Called "Pacific Light Cable Network" (PLCN), the underwater fiber optic cable that was supposed to link Los Angeles to Hong Kong will finally not be built. This is indeed what Facebook and Google have just announced. The new plans for this cable filed with the U.S. telecom police, the FCC, indicate that it will connect only the United States to Taiwan and the Philippines.

This project, initially announced in 2016, was intended to connect Hong Kong directly to Los Angeles via six pairs of optical fibers. It had to be redesigned in a hurry to get approval from the US regulator, whose management is said to be close to the Trump administration.

Three companies share ownership of the consortium: Google owns one pair of fibers with a branch to Taiwan, Facebook owns another pair with branches to the Philippines, and the Hong Kong Pacific Light Data Co (PLDC) has control over all the remaining pairs and acts as the landing point in Hong Kong.

And it is this last part that poses a problem for the FCC. The FCC has therefore refused to operate this submarine cable system connecting directly to Hong Kong, arguing that it would be contrary to U.S. national security interests.

The U.S. Telecom Constabulary also argued that the high capacity and low latency of the network would encourage U.S. communications traffic crossing the Pacific to detour through Hong Kong before reaching its intended destination, unnecessarily increasing the amount of data passing through the Chinese government-controlled infrastructure. This has forced Google and Facebook to revise their plans.

"We can confirm that the original application for the PLCN cable system has been withdrawn, and a revised application has been submitted.... We continue to work through established channels to obtain landing licenses for our submarine cables," said Google management, interviewed by ZDNet editors.

The initial project had the potential to attract many U.S. companies to expand their customer base in Asia. The current tensions between Beijing and Washington are claiming other victims...

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Source : ZDNet

On August 30th, the U.S. Internet service provider CenturyLink suffered a major technical failure. A misconfiguration in one of its data centers caused damage to the entire Internet network.

Involving both a firewall and BGP routing, this technical failure spread outside CenturyLink's network. This error also affected other Internet Service Providers (ISPs), ultimately causing connectivity problems for many other companies.

The technology giants whose services were disrupted include Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft (Xbox Live), EA, Blizzard, Steam, Discord, Reddit, Hulu, Duo Security, Imperva, NameCheap, OpenDNS, and many others.

Also severely affected, Cloudflare said that CenturyLink's outbound spread problem has resulted in a 3.5 percent drop in global Internet traffic. This would make it one of the largest Internet outages ever recorded.

According to CenturyLink's status page, the problem originated at its data center in Mississauga, a city near Toronto, Canada.

The ISP says the root cause of the incident is an incorrect Flowspec ad. Its Mississauga data center reportedly sent an incorrect Flowspec announcement, preventing the company's BGP routes from taking root.

As CenturyLink's incorrect Flowspec command caused some of the routers in its network to fail, some of these routers also began announcing incorrect BGP routes to other nearby "tier 1" Internet services. This caused other networks to fall into a domino effect.

CenturyLink solved the problem by taking the unprecedented step of telling all other "Tier 1" ISPs to disconnect and ignore all traffic coming from its network. Companies rarely make these kinds of decisions because it results in a total loss of connectivity for all their customers.

As a result, the ISP had to reset all equipment and start with clean BGP routing tables, a process that took nearly seven hours, the company said.

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Source : ZDNet

Olivier Roussat, deputy managing director of the Bouygues group, announced that the telecom operator will gradually withdraw cell phone relay antennas manufactured by Huawei. Located in dense areas in France, 3,000 antennas will be affected by 2028. A decision taken at the request of the French government for security reasons of the 5G network.

ndeed, the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (Anssi) will grant authorizations to telecom operators to use 5G equipment, including those manufactured by Huawei, for a maximum period of 8 years. When they expire, authorizations to operate Huawei equipment are not expected to be renewed.

As a result, by 2028, the Chinese giant could be completely squeezed out of the French 5G networks.

