Reuters reported that Patrick Drahi was in discussions with European satellite operator Eutelsat about a possible takeover. A deal that would have seen one of his investment vehicles take direct control of the Paris-listed company. "An offer for Eutelsat, which has a market value of €2.3 billion ($1.96 billion) and is backed by public investor Bpifrance with a 20% stake," according to Reuters. This was rejected by the satellite operator as being too low.

The man recently received regulatory approval to take telecoms group Altice Europe private after its minority shareholders approved his bid to buy the company. In June, he had taken a 12.1% stake in UK telecoms operator BT Group using the newly created Altice UK vehicle. According to unnamed sources, the billionaire had no intention of merging Eutelsat with his telecoms and media assets and would like to keep the French company in a separate holding company.

For its part, incumbent Eutelsat - since 1977 - recently bought nearly 24% of UK rival OneWeb for $550m - the biggest deal since CEO Rodolphe Belmer took office in 2016.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

It is clear that white areas are not limited to rural deserts. They also concern tourist areas that are very popular in the summer with cyclists, hikers and coastal travellers.

In the Luberon, if optical fibre has arrived in Isle sur la Sorgue or Maubec, ADSL is particularly anaemic in Gordes, and 4G is almost absent. The various local players are suffering from the disinvestment of the main operators and the public authorities. The latter are struggling to impose a minimum service for services that are now essential at a time when administrative procedures are being dematerialised.

If digital technology is on everyone's lips today, once you leave the urban areas, you are in digital poverty with a two-speed France.

In a report published on 16 January 2020, the former rights defender Jacques Toubon stated that "in municipalities with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, more than a third of the inhabitants do not have access to quality Internet, which represents nearly 75% of municipalities in France and 15% of the population". Fortunately, alternative Internet service providers and digital development companies are helping rural communities. They are setting up small-scale radio networks accessible to individuals and small businesses. These are essential local initiatives, as the France Très Haut Débit plan, launched in 2013, and the New Deal Mobile, launched in 2018, are struggling to eradicate the digital divide and ensure equal access to the Internet for all French people.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

According to French, German and Norwegian researchers, the GEA-1 and GEA-2 encryption algorithms used in mobile data networks in the 1990s and 2000s have been weakened, one of them from the outset. Based on 2G technology, they were intended to secure the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) standard. Today, this network continues to be used for M2M systems or as a backup for data, SMS and mobile calls. Most of today's terminals are GPRS-enabled.

The aim of these two algorithms is to secure the transfer of data between phones and base stations in order to avoid the interception of communications. However, the experts found, for example, that GEA-1 did not encrypt in 64 bits as expected but only in 40 bits. With a lower security level, a computer network can more easily discover the key by brute force and read the streams.

To support this theory, specialists reverse engineered GEA-1 and GEA-2. By recreating the former, they found that their algorithm was more secure than the original version. Disregarding the notion of chance, they believe that this weakening of security was intended from the design of the algorithm.

These algorithms were developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in 1998 by a dedicated working group. The European body admitted that GEA-1 contained a weakness. But it explained that it had been introduced to comply with export regulations which did not allow for stronger encryption. For GEA-2, the rules were relaxed at the time of its design, but the researchers were able to decrypt the traffic. They therefore recommend relying on the more robust GEA-3 and higher algorithm.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

The Internet is made up of access links that route traffic to high-bandwidth routers and accompany the traffic from its source to its destination using the best available path.

In order to ensure that Internet traffic can be routed anywhere in the world, these individual high-speed fibre optic networks must be interconnected. This interconnection is therefore called backbone or Internet backbone interconnection. Each network is owned by Internet operators, usually private, Tier 1 operators whose networks are interconnected.

These Tier 1 Internet operators create a single global network by bundling their long-distance networks, allowing each of them to access the entire Internet routing table. This allows them to efficiently route traffic to its destination through a succession of local, tier 2 and tier 3 providers. These backbone operators all use the same shared network protocol: TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)/IP (Internet Protocol).

