In order to accelerate the development of 5G, and in particular in the industrial world, the State is targeting €1.7 billion in public and private investment until 2025. The executive "will mobilise €480 million in public funding to support priority projects between now and 2022, and is aiming for up to €735 million in public funding between now and 2025 in order to mobilise, through a leverage effect, up to €1.7 billion in investments between now and 2025", said Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Minister for Industry, at a press conference on 6 July.

The problem for the government today is not to deploy 5G infrastructure but to accelerate the development of 5G use cases. In September 2020, the State has already selected 18 projects that will receive 83 million euros of public money, for a total investment of 260 million euros.

Three other projects have been announced and will receive €10 million of public money: a machine-to-machine communication (mMTC) project led by the engineering and consulting company Médiane Système, a network acceleration card from the Grenoble SME Kalray, and a building ventilation and heating control solution from another Grenoble SME, Adeunis.

The public funds will come from France Relance, the plan to support the economy after the Covid-19 crisis, and the 4th programme for future investments. The government estimates that this effort to stimulate 5G applications could create 20,000 new jobs by 2025, and bring the 5G market in France to 15 billion euros by that date.

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Source : FrenchWeb.fr

The French National Digital Council (CNNum) has just published 50 measures for "a national and European agenda on responsible digital". The objective is to place digital technology at the service of the ecological and solidarity transition.

In this roadmap on the environment and digital, measure 7 aims to limit the environmental footprint of the deployment of digital networks and infrastructures. The CNNum intends to "encourage packages with limited consumption, including on fixed lines".

The ambition of this measure is thus to put in place "more sober" network and infrastructure design methodologies in order to adapt traffic to the "real needs of the user".

But will such limitations really be accepted by Internet users and Internet service providers? Unlimited access has become commonplace and it seems difficult to turn back the clock...

Last June, the Senate proposed banning unlimited data plans to reduce France's carbon footprint. This measure is also controversial.

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Source : Le Journal du Geek

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

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

Google's future private transatlantic submarine cable called "Dunant", a 6,600-kilometre long cable linking the United States and France, is due to come into service by the end of 2020. Orange, a partner of the Californian giant, laid the final section in the Vendée on 13th March.

To link up with the existing terrestrial network, the cable ends in a "landing station" near a beach in the commune of Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez. This underground installation was set up in a bunker more than 10 metres underground, originally built for a NATO cable. The bunker had been dormant since 2016, when it hosted its last cable, "Eurafrica", linking France, Morocco and Portugal. Similar work will soon take place at the other end of the cable, i.e. at Virginia Beach in Virginia.

As the first cable between the United States and France in 15 years, Dunant should make it possible to cope with the sharp increase in traffic expected between Google's data centres on either side of the Atlantic.

The fiber pairs will have a capacity of 30 Tbps each, compared with 3.2 Tbps offered by the previous transatlantic cable, which has been operational since 2001. Orange will benefit from two fiber pairs.

In addition, at the end of 2019, Google inaugurated a first cable, called "Curie", between the United States and Chile. A third, "Equiano", is planned between Portugal and South Africa.

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Source : L'Usine Nouvelle

On March 10th, Internet exchanges around the world recorded spikes in traffic. There are two reasons for this record level: the increased use of the Internet linked to the spread of Coronavirus and the release of a new game Call of Duty.

One of the key strategies to slow the spread of the virus is social distancing and crowd avoidance. Many companies have already asked their employees to work from home. This trend is expected to increase in the coming days as the number of cases in the United States and Europe increases. At the same time, universities are turning to online course delivery.

These decisions increase their reliance on data networks that allow for video streaming and collaboration. Kentik, a network operating company, said it has "seen an approximate 200% increase in video conferencing during working hours" in North America and Asia.

This increase in business traffic collided with the release of "Call of Duty: Warzone" on Tuesday, March 10. The release caused congestion and delays on major Internet networks, as well as record traffic.

Frankfurt's DE-CIX, one of the world's busiest interconnection points, announced on Tuesday evening a new peak traffic of more than 9.1 terabits per second, an increase of 800 gigabits per second (Gbps) compared to two weeks ago.

"Whether it's exchanging information, streaming movies, playing games online, or the exceptional situation people are currently experiencing with the COVID-19 virus, Internet use is playing an increasingly important role," said Dr. Thomas King, DE-CIX's Chief Technology Officer.

Internet use is likely to increase further in the coming days as more and more companies adopt teleworking and school systems begin to offer online courses.

"As the world faces uncertainty, the digital economy continues to allow the global economy to continue to evolve. ... Teleworking via videoconferencing on applications such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco and Slack are key examples of our clients helping the world's largest companies enable and conduct business," said Marc Ganzi, CEO of Digital Bridge, part of Colony Capital's digital infrastructure business, which includes fiber, cell tower, and data center operators DataBank and Vantage.

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Source : Data Center Frontier

In a rapidly expanding global traffic, the Internet is constantly evolving. But analyzing these data transfers in their entirety represents a real challenge for researchers, while with such information they could help create a more efficient network, prevent failures and improve defenses against cyber attacks.