To anticipate this decision, Bouygues is starting today to withdraw and replace the antennas manufactured by Huawei. This also enables it to limit the financial impact of this decision. Bouygues did not specify which company would replace Huawei.

Olivier Roussat also indicated that discussions were underway with the French authorities to compensate for the ban on Huawei equipment, which is very costly for the French operator. But without saying more. However, he specified that the group had launched several parallel legal proceedings against the French State.

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Source : L'Usine Digitale

The executive's discourse seems to have evolved over the summer on the issue of digital planning. The future recovery plan will not forget fiber since the plan will provide additional funds to support areas where some 3 million lines remain to be financed.

This financial boost is part of a more ambitious project, outlined by Cédric O: moving towards a "universal service" for fiber.

The first piece of information delivered by the Secretary of State for the Digital Transition and Electronic Communications: the subsidy window for public fiber deployment projects is going to be replenished.

Until now, the government has refused to go beyond 280 million euros in subsidies, when both local authorities and manufacturers calculated total needs at 680 million euros. 680 million. Last May, in a letter sent to the executive, local authority associations warned that "a reassessment of this envelope will have to be studied in light of the financial situation of local authorities, the higher deployment costs associated with health measures and the higher than expected number of catches to be deployed".

Unveiled next week, the recovery plan will provide more details on the effort the government is prepared to make on this specific point.

Additional funds to generalize fiber, yes, but "with the ambition to move towards the logic that fiber must be an essential service," added Cédric O. The government seems to be aligning itself with a request made by local authorities, since this would allow "professionals in the sector to continue to ensure the deployment and operation of fixed and mobile networks in the event of a crisis". It would also provide an opportunity to remove certain obstacles to deployment, such as access to common areas to fiber the risers of buildings.

If the idea of making fiber an essential infrastructure met with the reservations of the former Minister of the City and Housing - in charge of the THD dossier - this is however what the executive wants to work towards today: "we want to work on the notion of universal service," indeed added Cédric O. A project that could start as early as this fall, when the European Electronic Communications Code is transposed into French law. "This should enable us to extend the concept of universal service to include fiber coverage of the territory," the Secretary of State for Digital Affairs added.

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Source : DegroupNews

The Grand Duchy's telecoms gendarme has just issued its call for tenders for the award of 5G frequencies in the 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands for a total amount of 41.3 million euros.

The operators Orange Luxembourg and Post have both been granted 130 MHz of frequencies in these two bands. For its part, the operator Proximus has also been offered 120 MHz of frequencies in these two bands, while the operator Luxembourg Online will have 10 MHz of frequencies at its disposal. Finally, Eltrona participated in the auction but did not win any spectrum.

The licences distributed will thus be valid for a period of 15 years, renewable at least once for a period of five years. They will be subject to coverage obligations aimed at ensuring the availability of 5G in the municipality of Luxembourg by the end of 2020 and throughout the country by 2025 at the latest.

Orange, which has a strong presence in Luxembourg, welcomed the significant 110 MHz of spectrum in the 3.5 Ghz band. "We have obtained 110 MHz in the 3.5 GHz band, which is the maximum. This will enable us to provide our customers with the highest capacity to use or imagine the services of tomorrow", said Corinne Lozé, CEO of Orange Luxembourg.

In France, the call for tenders for the allocation of 5G frequency blocks in the 3.5 GHz band will be held between 20 and 30 September under the aegis of Arcep. The end of the procedure should make it possible to allocate the remaining 110 MHz of frequencies to each of the four competing operators.

This auction phase will be followed in October by an additional phase during which the operators will again be able to bid to the highest bidder to determine their positioning in the 3.5 GHz band. The allocation of frequencies in the 3.5 GHz band alone should bring in a minimum of €2.17 billion for the French authorities.

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Source : ZDNet

Another thorn in the side of the digital infrastructure sector is customers' end connections to fibre optic cable. Indeed, there is growing discontent with the disruptions observed in the sharing points and the threat they pose to the sustainability of networks. Called upon to intervene more frankly, the Arcep is finally taking matters into its own hands to do something about the "noodle dishes".