The networks of these Tier 1 operators are connected at the IXP (Internet Exchange Point) level. These exchange nodes, being equipped with high-speed switches and routers, allow traffic to be routed between peers (participants connected to the exchange node using the BGP protocol to make traffic). These interconnection points are often owned by third parties, sometimes on a non-profit basis, thus facilitating the unification of the backbone.

Tier 1 operators participating in the IXP contribute to their financing, but do not charge each other for carrying the traffic of other Tier 1 operators. This type of relationship is known as "peering" or "peering without agreement". Peering avoids possible financial disputes that could impact Internet performance.

There are smaller Tier 2 (Tier 2) and Tier 3 (Tier 3) operators. Tier 3 operators allow businesses and consumers to access the Internet. As these Tier 3 operators do not have their own access to the Internet backbone, they contract with Tier 2 or regional ISPs that have their own networks to carry traffic to a limited geographical area.

As access does not concern all devices connected to the Internet, the second-tier providers in turn contract with the first-tier providers to have access to the global backbone.

In summary, traffic originating from a computer on one side of the globe can connect to a connected computer on the other side of the globe by sending the traffic to a Tier 3 operator. This operator routes the traffic to a Tier 2 operator who redirects it to a Tier 1 backbone operator. The latter then redirects it to the appropriate Tier 2 operator. The operator itself sends this traffic to a Tier 3 operator who delivers the traffic to the destination computer.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

Despite steadily increasing IT job vacancies, the female population is under-represented in this sector. The Gender Scan survey presented last November even confirmed a decline in the rate of feminisation in the Digital sector, both in terms of the diplomas obtained and their access to employment.

The Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region has therefore launched a call for "Actions and Training" projects to increase the proportion of women in IT.

The aim of this scheme is to support, through operating grants, action plans to encourage gender diversity in the digital sector in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Applications must be submitted before 15th March in one of the following categories: awareness raising, vocational training and support for employment.

The Region will select and financially support 3 applications - the best application in each of the three categories - for a total amount of 40,000 euros. Proposals will be implemented for a maximum of one year from the date of signature of the grant award agreement. The rate of support may not exceed 50 % of the total project budget.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

As expected last September, Iliad confirmed its choice to turn to Nokia for its 5G telecom infrastructure. A total of 17 million subscribers in France and Italy are potentially concerned to switch to this latest generation mobile technology when the time comes.

"The Iliad Group will install Nokia's latest radio access technology, AirScale, enabling it to take advantage of the first 5G networks while supporting 4G/LTE and 5G in the same radio access system," said the Finnish equipment manufacturer.

The technology supports different network topologies, from distributed, centralized and cloud-based RANs. The OEM points to its speed and ease of installation and 60% energy savings as well as backward compatibility with its Flexi base station controllers.

In addition to Iliad, Orange has also chosen Nokia - alongside Ericsson - for the deployment of its 5G network. In particular with its Single RAN technology coupled with network automation and management tools and associated professional services in the regions.
 

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

On January 31st, the CNLL, the OSBalliance and the Cossfi laid the foundations of a new structure: APELL (Association Professionnelle Européenne du Logiciel Libre). "The idea is to create a umbrella association to carry the voice of Free Software companies in Europe in the broadest sense" explains Stéphane Fermigier, co-president of the CNLL.

A relatively light structure that includes members, supporting members (such as the Open Forum Europe or OW2) and associate members. The association will be based in Brussels and registered in the register of lobbies with the European institutions.

Two triggers were at the origin of this creation. "The first was the copyright directive and its impact on the development of free software, the battle over the forges. We clearly saw that it was necessary to have the voice of free software companies," observes Stéphane Fermigier. "The second trigger is the structuring of associations to respond to European issues, to collaborate on commercial projects, to have collaborative R&D," he continues.

