The AOTA - Association of Alternative Telecommunications Operators - has just referred the matter to the Arcep to request the opening of Orange's fibre network. Indeed, the 47 members of the association complain that they do not have sufficient access to it and accuse the incumbent of anti-competitive practices.

Since they cannot build very expensive networks themselves covering the entire country, small operators must first "borrow" Orange and SFR networks. They therefore rent access to the two dominant players in the corporate telecom market and buy voice or data from them at wholesale prices. They then sell them to their own customers.

But here we are, alternative operators feel ousted from the market of companies that have not been able to "connect" enough to the Orange network. With 12.4 million outlets, the incumbent's fibre network is both very large and very capillary. Hanging on to it therefore makes it possible to target SMEs with connectivity needs on several sites or plants spread over the territory. It is precisely these customers who escape the more geographically limited members of the AOTA.

A long-standing problem linked to the lack of fibre regulation for professionals. Indeed, Orange is obliged to offer wholesale offers to small operators wishing to access the copper network (ADSL) but not on fibre. In 2017, Alternative Télécom had already demanded more openness.

However, it is impossible for Orange to open up to competition a network built with billions of investments. Small operators believe that the operator has been favoured by its historical footprint on cable, which it was able to convert very quickly to fibre. Today, Orange controls approximately 70% of the corporate fibre market.

For its part, the French Competition Authority has chosen to regulate this market by creating a third player, Kosc, to "break" the predominance of Orange-SFR. This "wholesale" operator deploys its own fibre network, which it then rents to small AOTA or Alternative Télécom operators. "Kosc is a good complement, but it's one of many solutions. And anyway, the Kosc network does not have the same capillarity as Orange," explains one of these small operators. The ball is now in the Arcep's court.

 Read the article

Source : Les Echos

One month after the validation by Arcep, the contract was finally signed between the department and Savoie Connectée. This transaction comes two years after the departmental council terminated its contract with Axione, a Bouygues subsidiary. At the time, an investment of €223 million was planned: €63 million financed by local authorities and €70 million provided by the region, the State and the European Union.

In 2017, elected officials from the Maurienne had entrusted Fibréa with the installation of its own fibre optic network. The departmental council then accused the latter of having unbalanced the public service delegation concluded with Axione. Mauritian elected officials said they had had enough of waiting for the department to deploy the fibre. They had therefore taken charge of it themselves to ensure the development of their territory.

A few months after the termination, the government proposed to local authorities to deploy AMELs to accelerate the installation of optical fibre in rural areas. A system enabling departmental councils to have the deployment financed from operators' own funds.

The Savoie department has therefore chosen this framework to deploy its fibre optic network in rural areas. And it is Savoie Connectée that finances the cost of the works, relying on its shareholders (Covage with 70% of the capital and Orange with 30%). Within four years, 255,000 sockets will have to be connected in 243 municipalities in Savoie. Almost the entire territory of the department will then be connected to very high bandwidth.

The operation is not new for Covage since the operator operates the DSP for optical fibre in 246 municipalities in Haute-Savoie. And he was also awarded an AMEL in Saône-et-Loire.

This eliminates the need for the department to worry about funding and shortens the deployment time. The maturity date is 2023 instead of 2026 in the terminated contract with Axione. However, the departmental council will have paid 6.8 million euros in compensation to Axione to free itself.

A year ago, Covage acquired Fibréa, the company that has wired nearly 500 kilometres of optical fibre in the Maurienne. Therefore, the repetition of the scenario from the previous contract is ruled out. "This avoids any subsequent conflict," agrees Hervé Gaymard, president of the Savoie County Council.

 Read the article

Source : La Tribune

Since the Internet is considered as a space, is it possible to provide a complete graphic representation, to draw one or more maps? Artists and experts have been trying for a long time.

To find an answer, the first tool was Google. The results in French mainly show Internet maps seen from the outside. For those in English, we get some visualizations of the weight of sites in number of connections.

Boris Beaude, a geographer and researcher at the University of Lausanne, explains that mapping the Internet "makes it possible to better understand the architecture[of the Internet and its sub-areas, such as websites], the actors who produce them, the reality of what is happening there and the underlying power issues".

This is not a fundamentally recent idea, since he himself studied the subject at the end of the 1990s. He noted that "the continuation of TCP/IP protocols, or even packet switching alone, is based on essentially spatial considerations: how to make communication as efficient as possible on heterogeneous and vulnerable networks".