Using a supercomputer, a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently succeeded in creating a tool to analyze global Internet traffic. Since 2015, they have analyzed nearly 50 billion data packets collected in Japan and California.
To do this, they were first forced to process this "hyper-deep" data with a technique called Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Mode (D4M). Then, in a second step, they created a neural network to analyze the data to find relationships.

The researchers likened the results to a measure of Internet background noise. This allows you to detect anomalies and obtain information on file sharing, malicious IP addresses and spam, attack distribution, as well as data traffic jams.

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Source : Futura Tech

By publishing this barometer of data interconnection in France 2018, the Autorité de Régulation des Communications Electroniques et des Postes (Arcep) proposes to popularize the subject in order to better understand the state and developments of this market.

The first part of this report presents this ecosystem of the Internet: what is the purpose of data interconnection, who are the main actors, how are they interconnected, what are the issues and modes of interconnection, etc.

In the second part, the Arcep makes an inventory of the interconnection situation in France. The data collected are aggregated results for the period from the first half of 2012 to the first half of 2018. They thus make it possible to see the growth of incoming and outgoing traffic, the increase in installed capacity, the evolution of interconnection methods, the distribution of traffic by interconnection mode, the breakdown of traffic by origin and the range of current tariffs.

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Source : Arcep

In the 2018 edition of its Visual Networking Index (VNI), Cisco announced that IP traffic is expected to triple in five years to 4.8 zettaocytes by 2022 (396 exabytes per month from 122 in 2017).

This growth is mainly due to two factors: the increase in the number of Internet users and the increase in the number of connected devices. According to Cisco, 4.8 billion people will use the Internet in 2022 compared to 3.4 billion in 2017. The number of fixed and mobile connections would increase to 28.5 billion within five years, half of which would concern Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and IoT.

According to the American network equipment manufacturer's forecasts, global Internet traffic generated by consumer uses will increase from 267 exabytes per month in 2017 to 333 exabytes in 2022. Business and government traffic is expected to double and represent 16% of total IP traffic.

The network preferred by users would be the fixed Internet with 273 exabytes per month at the end of 2022. Mobile IP traffic would follow with 77 exabytes but would be ahead of managed IP with 45 exabytes per month.

Internet video is also expected to grow strongly and represent 82% of global traffic in 2022, an increase of 7 points, all networks combined.

The adoption of SD-WAN in companies is also confirmed, with traffic increasing by 37% per year.

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Source : Silicon

[French article]

Bits of Networks : Etat des points d'échange Internet en France (extraits)

Qu'est-ce qu'un point d'échange Internet ?

Un point d'échange Internet, ou IXP (Internet eXchange Point), c'est un endroit où plusieurs opérateurs réseau s'interconnectent pour échanger du trafic.

De façon simplifiée, il faut voir ça comme un gros switch Ethernet sur lequel chaque opérateur réseau va se brancher, à l'aide d'un câble RJ45 ou une fibre optique. Oui oui, on parle bien du même genre de switch Ethernet que vous avez sûrement chez vous pour brancher vos ordinateurs, juste un peu plus rapide et fiable (et donc plus cher) [...]

Les IXP permettent de développer le territoire local

Les points d'échange sont importants pour développer le réseau sur le territoire local, puisqu'ils permettent aux opérateurs locaux de s'échanger du trafic directement, sans passer par les gros noeuds d'interconnexion comme Paris, Londres ou Amsterdam. Ça permet de réduire la latence et le coût, et de moins dépendre d'infrastructures qui deviennent critiques de par leur concentration (par exemple TH2 à Paris concentre une grosse partie des interconnexions de l'Internet français...). En somme, décentraliser et relocaliser le réseau, ce qui a des vertus non seulement techniques et économiques, mais également humaines : cela permet aussi de relocaliser les compétences techniques [...]

[…] L'effet de réseau joue : comme pour beaucoup de systèmes en réseau, plus un point d'échange possède de membres, plus il devient intéressant de s'y connecter. En effet, plus de membres présents signifie d'avantage de trafic échangé potentiel, pour le même coût fixe […]

La qualité de service d'un IXP doit être irréprochable

[…] Les opérateurs ont donc naturellement tendance à privilégier les points d'échange bien gérés et fiables. En réponse, les points d'échanges qui veulent subsister et grossir se donnent les moyens d'assurer un service fiable : astreinte 24/24, architecture technique redondée, matériel de pointe, etc.

On assiste donc à la fois à un regroupement des compétences, via des structures comme Rezopole pour éviter de tout réinventer de zéro à chaque IXP, mais aussi à un fort partage de connaissance et d'expérience à plus large échelle, avec le RIPE et EuroIX.

[…] L'ecosystème des points d'échange n'est pas un sujet nouveau, mais il reste fascinant parce qu'il entrelace des problématiques techniques et des relations entre structures parfois très différentes. Il illustre bien le modèle distribué et pair-à-pair qui a fait d'Internet un succès. On peut par ailleurs constater que certains points d'échange sont gérés comme un bien commun !

Si le sujet vous intéresse, le RIPE NCC maintient un blog collaboratif très actif sur des sujets liés à Internet en Europe, notamment les IXP et le peering. Toujours sur RIPE labs, Uta Meier-Hahn écrit régulièrement des articles passionnants sur les enjeux des interconnexions entre opérateurs.

Vous souhaitez en savoir plus, retrouvez ici l'intégralité de cette étude.