This initiative also comes at a time when the European Commission is communicating a lot about open source and 2020 should be an important year in this area. "A major study is being launched on open source in Brussels and a major restitution event is due to take place in 2021," emphasises Stéphane Fermigier. He also mentioned other elements such as recommendations on good practices in terms of free software, policies to support innovation and work on ethics and digital sovereignty.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

The European Union has just published a raft of measures - a toolbox in EU jargon - to enable its members to mitigate cyber risks. "According to the EU coordinated risk assessment report, the measures concern the security of stakeholders in the 5G ecosystem, which are mainly mobile network operators and their suppliers, in particular telecoms equipment manufacturers," the report reads.

The measures set out by the EU fall into two categories: strategic and technical, complemented by targeted support actions. Each of these measures is associated with a level of risk backed by positive or negative implementation factors and the time required for implementation.

It has thus identified 8 strategic 5G cyber risk mitigation measures and 11 mitigation measures at the strategic level.

In addition, a roadmap has been specified: Member States are invited to take "concrete and quantifiable steps to implement the set of key measures according to the recommendations contained in the conclusions associated with the EU toolkit" by 30th April 2020. Then to draw up by 30th June 2020 "a report by the SRI Cooperation Group on the state of play of the implementation of these key measures in each Member State, based on the reports and regular monitoring carried out in particular within the SRI Cooperation Group, with the assistance of the Commission and ENISA".

This announcement comes at a time when the 28 members of the Union have agreed to give priority to local players, Nokia and Ericsson, for 5G core network technologies, de facto excluding players such as Huawei. This does not mean, however, that the Chinese manufacturer's equipment will disappear altogether, as it will, for example, be able to offer it for non-sensitive parts of the network in the UK, while being capped at 35% of the 5G market. This prospect seems far from being a topical one in Germany, where the government is said to have evidence of Huawei's connivance with the Chinese intelligence services...

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

Free had been involved for several years in co-financing the FTTH networks deployed by Orange and was challenging several terms of its contract with the incumbent operator. The Regulatory Authority had settled this dispute in Free's favour, but Orange had been challenging the legality of the dispute since then. The Paris Court of Appeal upheld Arcep's decision in an order dated 26th September 2019.

The planned renewal of the term and conditions of access to Orange's infrastructure was contested by Free. Arcep confirmed that they did not meet Free's needs for visibility and transparency and therefore imposed on Orange to grant a right of access for a defined period of time and at least 40 years. In its decision, the Court of Appeal confirmed that these conditions are "not sufficiently precise in view of Free's need for visibility over the effective duration of this right".

In addition, Arcep considered that it was justified and reasonable for Free to obtain information on the formation of access tariffs for Orange FTTH networks in less dense private initiative areas. This was also supported by the Court of Appeal, which stated that these tariffs were "directly linked to the financial terms of the bid, which it seeks to ensure is fair".

Finally, the Regulatory Authority considered that the incumbent operator should allow Free to connect mobile base stations in less dense areas of private initiative via the extra optical fibres of the FTTH network deployed by Orange and co-financed by Free. A point that has not been contested by Orange in its appeal.

In addition, the Paris Court of Appeal held that the decision did not affect business confidentiality and confirmed Arcep's analysis. And noting that the information that Orange must provide to Free pursuant to the decision "is characterized by a very high degree of aggregation, both geographically and by expense items".

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

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

Syntec Numérique has revised upwards the growth forecasts for the IT sector in France with a 4.2% increase in 2019. The Chamber of Trade Unions was expecting an increase of 3.9% for the current year. In 2018, growth averaged 4.1% for the sector as a whole: digital consulting and services companies (ESN / ex-SSII), software publishers and technology consulting specialists.

79% of companies in the IT sector plan to increase their turnover in 2019.

With a growth rate of 3.3%, equivalent to that of 2018, 76% of NSEs expect their revenues to increase in 2019. They will benefit from high value-added services on projects that their customers engage in cybersecurity, cognitive systems, as well as on Cloud offerings. This development will be driven by the banking/insurance, energy and water suppliers (utilities) and business services sectors.

