A new contract between the Region, the 4 Auvergne departments and Orange, signed 10 months ago, provides for broadband coverage of the entire Auvergne region by the end of 2020. Everything suggests that this objective will be achieved, as will the goal of making 91% of the Auvergne population eligible for fibre by the end of 2022.

In order to finance the equipment of rural areas, the Auvergne Region and the 4 departments had created a Public Initiative Network (RIP). Last year, Laurent Wauquiez renegotiated phase 3 of the RIP, getting the national operator to do "better (800 communes instead of 400), faster (2022 instead of 2025) and for less (137 million saved)".

A monitoring committee was then set up to ensure that Orange respects its commitment. It met for the second time on 7 February. Jérôme Barré, Head of Wholesale Markets at Orange, declared bluntly: "In 2019, we have hit the grand slam".

In figures: 50% more sockets connected in 2019 than in 2018, 166,000 customers already connectable, 48,000 customers connected, i.e. a penetration rate of 28%.

Since July 2019, connected households have been able to choose another operator, Free. Jérôme Barré also announced that the entire offer (with SFR and Bouygues) will be available in 2021. And this will be a first for an RIP.

On the business side, Orange is committed to "putting fibre everywhere". An offer at 250 € is proposed to them, whereas the previous tariffs were prohibitive, Laurent Wauquiez recalled.

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Source : La Montagne

Published on February 4th, a Tactis study shows that in peri-urban areas, around 30% more sites will be needed to offer a 5G service level equivalent to 4G. This is particularly true in rural areas, where twice as many sites will be needed to provide equivalent coverage, and up to three times as many to deliver a broadband service.

To arrive at these estimates, Tactis experts have simulated 4G coverage in several peri-urban and rural areas from existing mobile antenna sites. They then simulated what 5G coverage would look like based on these same sites. In its projections, Tactis uses only the 3.5 GHz frequency band. However, it is clear that coverage is much less in 5G than in 4G.

Why such differences? Because the frequencies used to provide 5G will not be the same as for 4G, and they do not have the same characteristics. "Current 4G deployments use low frequencies, which carry far, while the high frequencies that will be used for 5G deployments, in the 3.5 GHz band, offer a lot of throughput but carry much less far," explains Julien Renard, radio expert at Tactis. However, the Tactis simulations do not include the 700 MHz frequency band, even though these frequencies are low and allow much better coverage of territories. To explain this choice, Julien Renard points out that the 700 MHz band will not allow us to benefit from "all the promises of 5G". It is impossible, he says, to offer a real broadband service with these frequencies.

The densification of 5G networks in the heart of cities and the most urbanized areas, which are generally very profitable for operators, will certainly be a priority for Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free. On the other hand, the firm is looking at peri-urban areas and rural areas, which are less profitable. To acquire 3.5 GHz frequencies, operators will have to commit to ensuring that by 2024 and 2025, 25% of the number of 5G sites deployed will be in rural areas. However, there is no obligation to deploy new sites in rural areas. However, this will be an imperative for providing quality 5G coverage, according to Tactis.

The risk? A new digital divide between urban and rural areas. The latter could end up, in the long term, with non-existent or poor quality 5G networks. The solution to further densify the networks could come from a greater mutualisation of mobile infrastructures.

Operators are already thinking about this. In an interview with Les Echos, Stéphane Richard, CEO of Orange, judged that "the question of an advanced mutualization is raised. [...] Orange has signed (agreements in this sense) in Spain, Poland and Belgium. In France, some of our competitors already share their networks to a large extent; we are also thinking about it". The major manoeuvres could start as early as this year, once the 5G frequencies have been allocated.

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Source : La Tribune

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

A little over a year ago, Axione and the Mirova Fund created CityFast. The company had bought the 140,000 fibre optic lines deployed by Bouygues Telecom in major cities. CityFast then made a commitment to connect 3.4 million urban households by the end of 2021 and to lease this infrastructure to Martin Bouygues' operator and others.

One year later, CityFast assures to have crossed the 800,000 fiber optic lines deployed. The wholesaler will therefore move on to the next phase: the marketing of these pipes to interested operators. The multitude of regional or specialized operators supplying VSE-SMEs will then be able to offer fibre optic subscriptions in city centres at very competitive rates.

The president of CityFast, Eric Jammaron, explains "Today, it is a very closed market. A downtown law firm, for example, has a very limited choice. Either it takes an FTTH subscription from one of the major operators present in the building, without guarantees, or it goes through a corporate operator to have a dedicated fibre with a very superior quality of service, but a very expensive subscription".