At the Telconomics conference on 16th June, the Regulatory Authority said it was "extremely concerned" by the multiplication of these aberrations. To remedy this, the telecoms regulator has therefore published a "first roadmap" drawn up in consultation with the players in the sector. The objective is to give infrastructure operators the possibility to better control interventions on their networks. They will thus be able to report, or even deregister, unscrupulous subcontractors mandated by commercial operators.

Sébastien Soriano, President of the Authority, explains that the aim is to "prevent a few black sheep from destroying the highly professional work of most of the other subcontractors". A first step that will not settle all the questions, such as those of recruitment, the pricing of these interventions, or the differences in connection technologies between infrastructure operators and access providers.

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Source : DegroupNews

The telecoms regulator has published a new timetable for the continuation of the 5G frequency allocation procedure in the 3.5 GHz band. It will therefore be between September 20th and 30th.  Bouygues Telecom, Free, Orange and SFR, which qualified last February following a call for applications, will participate.

At the end of the procedure, they will each obtain a 50 GHz block in return for 350 million euros per head and a number of deployment obligations. In early autumn, the main auction will allow them to complete this first block by winning one or more 10 GHz blocks. This will be followed by an auction to position the resulting frequencies in the 3.4-3.8 GHz section. The Arcep indicates that the final allocation of frequencies will take place "in October or November". Operators will thus be able to market their future 5G packages "by the end of the year".

However, in the end, operators will not be obliged to provide 5G coverage in at least two major cities before the end of 2020. The delay in the procedure has led the telecoms police to lift this obligation accompanying the first 50GHz block. The marketing will be done "at the initiative of the operators" even if the Arcep promises to remain attentive to the conditions of marketing of the new network and the promises of the operators.

The first obligation will therefore be to deploy 5G on at least 3,000 of their sites by the end of 2022. Operators will also have to distilled at least 240 Mb/s on 75 % of their sites into 4G+ by the same deadline.

This is a reminder that the specifications have been drawn up so that the deployment of 5G and 4G coverage of territories go hand in hand. It is also a response to Bouygues Telecom and SFR, who recently balanced the deployment of the 5th generation network against the need to improve 4G coverage in rural areas.

At the same time, Arcep also intends to respond to growing concerns about the environmental impact of digital technology. Within the framework of a new platform called "for a sustainable digital environment", "associations, institutions, operators, digital companies, personalities" are invited to contribute to it during a series of thematic workshops starting on July 9th.

A report by the end of the year will provide an opportunity to take stock of this work and will propose the "first avenues for taking the response to environmental issues further", which the Authority intends to make a "new chapter in regulation".

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Source : DegroupNews

As it has just celebrated its eighth anniversary, IPv6's technical specifications were developed nearly twenty years ago. Marco Hogewoning, a spokesperson for the RIPE NCC association, notes that this network protocol has not yet become a viable alternative to IPv4. He even estimates that the transition could take another five to ten years.

Despite the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses in November 2019, things have not accelerated. The economic incentive for small operators and corporate networks to switch to IPv6 could be the key to getting all players in the chain to switch to IPv6. Or the obligation for manufacturers to launch IPv6-capable connected objects on the market. In addition, governments in each country should lead by example with their own sites and services.

In France, Arcep is keeping an inventory of operators' efforts in this area. The latest barometer dates from November and showed that a significant portion of French subscribers are still not IPv6-enabled.

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Source : 01net

While the 4G deployment figures had remained within the norm in March and April 2020, the stall finally occurred in May. 330 new sites brought into service by Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free according to data from the French National Frequencies Agency. The figure is relatively low but remains higher than last February or spring-summer 2019.

Nevertheless, the breakdown by operator shows a significant slowdown on the part of Orange and Free. The locomotives of the deployment over the past year respectively brought 154 and 230 new 4G sites into service in May, well below the pace observed in recent months. This slowdown cannot help but be associated with the health crisis. Operators have reported various difficulties during containment.