They are also 76% to expect an increase in their turnover this year from software publishers. This represents a growth of 5.8% in their market in France in 2019, which is higher than in 2018 (+5.3%). Software-as-a-service will represent 25% of the software publishing market, Syntec Numérique predicts. It is expected to reach €3.4 billion this year.

The most optimistic are the technology consulting players, since 95% of them expect their turnover to increase. However, Syntec Digital expects growth of 5.2%, slightly lower than last year (5.5%). This will be driven by process engineering and IoT services, as well as the transformation of industrial customers' business models.

In 2018, ESNs generated 61% of revenue in the IT market, while software publishers accounted for 22% and technology consulting for 17%.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

This month, the recruitment firm Robert Walters published a study on job offers in the digital sector in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. The market continues to grow with a 19% increase in ads for IT executives in April 2019 compared to the same period in 2018.

A dynamic that benefits network engineers / architects since the number of proposals increased by 43% last month. "With the rise of the Cloud, the role of network experts and architects becomes strategic [...] Guarantors of design, network quality and security, they are a major asset, even for companies that have outsourced their infrastructures" comments the manager of the IT and digital division of Robert Walters' Lyon office, Edouard Trackoen.

According to him, this is even more true for companies with many sites and wishing to develop an SD-WAN project. Indeed, he adds "Beyond technical expertise, companies will welcome candidates who are also able to make the link with business issues". According to this logic, the proportion of CIOs with a CTO / Infrastructure Director course would have increased at the expense of application managers.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

Free's parent company has just sold its passive mobile telecommunications infrastructure in France and Italy to Cellnex. This Spanish operator is acquiring all the Italian pylons and more than 70% of the French infrastructure for $2 billion.  That is nearly 10,000 sites in both countries.

Iliad and Cellnex will be partners in the management and development of Iliad Tower Co for the French business. This service contract includes a construction program for 4,500 custom-built sites.

Iliad's Chief Executive Officer, Thomas Reynaud, explains that "this operation is part of an industrial logic that accelerates the deployment of 4G and 5G networks and increases Iliad's investment capacity. It will enable the efficient deployment of tomorrow's infrastructures for the benefit of all operators and also aims to better meet the challenges of territorial coverage".

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

Driven by a booming cloud infrastructure market, hardware and software spending in DataCenters increased by 17% in 2018. A global market dominated by Dell EMC followed by Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Huawei. Investments driven by a "growing demand" for public cloud services and the need for "ever richer" configuration according to Synergy Research Group, which publishes these figures. As a result, the average selling price of enterprise servers has skyrocketed.

In more detail, spending on infrastructure purchases for the public cloud increased by 30% compared to 13% for those directed at equipping enterprise data centers. "Cloud services revenues continue to grow by nearly 50% per year," said John Dinsdale, analyst at Synregy Research Group. "SaaS and e-commerce revenues are each increasing by about 30%. All these factors contribute to a significant increase in spending on public cloud infrastructure," he adds.
The public cloud market is dominated by the MDGs, which account for the largest share of cumulative revenue. On the brand side, Dell EMC is ahead of Cisco, HPE and Huawei. Dell EMC is also a leader in the private cloud market, followed by Microsoft, HPE and Cisco. These four providers are the leaders in the non-Cloud Data Center market, but in a different order.

Total revenue from Data Center equipment, including both cloud and non-cloud hardware and software, is $150 billion in 2018, the analyst said. The Data Center infrastructure market is 96% composed of servers, operating systems, storage, networking and software. Network security and management software represent the rest.
By segment, Dell EMC leads in terms of server and storage revenue. Cisco, on the other hand, overlooks the network segment. Then there are Microsoft, HPE, VMware, Lenovo, Inspur, NetApp and Huawei, which recorded the strongest growth in one year.