Beyond the researchers, some artists have also looked at the issue. An American designer, Chris Harrison, represented the journeys that data makes around the world. He explains his gesture quite simply: "Humans have always tended to represent graphically the spaces in which they evolve. Now the Internet, we walk around, it moves, there are millions, trillions of tools connected to each other".

Louise Drulhe was looking to represent the Internet for her diploma from the Ecole des Arts-Déco. She then faced two difficulties. The first is that the space in which we operate online is constantly changing. She explained to Numerama "it's terrible to want to represent cyberspace, because the speed at which it changes has nothing to do with geography. When I started working on my first maps in 2013, we were barely talking about the Chinese Internet, for example".

The second is the very low number of representations of the online space. "In 2013, I was working on a thesis on Internet space, but I quickly realized the lack of information on online space as I understood it. There were some old maps from the 90s. But it had nothing to do with the current cyberspace," says the young woman.

According to Boris Beaude, the lack of representations is explained by the fact that it is the "powerful imaginaries, which suggest that all the spatial vocabulary associated with the Internet is metaphorical". He attributes this mixture to "a materialistic conception of space". The territory and "the materiality of the ground on which our feet rest" would too often be confused with the idea of spatiality.

So what measures for an online space? For Boris Beaude, "distance is thought in terms of gaps, contact or interaction. This allows us to think about the relationship and how beings (and more and more objects) are connected and interact". And to show the architectures that facilitate these contacts.

Louise Drulhe has opted for a multiplicity of hypotheses that suggest a different aspect of the Internet. But all of them meet the same need: "representing the Internet helps us to understand the (geo-)political issues at stake".
The artist does not stop there since his last hypothesis is that of an Internet architecture that would be specific to everyone. It may not be possible to map the Internet for the simple reason that no road is used exactly twice in the same way.

Boris Beaude responds to this by opposing personal navigation and the power of the world's largest networks: "Google and Facebook are the two players with the greatest visibility on contemporary digital spatialities". Paradoxically, therefore, "while it is difficult to map the Internet because the relationships that constitute its space are so disproportionate and reticular, it has never been so simple for those who have mastered it to map the spatiality of individuals".

And to conclude that "politicians will have to ask themselves what they are trying to control: things[in this case, data, editor's note] or the movement of things and the architecture that makes this movement possible". A cross-border and disproportionate space par excellence.

 Read the article

Source : Numerama

The Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques et des Postes is publishing the 2019 edition of its Internet Health Check in France. Submitted to Parliament, this report highlights the actions taken to ensure the openness of the Internet, looks at potential threats and presents the regulator's action to contain them.

The balance sheet in brief!

1- Quality of services
The service comparators are so inhomogeneous today that the Arcep wanted to improve them by setting up an API in the boxes containing the "access identity card" of each terminal. This will allow a much better diagnosis with reliable information on the parameters of each measurement. This API is complemented by a code of conduct. Gradually adopted by the measurement stakeholders, it makes it possible to improve the reliability, transparency and readability of the results.

2- Data interconnection
In constant evolution, this ecosystem can be the site of occasional tensions. The Arcep is vigilant in monitoring the market. It publishes data from its information collection in its annual barometer of interconnection in France. When the situation requires it, the Arcep can also become a "gendarme" and settle disputes between the actors.

3- Transition to IPV6
The end of IPV4 is now scheduled for June 2020. Operators' planned deployments of IPV6 may not be able to address the shortage of IPV4 addresses. Therefore, Arcep will organise the first working meeting of the "IPV6 Task Force" in the second half of 2019. These meetings will aim to accelerate the transition to IPV6 in France by sharing the experiences of the different actors and defining actions to be implemented

4- Net neutrality
The guidelines for the implementation of the principle of net neutrality by national regulators have generally proved their worth. The country has a positive balance sheet. However, Arcep ensures that access providers continue to adjust their practices in line with the European regulatory framework.

5- Opening of terminals
If in terms of net neutrality, the Arcep can exercise its protection on networks there is a weak link: terminals. Adopted at the beginning of this year, the European "Platform-to-business" regulation brings more transparency on the practices of online platforms towards their corporate clients. However, this regulation does not yet ensure the neutrality of terminals. Arcep made 11 concrete proposals to ensure an "end-to-end" open Internet in a report on the issue in February 2018.