What's more, the number of new activated antennas is down 20 to 50% compared to the previous month at Free and Orange. Antenna activations on their current flagship bands have reached the lowest levels seen in a long time, 18 to 24 months in some cases.

There was also a general decline in the number of authorizations obtained by Free and 4G in 700 MHz. The number of authorizations received by Iliad's brand in this band, which has usually fluctuated between 500 and 1,000 per month for the past year, plunged to less than 200 in May.

At first glance, SFR and Bouygues Telecom appear to have been less affected by the disruptions despite a decline in activations and authorizations on several frequency bands. However, it is difficult to draw conclusions from this, as the pace of deployment of these two operators has been irregular for several months. It should be noted that only SFR seems to have felt the need to make extensive use of the derogatory mechanism put in place by the State to ensure the continuity of deployments, on 58 occasions.

With 155 new 4G media in service, Bouygues Telecom achieved its best month since December in May. In terms of antennas too, the operator set a six-month record: 556 more in May. Of these, 313 were in the 1,800 MHz frequency band, notably to serve a number of major cities (Paris, Lille), several major roads and seaside resorts, according to ANFR.

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Source : DegroupNews

Due to the containment caused by the coronavirus outbreak, telecommunications operators are expecting an increase in the load on their infrastructure.

Invited by franceinfo on 17 March, the president of the French Telecommunications Federation, Arthur Dreyfuss, called for "digital responsibility" to avoid saturation. He warns that operators "may need to adapt" and "prioritize" certain uses to cope with these peaks in connections.

franceinfo: Will the infrastructure withstand the shock?

Arthur Dreyfuss: More than 15,000 technicians and engineers from all telecom operators are mobilised to ensure that the networks will hold up for the next few days, weeks, or even months. We are entering an era of social discipline and we must also enter a period of digital responsibility, both individual and collective. This is a completely new situation. The bulk of the population will be at home at the same time, all day long, for the coming weeks and months.

We are on the verge of a rise like we have never seen before. The operators are fully mobilized and we are working hard to make sure they can operate.

Does that mean rationing digital consumption?

No, but there are everyday gestures to be apprehended. At home, for example, it's better to use Wi-Fi to make calls, work, communicate and get information. This makes it possible to switch to fixed networks with greater capacity than mobile networks.

But we are going to combine telecommuting, distance learning for children, digital entertainment... Aren't the networks going to overheat?

We are used to absorbing consumption peaks, but we are going to live with a continuous increase in consumption. All individuals and companies must adapt and prioritize. It is a collective responsibility.

Could the operators come to curb the most consuming uses?

In this period, the priorities are the health of the population, working at home, the pursuit of economic life... We may indeed need to adapt to meet these priorities and we will work with all the players to adapt if necessary.

It's like the highway crossings at the end of July, beginning of August. You have to know how to adapt your consumption in the same way that you sometimes adapt your traffic.

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Source : franceinfo

The operator has launched the marketing of its Very High Speed subscriptions, up to 1 Gb/s, in many cities. To do so, it relied on SFR's FttH network. These are AMII zones, moderately dense zones, where the red square operator is the only one to manoeuvre. It installs a shared optical fibre network there, which other ISPs will then be able to use.


More than 50 cities in some 15 departments are affected by the arrival of Bouygues Telecom's offers. The operator is thus following in Free's footsteps, which has been investing in these territories for several months now.

Bouygues Telecom, which has not been present so far, seems to have launched a vast marketing effort since the end of September. In particular on the outskirts of major cities such as Calais, Cannes, Marignane, Nantes, Toulon, Toulouse and Orléans as well as in several major municipalities in the Ile-de-France region.


In these regions, competition will therefore be somewhat fiercer since at the beginning of the year only SFR, RED, Orange and Sosh offers were available. For several months now, Free has been growing in power, so it is not surprising to see Bouygues Telecom complete the picture. This is to keep pace with these territories with hundreds of thousands of potential customers.