The wholesaler is convinced that small and medium operators will be in a hurry to offer fibre, with or without a guaranteed recovery time, to VSE-SMEs.

"We are betting on the mass, with extremely aggressive prices," says Eric Jammaron. Today, an ADSL pro offer, with much lower speeds, sells for 60 to 80 euros. Pro fibre doesn't go below 300 euros. "CityFast will sell its FTTH lines with service guarantees three times cheaper to operators.

An argument that is not entirely convincing. Nicolas Aubé, head of Celeste, is convinced that companies will remain fond of lines just for themselves.

CityFast will quickly know what to expect. As of this week, it opens to rent its fiber lines in the 7th district of Paris, then in the other districts of the capital, as well as in Lyon and Marseille.

 Read the article

Source : Les Echos

According to several telecom specialists, operators' uncertainty about whether or not to use Huawei's 5G antennas for their new mobile networks is growing.

Yet the law on securing mobile networks (nicknamed "anti-Huawei") has made things clearer. Indeed, operators must get the green light from Anssi - the National Agency for Information Systems Security - before using 5G equipment. The Agency then has two months to study their files.

At the end of December, Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom all submitted authorization applications for the deployment of Chinese 5G antennas in France.

However, according to several sources, cyber-experts in the French-speaking part of the country are making more and more requests for further information. It's not serious, "says a concerned operator. If they're trying to save time this way, it's a mistake. A court would never agree with them, the case law is very clear".

What operators are actually afraid of is that the Anssi is deliberately dragging its feet to avoid having to post a denial of clearance ahead of the 5G frequency allocations, scheduled for April. If equipment manufacturers were to be denied to operators before that date, the latter would then be weakened and could therefore lower their bids for the 5G auctions .

According to the new legal framework, the absence of a positive response from the Anssi within two months is tantamount to a refusal. But this time limit runs from receipt of a complete file... a complete file. Hence the irritation of the operators in front of what one actor describes as "delaying tactics" to postpone the deadline.

A specialist in the sector even indicates that "Some operators are impatiently waiting for an implicit refusal to be able to take legal action".

But the strategic interest of the four players differs. Indeed, Free, using only antennae of the Finnish Nokia, is not concerned.

Orange does not use Huawei antennas in France to date. However, it wants to have the possibility to solicit the Chinese supplier for its future 5G network.

As for SFR and Bouygues Telecom, which use Huawei on half of their respective networks, they are keen to be able to continue doing business with the Shenzhen giant. Doing without its 5G antennas would indeed require dismantling the 3G and 4G antennas for compatibility reasons. The cost would be enormous. You would have to buy and install this equipment. Above all, a large part of the network would be disrupted for many months, pushing customers into the arms of the competition. "Free would become, without doing anything, the second best network in the country... while it remains far behind" as a telecom specialist analyses.

 Read the article

Source : Les Echos

Sorry for the latecomers, but we are closing registration today!

AOTA and Rezopole thank you for your interest in this event.

See you on Wednesday, January 29th from 6:30pm

in the iconic music and entertainment venue, the Hard Rock Café.

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

The mobile access network sharing agreement between Orange Belgium and its competitor Proximus has just been suspended by the Belgian Competition Authority after Telenet, the third largest mobile operator in the French overseas market, filed a complaint against it. Telenet believes that the alliance would create a giant on the Belgian telecoms market.

"Telenet understands what motivates mobile operators to want to share their mobile network, albeit within the limits of legality, but has serious questions about how far-reaching it is that Belgium's two largest mobile players want to work together in a joint venture," the management said.

All the more so as "such a far-reaching agreement between Proximus and Orange Belgium also has the effect of reducing the number of players holding mobile infrastructure from three to two", Telenet pointed out after an argument that did not leave the Belgian regulator indifferent. And that could well interest French operators.

"In view of their possible impact on competition, the Competition College requires Orange and Proximus to suspend the implementation of the shareholders' agreement and the RAN sharing agreement concluded between them on 22 November 2019, as of the date of receipt of this decision and until 16 March 2020," explained the Belgian Competition Authority at the end of last week.

The decision adopted by the Belgian Competition Authority allows Orange Belgium and Proximus to continue their preparatory work for the establishment of their future joint venture. Indeed, the Belgian regulator's decision "does not prevent the sending of RFPs for the acquisition of network equipment and the selection of employees to be transferred, if this does not lead to the conclusion of binding agreements".