 Read the report

Source : Arcep

Since 1995, Mary Meeker, an investor in the powerful venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has been reporting on major Internet trends. An analysis of the global use of the Web and its services: e-commerce, social networks, video games, podcasts, various connected objects, etc.

The 2019 edition has reached a new milestone! According to the document, more than half (51%) of the world's population now has access to the Internet, or more than 3.8 billion people worldwide. Whereas in 2009, just ten years ago, this rate was only 24%. China, India and the United States are the three countries with the most Internet users in the world.

Nevertheless, global growth is slowing every year. Between 2018 and 2019, it was 6%. Indeed, for Mary Meeker, it is more difficult to connect new people as the number of Internet users increases.

The report details, for example, that Americans spend 6.3 hours online per day. An average increase of 7% compared to last year. They now spend more time in front of their mobile phone (almost 4 hours a day on average) than in front of their television (about 3h30).

The document also includes the 30 most highly valued new technology companies in the world. Of these, 18 are American, 7 are Chinese and only 1 European (Spotify, the Swedish music application, is ranked 30th in this ranking).

 

 Read the article

Source : Le Figaro

Fibre optic cables, data transfer and storage stations and power plants form a vast network of physical infrastructure that underpins Internet connections.

Recent research shows that a large part of this infrastructure will be affected by rising water levels in the coming years. After mapping the Internet infrastructure in the United States, scientists overlayed it with maps showing sea level rise. Their results: in 15 years, thousands of kilometres of fibre optic cables and hundreds of other critical infrastructures are at risk of being overwhelmed by the waves. Still according to the researchers, the extra few centimetres of water could plunge nearly 20% of the U.S. Internet infrastructure underwater.

"Much of the existing infrastructure is located just off the coast, so it doesn't take much more than a few centimetres of water to get it underwater", says Paul Barford, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-author of the study: The network was deployed 20 years ago, when no one thought that sea levels could rise.

The physical structure of the Internet network has been installed somewhat randomly and often opportunistically along power lines, roads or other major infrastructure in recent decades when demand has exploded.

While scientists, designers and companies have long been aware of the risks posed by rising water levels on roads, subways and power lines, no one has so far been interested in the consequences that this could have on the physical Internet network.

"When you consider how interconnected everything is today, protecting the Internet is crucial", says Mikhail Chester, director of the Resilient Infrastructure Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Even the smallest technical incidents can have disastrous consequences. He continues "this new study reinforces the idea that we must be aware of the state of these systems, because it will take a long time to update them".

Rich Sorkin, co-founder of Jupiter Intelligence, a company that models climate-induced risks, says, "We live in a world designed for an environment that no longer exists". And concludes by saying that "accepting the reality of our future is essential - and this type of study only underlines the speed with which we will have to adapt".

 Read the article

Source : National Geographic

Telecommunications operators are concerned about the impact of this heat wave on their infrastructure networks. Just as heat waves can affect smartphones, tablets and other laptops, the infrastructure underlying telecommunications networks can also suffer in hot weather. Indeed, the electricity network, which is heavily solicited and subjected to high temperatures, can fail this equipment. They can then stop working in a punctual and localized way.

But the real "vulnerability" of these infrastructures is concentrated on two specific network points: relay antennas and data centres. Depending on the equipment considered, the temperature threshold not to be exceeded is around 50 degrees Celsius.

Relay antennas are particularly exposed to high temperatures since they are located at high altitudes, particularly on the roofs of buildings in urban areas. The risk of their electronic components going into standby mode in the event of overheating is therefore not negligible.

Depending on their air conditioning systems and exhaust air devices, data centres risk overheating if they fail to operate.

All the attention of the operators is focused on not exceeding 50 degrees Celsius. "We have set up a weather monitoring system to enable us to prevent in the event of a natural disaster and to analyse the good performance of each point of our network [...] Over the past few months, we have focused our preventive campaigns on monitoring the maintenance and air conditioning equipment in our infrastructures for greater safety", explains Hubert Bricout, Bouygues Telecom's Regional Director for Ile de France and the North-East.

In the event of a site failure, rapid response teams will be dispatched. To support the systems already in place, mobile air conditioning equipment has also been reserved in the event of overheating of a network point.

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

After a first meeting on January 29th, the second is planned for July 2th at Challes-les-Eaux.