At the same time, Bouygues Telecom is whipping up new ground in major cities. At the beginning of 2019, its very high speed Internet offers were still absent from many large cities located in so-called very dense areas (ZTD). But the situation is gradually improving with the arrival of its fibre in Cannes, Clermont-Ferrand, Grenoble, Poitiers, Rennes, Rouen, Saint-Etienne, Toulon or even some Ile-de-France municipalities such as very recently Fontenay-sous-Bois.

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Source : Ariase

Arcep still estimated, before the summer holidays, that the number of public IPv4 addresses available would allow it to last until March 2020. But since then, requests for allocations have multiplied and the remaining stock is melting like snow in the sun. The exhaustion date is now scheduled.... November 5th, 2019.

After this date, the European RIPE register will switch to a strict rationing mode. Organizations wishing to provide themselves will therefore have to register on the waiting list. If so, they will receive a small range of 256 addresses. For those who already have address ranges, they have almost no chance of receiving this boost. "We will focus on players who have not yet received an IPv4 address allocation," warns Marco Schmidt, head of rule development and internal policy at RIPE.

These addresses will mainly come from companies in bankruptcy. Historical actors who have received a large allocation in the past and who no longer use certain beaches can obviously return them to RIPE. But this case will be quite rare. "IPv4 addresses have become strategic assets. Almost no one will want to part with it," says Vincentus Grinius, CEO of Heficed.

The number of IP address transfers is not expected to increase significantly in the future for the same reasons as seen above. However, the price of the IPv4 address could increase significantly as the offer becomes scarcer. There are currently about twenty bids at the global level on the auction site auctions.ipv4.global. The average purchase price more than doubled from $9 to $21 in three years.

This shortage is already inspiring fraudulent minds who are on the lookout to recover stocks of IPv4 addresses. In recent years, a few hundred cases have already landed on the RIPE offices.
RIPE has therefore strengthened its controls to remedy this situation. More than 600 surveys, twice as many as the previous year, were conducted in 2018. Members are now asked to check regularly that their data is correct and up to date.

However, this will not solve the fundamental problem of shortage. Today, no telecom player can ignore IPv4. Even if IPv6 is developing, this technology only connects about a quarter of the Web. "The Internet will not stop working, but it will stop growing. This shortage will especially affect new entrants and growing players, as they are the ones who need new public IPv4 addresses the most. Either they manage to obtain them on the secondary market, or they will have to share IPv4 addresses with several customers," explains Vivien Guéant, project manager in Arcep's "Open Internet" unit.

This situation is far from neutral for the end user as it affects the quality of service. Indeed, when an operator retrieves IPv4 addresses from an actor located in another country or continent, it may happen that this geographical information is not updated.

Address sharing also has shortcomings since it allows several hundred or even thousands of clients to be connected to a single IPv4 address. And this significantly complicates maintenance for the operator and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to use certain applications "such as peer-to-peer, remote access to shared files on a NAS, access to connected home control systems, certain network games", explains Arcep in its "Monitoring the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses".

The police also suffer from this forced sharing. Investigations will be difficult to complete if addresses are increasingly shared, as it often relies on an IP address to find a digital offender. To overcome this situation, European police forces would like operators and ISPs to reduce the number of customers shared per IPv4 address. In Belgium, for example, the telecoms industry has played the game and the introduction of a code of conduct has made it possible to limit the subscriber ratio to 16:1.

The only long-term solution is the widespread use of IPv6. "Industry players have never seen much interest in IPv6, as this technology had no immediate effects: all websites and customers that have IPv6 also have IPv4. IPv6 is only useful if everyone gets involved. IPv4 will probably have to be kept for a long time to come. Some even think that IPv4 will never stop," adds Vivien Guéant. Unless we do like Belarus, which has just issued a presidential decree requiring these ISPs to deploy IPv6 to all users by 1 January 2020. To date, it is the only country to force the deployment of IPv6 through legislation.

