The wholesale operator, which took control of Kosc in the summer of 2020, is now preparing to relaunch it. And Kosc's rebound is bound to be closely scrutinised by the various players in the sector.

David El Fassy, the CEO of Altitude Infrastructure - now renamed Altitude Infra, explains, "For us, the acquisition of Kosc is an unprecedented opportunity to expand our client base in areas other than those where we have traditionally operated, particularly in AMII or urban areas. [...] After beating Kosc's order record in September, we now wish to enrich its catalogue of addressable FttE and FttO products, on which Kosc has not had a strong presence until now". Other objectives include the development of Kosc's coverage in SFR's AMII zones, with the eventual ambition to push for full unbundling of the wholesale operator.

Altitude Infra wants to make Kosc's API the most complete aggregator of telecommunications infrastructures, both for its major accounts (such as OVH) and also for VSEs. Indeed, the latter constitute the most important economic development basin of the corporate telecoms market.

To achieve this, the wholesale operator is planning a massive investment of 100 million euros over five years in Kosc. Xavier Grossetete, who has been working for Jaguar Network since 2017, has been appointed sales director and will be responsible for boosting the recruitment of new customers.

"With Kosc, we are becoming the operators' one-stop shop, with coverage throughout the country," says David El Fassy, confirming his intention "to invest and have a long-term influence on the fibre optics market, but also to develop new offers and services for companies". The plan proposed by Altitude Infra should enable Kosc to return to a positive Ebitda, as well as a turnover of between 80 and 100 million euros in 2022.

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

From the second half of the year, the railway group will sell fibre to regional telecom operators for business customers.

On this market dominated by Orange and SFR, the arrival of SNCF should therefore make waves. The company has historically had a 20,000-kilometre fibre network that connects its 3,000 stations in particular. For years, SNCF has already been leasing access to its network to regional telecom operators too modest to build such infrastructures themselves. However, this is very long-distance "dark" fibre. The operators have to install their own equipment to bring it into service. This time, SNCF's ambition is to sell "activated" fibre, i.e. ready to use.

The group assures that it does not want to "disrupt" the market, but simply to contribute to the digital development of the region. The Very High Speed Broadband plan should generalise fibre throughout France by 2022, but today only 23% of VSE-SMEs are connected to it, according to a Covage study.

The SNCF wants to propose a premium offer with the aim of achieving profitability. "The SNCF is going to enter this market with State aid. So this project is not going to be very well received by the major operators. It's a very political issue," says one observer.

There is nothing trivial about the timing of this project. Kosc, a wholesale operator created in 2016 to shake up the Orange-SFR duopoly in corporate telecoms and which leased its fibre network to 65,000 customers, has only six months to find a buyer. In this context, small operators worried about being cut off from the Kosc network could turn... to the SNCF.

 Read the article

Source : Les Echos