However, Orange Belgium and Proximus were keen to defend their agreement finalised last November "the agreement on the sharing of the mobile access network will have positive effects for customers and for Belgian society as a whole, in particular a faster and wider deployment of 5G, a significant reduction in overall energy consumption and a total improvement of the mobile experience, while maintaining a strong differentiation between the parties in terms of services and customer experience".

As a reminder, this alliance aims to create a 50/50 joint venture between the two operators. "Although sharing their mobile access networks, the two companies will retain full control of their own spectrum resources and will continue to operate their core networks independently to ensure a differentiated customer and service experience," said Orange Belgium and Proximus at the announcement of the agreement.

The Belgian mobile telecommunications market is currently driven by three main operators: Proximus, (44% market share in 2017), followed by Orange Belgium (27%) and Telenet, (with a market share between 20 and 30%).

For several months now, various rumours have been circulating that a fourth operator is entering the Belgian market, thus introducing more competition in a market characterised by a small number of players and relatively high prices. In a study published in 2018, the Belgian regulator had itself shown itself in favour of the entry of a fourth mobile operator on the market, noting that this new competition would make it possible to lower prices and improve innovation, but at the risk of a reduction in investment, particularly in rural areas.

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

This time, let's do it! Operators who wish to launch into 5G can now apply to the Arcep for frequencies in the 3.4 - 3.8 GHz band. Operators must apply before 12 noon on February 25th 2020.

The regulatory authority will examine the applications and issue authorisations during the first half of 2020. It is expected that the four operators - Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free Mobile - will be successful at the end of the award procedure.

As resources are limited, the real question is how many frequencies each applicant will have.

A mixed allocation system has been planned: the frequencies are divided into fixed-price lots and variable-price lots, which will be determined by auction. The fixed-price lots each contain a 50 MHz block, while the variable-price lots consist of a 10 MHz block. An operator must apply for at least 40 MHz and is not allowed to have more than 100 MHz.

Fixed price blocks are sold for EUR 350 million each. The others start at EUR 70 million.

However, the government does not intend to squeeze the candidates and a certain flexibility in the purchase of frequencies is thus provided for: the 10 MHz blocks can be paid for over 4 years and the 50 MHz blocks over 15 years - this is the duration of the allocation of frequencies. This is the duration of the frequency allocation, which may be extended if necessary.

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Source : Numerama

After Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Ireland, the European telecommunications infrastructure giant Cellnex is setting out to conquer Portugal. On January 2, the company announced the acquisition of 100% of Portuguese tower operator OMTEL, valued at EUR 800 million, 25% of which was owned by Altice Europe, SFR's parent company.

The Portuguese company heads 25% of the tower network in Portugal and its main customer is PT Portugal, the operator owned by Altice Europe.

"With OMTEL, we are not only integrating one of the leading independent operators of telecommunications infrastructure in Portugal. We are also committed to consistent growth in Europe, integrating an eighth market - which naturally extends the current geographical coverage of the seven countries in which we are already present", says Tobias Martínez, CEO of Cellnex.

The management of the Spanish company has also indicated that it wants to strengthen OMTEL's network with an additional 350 sites by 2027, for an investment of 140 million euros.

An investment outburst that does not seem to frighten Cellnex. Since its IPO in 2015, the company has announced that it has committed no less than 12 billion euros of investment for the acquisition or construction until 2027 of around 48,000 telecommunications infrastructures in addition to the 10,000 or so that the company had at its disposal at the time. Its portfolio thus amounts to a total of 58,000 sites.

Cellnex's appetite also extends to France. After acquiring no less than 3,000 sites belonging to Bouygues Telecom in 2017 for a total of 800 million euros, the Spanish ogre finalised at the end of last year the acquisition of 70% of Iliad TowerCo, which operates some 5,700 mobile telecommunications sites in France, for a deal valued at 2 billion euros.

2 billion. The transaction with Free, which also included the sale of 100% of Free's Italian infrastructure subsidiary and 90% of Salt's antennas, enabled Cellnex to increase its number of masts from 3,000 mobile telecommunications sites to more than 8,000 sites in France.

This is enough to make the competition shudder, given that Hivory claims a fleet of more than 10,000 sites and TDF's fleet peaks at 13,900 sites.

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

On November 25th, 2019 at 3:35 p.m., the RIPE NCC made its last IPv4 /22 allocation. The organization is now short of IPv4 addresses. An announcement that comes as no surprise to network operators: the RIPE community has long anticipated and planned the exhaustion of IPv4. Indeed, the RIPE NCC has been able to provide thousands of new networks with /22 allocations through responsible management of these resources by the community.