Theme: HSBB in the Alps

Departments concerned: 38; 73; 74 and 01 (South Jura) with a focus on tourist areas (ski resorts, hotels).

Observation:

Broadband needs are exploding with the advent of "Over The Top" (OTT) networks and the strong growth of services such as Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, OCS, MyCanal...
Initial observations between the 2017 and 2018 Christmas holidays show a +60% increase in the throughput consumed in hotels and hotel residences. For these establishments, connections in Mbs will soon no longer be enough and requests in 1, 2, 3 or even 4 Gbs are beginning to arrive.

Work in synergy:

From now on, it is essential for telecom and Internet operators to organise themselves in order to be able to respond effectively to this need, which was yesterday emerging and is now very present.
This is the objective of yALPA! We must encourage the actors of Very High Speed deployment to meet and get to know each other better in order to consider future collaborations rather than planning, each on its own, investments in the same places.
The local DSPs (38, 73 and 74) do part of the work, but simply changing departments is complicated. Let us bet that by exchanging informally, a collective intelligence will make it possible to accelerate the arrival of really Very High Speed offers in the Alps (resorts but also valleys and plains).
It is understood that the results of these initial yALPA discussions will not have immediate effect. However, in the more or less short term, the problems currently encountered in terms of HSBB in tourist areas can be solved.

Morning program (9:00 am - 12:00 pm):

• welcome, coffee, pastries
• round table discussion: presentation of each participant
• Transalpinet presentation (study by Rezopole)
• room for improvement:
  • common carto tool.... Should we start where we wait another 10 years?
  • new backbone offers from external operators
  • territories without POPs

Registrations:

from Samuel Triolet (director of Rezopole) : striolet (from) rezopole.net

Practical informations:

See you on July 2nd at 9:00 am at Hub des Alpes (salle Altitude 193) - 37 avenue des Massettes, 73190 Challes-les-Eaux.

The visionary trend of the 2010's massively positioned data center surfaces in Hyperscale DCs, ideally located in areas close to the Arctic Circle. At the time, only the issue of systemic risks seemed to be able to slow down this development.

But today the reality is no longer the same. Indeed, a continuum model has replaced this vision of hyper-concentration of surfaces, which can be summarized in 6 levels.

• Hyperscal Data Centers are still attractive for mass storage and non-transactional processing. Their objective is to bring the best production cost, by positioning a large area pooling where land and energy are cheap.
• Hub Data Centers are mainly located in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris in Europe. These areas concentrate large data centers and benefit from fast interconnection between them. These areas over-attract operators because interconnection takes precedence over the potential of the local market.
• Regional Data Centers, located in all other major cities, address this time the local economic potential, with cloud players for companies or hosting providers acting as first level access to DC Hubs.
• "5G" Data Centers will be located as close as possible to urban areas in order to meet the need for latency required by population uses.
• Micro-Data Centers will bring low latency during a high concentration of use (a stadium, a factory).
• Pico-Data Centers will address the use of the individual, thus bringing a minimum latency and especially a management of private data.

Despite different sizes, the first three levels of these data centers follow the same design principles. Except that Hyperscal Data Centers are often single users. It is therefore possible for them to position more restrictive design choices than in shared apartments.

The last three levels belong to the Edge universe and aim to position the DC space as close as possible to usage. However, these levels have different design principles.

The installation will be done in an industrial way for micro and pico-Data Centers. The main issues will be more related to physical protection or maintenance/operation of these infrastructures.

The "5G" Data Centers bring a new deal. Indeed, they have all the characteristics of a "small" DC but must be implemented in complex environments. They are subject to numerous safety and standards compliance constraints being located in urban areas. However, the greatest complexity lies in the lack of space to deploy the technical packages.

 Read the article

Source : Global Security Mag

In the fight expected from operators for the acquisition of frequencies dedicated to 5G, the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications and Posts is preparing to open a new front. Indeed, last weekend Arcep reported that it had set 31 December 2022 as the maximum deadline for frequencies in the 1.5 GHz band, known as the L band.

"Today used for point-to-point links for the collection of mobile networks open to the public and professionals and by the Ministries of the Interior and Defence", its release by the end of 2022 should allow mobile operators to have more frequencies to deploy future 5G and Very High Speed networks.

"The 1.5 GHz band has been subject to European harmonisation since 2015. It has 90 MHz that can be used to meet downlink requirements. The propagation properties of these frequencies are particularly interesting for the coverage of the territory and the coverage inside buildings", said the Telecom Constable.