"We are also seeing relatively strong growth in infrastructure spending in enterprise data centers, with more complex workloads, hybrid cloud requirements, increased server functionality and higher component costs being the main drivers," concludes Dinsdale.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique

While power outages are a frequent cause of data center outages, they are no longer the only ones. Indeed, IT system failures and network errors are causing more and more failures. That's why the Uptime Institute looked at known outages to find out what caused unplanned service interruptions. To do this, the company has analyzed 162 service interruptions reported in traditional and social media over the past three years.

27 outages were reported in the media in 2016, 57 in 2017 and 78 in 2018. "Service outages are increasingly making headlines in the media," said Andy Lawrence, the Institute's Executive Director of Research. This does not necessarily mean that the number of failures is skyrocketing, but rather that downtime is attracting more and more attention. "It is clear that for users, the impact of outages is certainly more damaging today," he adds.

The study revealed that in global outages, network and IT system problems are more often blamed than those related to power supply. This is explained by the fact that power supply systems are more reliable than in the past and that there are fewer power outages in data centers.

At the same time, the increasing complexity of IT environments is causing a growing number of IT and network problems. "Data is now dispersed in multiple locations, with critical dependencies on the network, on how applications are architected and on how databases replicate each other. It is a very complex system, and it now takes fewer events to disrupt its operation," said Todd Trader, Vice President of Optimization and IT Strategy at the Uptime Institute.

This trend is all the more pronounced when comparing causes from one year to the next. 28% of outages were due to power supply problems in 2017 compared to 11% the following year. IT system failures remained relatively constant: 32% in 2017 and 35% in 2018. Outages due to network problems have increased significantly, from 19% in 2017 to 32% in 2018. "Things are linked not to one or two sites but to three or four or more sites, or even more, The network plays an increasingly important role in computer resilience," says Todd Traver.

In order to be able to distinguish an interruption that can threaten the activity of a company from a just disturbing failure, the Uptime Institute has developed an evaluation grid with a scale of 5 levels:

• Level 1: refers to a negligible stop. The failure is recordable but there is little or no obvious impact on services and no service interruption.
• Level 2: refers to a minimal interruption of service. Services are disrupted, but the effect on users, customers or reputation is minimal.
• Level 3: refers to a service interruption that is significant to the company. These are interruptions in customer or user service, most often of limited scope, duration or impact. The financial impact is minimal or non-existent but there is some impact on reputation or compliance.
• Level 4: concerns a serious operational or service failure leading to service disruption and/or operations involving financial loss, non-compliance, reputation damage and possibly even security issues with possible loss of customers.
• Level 5: Describes a critical failure for the company or mission, resulting in a major and damaging interruption of services and/or operations, involving significant financial loss, security issues, non-compliance, customer losses and reputation damage.

This analysis was further developed by researchers who specifically identified the origin of data center failures.

The most common reasons for failures when the network is down:

• fiber cuts outside the datacenter and insufficient number of routing alternatives
• intermittent failure of the main switches and absence of secondary routers
• major switch failure without backup
• incorrect traffic configuration during maintenance
• incorrect configuration of routers and networks defined by softwar
• failure to power individual unsaved components such as switches and routers

For IT, the most common causes are:

• poorly managed upgrade
• failure and subsequent data corruption of a large number of disks or SAN storage systems
• synchronization failure or programming errors in the load balancing or traffic management system
• poorly programmed failure / synchronization or disaster recovery system
• power loss to unsaved individual components

When the power supply fails, the reasons for the failures are:

• lightning causes overvoltages and power outages
• intermittent failures with transfer switches and inability to start generators or transfer to a second datacenter
• inverter failures and lack of transfer to secondary systems
• the supplier is unable to deliver the necessary power with subsequent failure of the generator or inverter
• damage to computer equipment caused by overvoltages

"In general, companies should pay more attention to the resilience of data centers. They need to know their architectures, to understand all the interdependencies, to identify the reasons for failures, to plan solutions in case of failure. However, this last aspect is often neglected," adds Todd Traver.

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Source : Le Monde Informatique