Akamai, Microsoft and Sony also slowed down game downloads during peak hours to avoid congesting the Internet infrastructure when a new game or update is released and deployed to millions of users.

Some experts, however, have publicly criticised the agency's call, castigating unnecessary panic. Several ISPs said that the Internet backbone had been specially designed for times like these and is therefore designed to handle sudden and very large volumes of traffic.

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Source : ZDNet

Of course, the international bandwidth is increasing, but this masks a rollercoaster evolution in recent years. This is at least what a study published on Wednesday by the Telegeography Research Institute found.
Indeed, according to this analysis, global Internet bandwidth increased last year by only 26%, the lowest annual growth rate in at least 15 years. Although the pace is slowing, international bandwidth has almost tripled compared to 2015.

A dynamism attributed, by Telegeography, largely to the African continent. With a compound annual growth rate of 45% between 2015 and 2019, it is the continent that has experienced the fastest growth. The Asian continent is not to be outdone, with its bandwidth volume reaching a compound annual rate of 42% over the same period.

"Since we started tracking international Internet capacity in 1999, the most efficient channel has always been between Europe, the United States and Canada. This route was overshadowed by the Latin American-US and Canadian route, which experienced an explosion in bandwidth," according to the research institute.

A paradigm shift due in particular to a better integration of the countries of the American bloc, "while Asia and Europe have a greater diversity of connectivity". The researchers also note that content providers have an increasingly important role to play as they now dominate the creation of the backbones of the global Internet through submarine cables. The latter connect the different Atlantic or Pacific coastal countries. In view of the latest transcontinental submarine cable projects, the evolution described by Telegeography does not seem likely to slow down.

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Source : Les Echos

France's leading Internet service providers ranked it as one of the largest consumers of bandwidth a year ago. These groups, such as Google, Netflix, Akamai, Facebook, take advantage of the tips of French operators without paying their fair share.

The French Telecoms Federation (FFT) and its president are therefore calling for "more equity". In an interview with Le Figaro, Arthur Dreyfuss explains that "80% of the taxes paid in France by digital players are paid by French telecom operators. At certain times of the day, 80% of telecom network traffic is due to YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Facebook".

Under these conditions, the FFT proposes to introduce a toll, i.e. to charge for access to the networks of French operators. As these pipes are extremely profitable for American giants, access providers are wondering when they will participate in financing the infrastructure. Indeed, ISPs must constantly invest in expanding and improving their networks. These are therefore heavy financing for which the Internet giants participate little or not at all.

This proposal does not come about by chance since the government wants to introduce a tax on the advertising activities of the largest digital companies. It should be implemented very quickly since it has just been voted by the Senate.

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Source : Journal du Geek

In order to launch the new generation of mobile networks, operators must be allocated frequencies by the end of the year. The first 5G antennas will thus be able to flourish and the flow rates will explode as early as 2020.

Across Europe, the 5G flagship band is the one between 3.4 GHz and 3.8 GHz - 400 MHz theoretically available to operators to water their customers with high-speed Internet.

The only problem is that, in France, this strip is already partially occupied by tenants who have no desire to empty the premises before the end of their lease in 2026. Among these cumbersome tenants are the Wimax licensees. This radio technology from the early 2000s was intended to provide broadband in rural areas through dedicated radio antennas.

A household is required and concerns two actors who are seated on 30MHz each: Bolloré Télécom (now Wifirst) throughout France and SFR in Ile-de-France and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.

Arcep cannot therefore revoke their rights of use, even though frequencies are crucial for 5G. And Bolloré knows it. He is ideally placed today to recover. All he has to do is wait. The manufacturer can sit on it until 2026, use it himself to make 5G or even rent these frequencies to a third party.

But to make matters worse, the Arcep cut the 5G gang again a few months ago. The Telecom Constable has dedicated 50 MHz of his 400 MHz stock to "THD Radio" as part of the government plan to provide Very High Speed Internet access to all French people by 2022. And this until 2026.

On the Arcep side, it is stated that "there are no difficulties". Embarrassed, however, the regulator explained to Les Echos last summer that there could well be "only" 280 MHz of spectrum to auction... 30% less than the 400 MHz identified by Europe. Since the Authority has been studying its options, but nothing is moving.

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Source : Les Echos.fr

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