However, there could be many pitfalls.... Indeed, the current tenants of the band have already sent comments to the Authority during the consultation period: a disputed reallocation plan, potentially huge migration costs.

However, the decision is widely welcomed by operators who are pleased to be able to obtain new frequency blocks for the development of their future 5G networks. While the latter accept that this L-band will only be operated "for additional exclusively downlink links (in SDL mode)", it will still improve the throughput and capacity of downlinks below 1 GHz.

The spectrum available for the deployment of future 5G networks is relatively limited, so this release should be of significant interest to operators, particularly in the event of coupling with other frequency bands.

Operators are also unanimous that the entire band will not be able to operate effectively due to unfavourable neighbourhood conditions. On its adjacent bands, there are "space exploration satellite services, radio astronomy and space research services", which do not allow the use of both ends of the 1.5 GHz band. Orange has only one 85 MHz band that can be used, while Free goes further with only one 40 MHz band. For the operator, this block of frequencies constitutes "the only sub-band with a mature ecosystem today" and could even be the subject of an "immediate allocation scenario" via a reallocation of 10 MHz bands to each operator.

A scenario that will not be retained by Arcep but which illustrates the operators' appetite for this band, to the great displeasure of its current tenants. They should be required to be housed elsewhere, particularly in the 6 GHz band.

Most of these actors are industrialists and express doubts about the Arcep's decision and its implications for their own activities and finances. Questions about the economic viability of this migration on the part of EDF, for example, for whom "the estimated time required to replace 1.4 GHz links, without significantly impacting the company's performance, is around ten years".

Especially since the timetable imposed by the telecoms police officer is already causing the actors concerned to shudder. For Enedis, the deadlines proposed jointly by Brussels and Arcep "do not take into account this specific framework for the use of the 1.4 GHz band by Enedis, nor the current limits or the constraints imposed by the alternative solutions". And even one of the alternatives proposed by Arcep would involve the reconstruction of a large part of its network.

The public authorities also seem to be waiting, as does the Ministry of Transport, for whom the timetable mentioned cannot be kept. Hence the Ministry's request to maintain the current network "at least until 2027, knowing that if studies show that it is possible to have the future network available earlier, the network can be shut down before that date".

Current tenants propose other solutions such as the establishment of a "cohabitation context". This would allow L-band frequencies to be allocated to operators in dense urban areas and other actors to "continue to use Radio Beams in rural areas, which are less likely to be targeted by the need for SDL".

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

With the objective of 3 million eligible fibre sockets by the end of the year in these Public Initiative Networks located mainly in rural areas, the operator announced on Tuesday the finalisation of an agreement for the marketing of its fibre offers on the RIPs allocated to Covage.

At the end of this agreement, Orange will be able to roll out its services on certain FTTH networks in Covage: Calvados, Essonne, Haute-Savoie, Hérault, Seine-et-Marne, Somme, Lille and the Dunkirk Urban Community.

Last March, Orange's management claimed a 30% market share in RIPs but is now aiming to take the lion's share on these networks. This approach will necessarily involve partnerships with infrastructure operators specialising in the deployment of these RIPs, such as Covage. The company operates 46 public or private networks and currently covers 2.3 million sockets.

Orange had 350,000 own catches this winter in sparsely populated areas. To reach its target of 900,000 own-access catches in RIPs by the end of the year, the future will therefore depend on partnerships. The incumbent operator wishes to increase the share of catches purchased from partners in these areas to 2 million by the end of 2019. The issue is well understood by Orange, as evidenced by the conclusion of this partnership with Covage.

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

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%.

 Read the article

Source : Le Monde Informatique

Central data centres are connectivity relays, real marketplaces. They bring together almost all the players in the digital value chain. The challenge is therefore to know how to identify them, to be able to recognize them in order to open a PoP (Point Of Presence).

There are three types of data centers: hyperscale, edge and core. Usually organized in a loop, each one has a very specific role in the organization of an IT architecture. It is very common to see players hosting their application in a hyperscale, deploying their IT in an edge and ensuring an optimized network path by creating peering links in a core.

Central DCs have a very specific importance and are therefore becoming real performance levers that determine many infrastructure choices.