Even if there are no more IPv4 addresses, RIPE NCC will continue to retrieve them. These will come from organizations that have ceased operations or closed, or from networks sending back addresses that they no longer need. These addresses will be assigned to members (LIR) based on their position on a new waiting list that is now active. Only LIRs who have never received an IPv4 allocation from the RIPE NCC can request addresses on the waiting list, and they can only receive one allocation /24. However, these small amounts of recovered addresses will not be close to the millions of addresses that networks need today.

This event is another step towards the global exhaustion of the remaining IPv4 address space. The emergence of an IPv4 transfer market and the increased use of Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) in recent years does not solve the underlying problem: there are not enough IPv4 addresses for everyone.

Without large-scale IPv6 deployment, there is a risk of moving towards a future where the growth of the Internet will be unnecessarily limited due to a shortage of unique network identifiers. There is still a long way to go, and RIPE NCC calls on all stakeholders to play their part in supporting IPv6 deployment.

 Read the article

Source : RIPE NCC

The next Rezopole User Group will take place on 27th May 2019 from 9am to 12pm at the Hôtel de Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, 1 Esplanade François Mitterand, Lyon 2nd.

This edition will open with a short presentation of the technical and architectural developments that have taken place in the LyonIX infrastructure over the past year. We will continue with a review of the recent incidents in Route-Leak that have punctuated the news, such as:

• global injection and re-announcement of locally optimized routes (2019-06-24 Noction/Verizon/etc...)
• BGP-Hijack of Telegram by Iran-Telecom-Co (2018-07-30)
• SwissCom traffic suction by ChinaTelecom (2019-06-06-06)

The study of these incidents and countermeasures that would have limited their impact will lead us to the presentation of methods and issues such as:

• implementation and refinement of RPKI-ROA declarations
• bgpq3 : concrete filters from IRR data
• filter IP-bogon ranges simply
• feasibility of simple filtering on AS-Path
• PeerLock
• BGPmon's death announced

All these studies will be carried out in the form of a debate with the participants.

 Register 

The places are very limited !

Please confirm your participation before September 25th.

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.

 Read the article

Source : Journal du Geek

The next Rezopole User Group will take place on 24th May 2019 from 9am to 12pm at the Hôtel de Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, 1 Esplanade François Mitterand, Lyon 2nd.
This edition will focus on the challenges of network automation and the issues of its implementation. We will also provide feedback on the automated deployment of the configurations implemented on LyonIX in recent months.

Programme :

• Welcoming and coffee

• Feedback on the following configuration automation:

- Fabric-vxlan Huawei-Cisco (Rezopole)
- BGP and Inter-IXP Routing Server Route (Rezopole)
- Fabric-vxlan nexus 9300 via ansible (Alphalink)
- OpenBSD PacketFilter Firewall, OpenBGPd routers (Smile)
- Normalization of switch configurations (Smile)

• Exchanges with stakeholders in the form of questions and answers

 Register 

The places are limited !

Please confirm your participation before May 17.

Published by Axians, the DataCenter 2018-2021 study, Which evolutions for your IT infrastructures, indicates that data centres will be managed mainly in a private cloud mode by 2021. More than half will need to integrate a data management model based on a hybrid cloud model.

When asked in 2018, nearly 80% of CIOs say they mainly manage On Premise infrastructures and nearly one-third manage private cloud infrastructures. By 2021, this trend will intensify as, contrary to popular belief, internal data centres will not disappear. Indeed, it is the technologies implemented that will evolve and allow these data centers to operate in Cloud mode.

Although more than half of companies are aware of the need to manage data in a public-private cloud mode, only 12% of respondents have a project to implement a hybrid cloud solution.

According to this study, the 4 main current challenges for IT Departments are security (73%), cost control (66%), regulatory compliance (60%) and the digitalization of business lines (52%). The technology that will have the greatest impact on data centers within three years will be cybersecurity in the face of business service automation. On the software side, VMware leads ahead of Microsoft and Red Hat. While on the cloud operators side, Microsoft is cited first ahead of OVH and AWS.

For the majority of the CIOs interviewed, they remain the technical and operational guarantors of the infrastructure or strategy and innovation. However, new roles are emerging such as private cloud resource providers driven by SLA or hybrid cloud operators.

 Lire l'article

Source : Informatique News