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Source : 01net

On October 7th, Arcep announced the first projects selected to use the 26 GHz frequency band. Called "millimetre band", according to the regulator, this band represents "an extremely localized capacitive contribution for very high speed mobile networks in very dense areas, mainly in urban or suburban areas, in specific locations (ports, factories...) or inside buildings".

The regulator and the government issued a call for projects in January 2019 to identify the uses of 5G in this frequency band. In total, 11 projects have been validated by the authorities to test 5G on the 26 GHz band for 3 years. Sébastien Soriano explains "the fundamental challenge is the Internet of things, an almost infinite universe is opening up to us".

Heterogeneous proposals:

• the major seaport of Le Havre is seeking to develop the port city of tomorrow.
• Bordeaux Metropole will use the 5G to manage the connected streetlights and thus ensure intelligent energy management within the municipalities concerned.
• With a view to the 2024 Olympic Games, the Saint-Quentin en Yvelines national velodrome will be able to test 5G for the media.
• SNCF will be able to observe the benefits of 5G in Rennes station with different cases of use affecting both users and SNCF agents.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

Launched on September 16, Wi-Fi 6 will become widespread in the Telecom sector. Indeed, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, more than 1.6 billion devices will offer it by the end of 2020. "This is the first time in the history of Wi-Fi that we're going to see so much progress. The impact of Wi-Fi often goes unnoticed. Yet even international trade depends on it! Wi-Fi 6 is there, it's a reality, companies deliver their products," enthuses Kevin Robinson, Wifi-Alliance's Vice President of Marketing.

The next mobile phone standard, 5G, is planned for 2020 in France. Telecoms operators will first have to buy the valuable licenses this fall. However, using free frequencies, Wi-Fi 6 was able to arrive this summer in France.

This version 6 has many advantages. It allows dozens of devices to be connected simultaneously. "Today, in an average family of four people, there are at least four phones on the same Wi-Fi, not to mention business smartphones, tablets, one or more PCs, a connected TV... We see that the number of devices per household is increasing faster than the speed consumed," explains Christian Gacon, director of fixed networks at Orange Labs.

But 5G should not relieve the problem. 5G uses high frequency bands, compared to 4G, which allow broadcasting further away but penetrate less well inside buildings. For this reason, 5G will be used mainly outdoors and Wi-Fi 6 indoors. "These are two complementary technologies. For example, Wi-Fi 6 will not allow the development of autonomous cars!" says Kevin Robinson. In the industrial world, 5G will therefore be essential for uses requiring very low latency and long range. Wi-Fi 6 is more suitable for short-range uses.

But others are more measured. "Wi-Fi 5 is already very powerful and will support the next ten years. Wi-Fi 6 is for the next twenty years. It brings an improvement... From my point of view, the real breakthrough came with Wi-Fi 5," says Marc Taieb, president and founder of Wifirst.

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Source : Les Echos

Belarus becomes the first country in the world to legally require the adoption of IPv6. As of January 1, 2020, all Internet Service Providers will be required to support IPv6 on their network and provide an IPv6 address to all their customers.

The new law was promulgated by presidential decree on 18 September. This decree updates the previous one setting out the rules for using the country's "national Internet segment". Belarus has one of the newest and most modern Internet backbones on the European continent and local ISPs have already tested IPv6 support well before last week's announcement.

Currently, IPv6 adoption in Belarus is about 15% on average, below the global average (29%). But this is expected to increase from 2020 onwards, as local ISPs will have to support all connections.

Once enabled, clients will be assigned both an IPv4 Internet address and an IPv6 address, and connections will run fully on IPv6 if possible.

Officially approved as the Internet standard in 2017, IPv6 was designed to replace IPv4, which has almost exhausted its available address space of 4.3 billion addresses. Since its adoption, ISPs around the world have begun to deploy support, in collaboration with consumer and professional device manufacturers. A rather slow deployment, mainly because it was left to the discretion of the operators.
 

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Source : ZDNet