But how to identify them? The easiest way is to consult the referencing databases of network players such as PEERING DB and to search for the data centre with the largest number of members. If they have differentiating elements such as the number of members and network ports available, cushioned network equipment or an extremely wide choice of actors, it is in peering that their main attraction lies.

In a central DC everyone is on an equal footing: everyone shares data via a physical connection from point A to point B. Regardless of the nature of the interconnection: peering, direct interconnection or transit, I know that everyone is within cable distance of my rack. I will therefore benefit from clustering effect. And the effect is virtuous, the more actors a central data center brings together, the more interconnection there is, the cheaper it is.

Peering is a strong trend that is becoming essential. A study published by Arcep in 2017 related to traffic measurement among ISPs in France indicates that the data exchanged on the territory are distributed in this way: 50% for transit, 46% for private peering and 4% for public peering. The same ratios were observed by the Journal du Net in one of its central data centers. The share of transit decreases very significantly between 2017 and 2018. Public peering is growing and private peering is increasing very significantly. Three main consequences follow from this dynamic: content players will get as close as possible to end customers by bypassing hosters and forwarders in the short and medium term, freight forwarders seeing their business decline will try to recover the margins they are losing on the CDN link, and finally ISPs will try to get closer to the end customer themselves by including content in their offers.

Several good practices deserve to be shared to move to live traffic. First, start with the application. Before choosing where to host your IT, it is necessary to consider the nature of the IT. Depending on the answer, you have to organize your architecture. The challenge is to create network accesses that facilitate the user experience and reduce costs. Depending on their priority and the level of security required, the applications will therefore be divided between core, edge and hyperscale.

Secondly, how to bring the user closer to these applications? The alternative is quite simple: either use peering or direct interconnections, or put the application locally in its data center and set up a private network link to the end user.

The meaning of the story seems to be moving towards a transformation of the IT agent into a buyer. IT managers are now able to organize these outsourcing choices in these three types of data centers. Business choices therefore become business choices.

 Read the article

Source : Journal du Net

The Calls for Demonstrations of Local Commitments announced in December 2017 at the National Territories Conference were then presented by the authorities as "the possibility for local authorities to benefit from the deployment or extension of very high speed networks financed by operators' own funds".

Three of these AMELs had received a favourable opinion from the Arcep last March and an authorisation from the government. The first of these systems was finally the subject of an agreement signed on Monday between the operator Altitude Infrastructure and the Conseil départemental de la Côte-d'Or. By the end of 2022, the end of this agreement, 57,000 households will be connected by Altitude Infrastructure, including approximately 8,000 before the end of 2020. This AMEL will complement the Public Initiative Network set up by the Department to obtain 100% FttH coverage in the Côte d'Or.

Two other Calls for Demonstration of Local Commitments, in Lot-et-Garonne and in three departments of the South-PACA region operated by Orange and SFR, should follow the same path as the government announced last March. This system should "provide all French people in metropolitan France and overseas with a minimum speed of 30Mbits/s by the end of 2022" in accordance with the objectives set out in the France THD plan.

 Read the article

Source : ZDNet

As part of the 5G frequency allocation, scheduled for autumn 2019, the Arcep is continuing its work to free the 3.5 GHz band. This band has been made available to digital development players to deploy Very High Speed Radio networks. In order to identify the departments in which THD radio networks are still being considered, the Arcep is launching a public consultation.

To meet the territories' HSBB connectivity needs in the context of the France Very High Speed Plan, Arcep opened a window in December 2017 for the deployment of HSBB radio networks in the 3.4 - 3.8 GHz band. In parallel, the government and the Arcep have established to allocate new 5G frequencies in order to be launched in 2020. The Regulatory Authority must therefore allocate the 3.4 - 3.8 GHz band for the commercial deployment of 5G mobile networks.

At the end of 2018, Arcep planned to submit the applications to the THD radio counter before the end of March 2019. However, in order to free as many frequencies as possible for 5G while maintaining frequencies for THD radio networks, Arcep plans to maintain the counter for departments in which advanced projects exist. The opening of the window for these projects could be extended beyond 31 December 2019.

It is now up to Arcep to determine the territories where THD radio networks should be deployed. The purpose of this public consultation is to enable the stakeholders concerned to inform the Regulatory Authority of their project before 30 June 2019.

At the end of this consultation and taking into account the responses, the Arcep will modify the frequency allocation modalities for radio HSBB in order to integrate these calendar changes.

 Read the press release

Source : Arcep