"As you all know, 2020 will have been a pivotal year as we have validated the merger of Rezopole with France-IX, and we are now France-IX Lyon.

This choice has been carefully considered throughout the year 2020, with you, our members, the Rezopole team and the Board of Directors.

This choice will allow us to pursue and develop our know-how around the Internet network, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and throughout France.

I would like to thank in this last "Annual Review" all those who believed in the Rezopole project and supported us despite the difficulties:

• Thanks to the founders of Rezopole, all pioneers and passionate about the Internet!
• Thanks to the members of the office (volunteers) who spent many evenings all these years to help us grow,
• Thank you to the team in Lyon, who kept Rezopole running 24/7,
• Thanks to the public authorities for their indispensable financial support,
• And thank you to all of you, our members, for whom we have created Rezopole in order to develop the industry.

See you at a future event."

Philippe Duby,

Former President of Rezopole

Vice President of France-IX

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 "This text is written in Covid-19 confinement, which shows the enormous impact of the Internet in our daily lives, and its importance in helping us to continue our activities in telework or tele-education.

Exchange nodes such as those managed by Rezopole have a very important role in these periods of increased traffic. The first 100 Gbps client was set up on LyonIX at the very beginning of the Covid-19 crisis.

Looking back at 2019, the following highlights, detailed in the report, are worth noting:

• Migration of the core network to a new, latest-generation 100 Gb infrastructure,
• Securing links (redundancy) and BGP routing,
• Opening of new POPs related to their potential for new members,
• Reinforcement of the interconnection with the Swiss IXPs (CIXP & SwissIX),
• Survey on Telecom needs in the Alps with local players,
• First 24/7 BGP outsourcing services.

The IXP market is transforming towards increased service provision, and Rezopole will continue its transformation in 2020 to adapt to this evolution.

Thank you for your interest in our activities, I hope you enjoy reading. »

Philippe Duby,

President of the Rezopole Association

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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

This partnership between Orange and Free - known as the "passive mutualisation agreement" - will last at least five years and aims to share and build together mobile phone masts in rural areas. In other words, the operators would share masts and their operating costs, but each would graft its own radio equipment onto them. The territories concerned are located in a so-called "priority deployment zone" (or PDZ), i.e. rural territories where mobile coverage is poor or insufficient.

In general, this type of agreement allows operators to significantly lower their costs in order to cover sparsely populated and therefore unprofitable areas. However, the stakes here are a little different for Orange.

Today, any operator wishing to deploy a new tower in the ZDP is faced with a "prior consultation obligation". He must warn his rivals to find out if they are interested in sharing the site. This obligation appeared in January 2018 during the New Deal in order to put an end to the "white" and "grey" zones. But at the time, this provision was unacceptable for Orange, which considered it ruined all these efforts to differentiate the ZDP.

The Arcep then reviewed its copy and proposed that if an operator made an offer to one of its rivals for passive pooling in ZDPs that it considered reasonable, then the obligation of prior consultation could be waived. Orange therefore asked the regulator to lift this obligation. Free made the same request, but only for sites that would be co-constructed with Orange.

For its part, the Arcep has launched a public consultation to gather the sector's opinion on this subject but also concerning a possible removal, for all players, of this obligation.

The question of the pooling of mobile infrastructures has become eminently strategic for operators with the arrival of 5G next summer. SFR and Bouygues Telecom have long shared a large part of their mobile infrastructures in less densely populated areas. A similar agreement between Orange and Free would enable them to be more competitive. This is particularly true for Xavier Niel's operator, which is forced to make greater efforts to improve its national coverage.

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Source : La Tribune

The partnership between the European pylon giant Telco and Bouygues Telecom is being further strengthened with the creation of a joint venture (51% owned by Cellnex and 49% by Bouygues Telecom). This new agreement concerns the deployment and operation of the operator's fibre optic network in France, with an investment of one billion euros by 2027.

This will enable Cellnex to deploy a 31 500 km network linking the roofs and telecom masts operated by Bouygues Telecom to the network of "metropolitan offices" designed to house data processing centres.

This will create "a real fibre optic ring linking several key elements of the fixed and mobile ecosystem, from fibre-connected masts to data centres and small cells", said Tobias Martinez, CEO of Cellnex.

Placed within the framework of a joint venture created between the two companies, the agreement will also cover the deployment of 90 new "metropolitan offices" by 2027.

In France since 2016 via its local branch, the group now has 130 employees responsible for managing a portfolio of 9,192 mobile sites throughout the country. This rapid growth has led Cellnex France to become a first-name customer for the other two sector champions, Hivory and TDF.

This is a good illustration of the group's strong ambitions in France and in Europe, where in 2019 - and for the first time ever - it will generate 51% of its turnover and 60% of its ebitda outside Spain.

This strategy is supported by a substantial investment by the Spanish ogre in France. 4.3 billion in France since the creation of its local branch. 4.3 billion in France since the creation of its local branch, making it Spain's leading investor and raising it to the status of a benchmark player in mobile infrastructures.

Cellnex France has also acquired 5,700 passive sites from Free through the acquisition of 70% of Iliad's TowerCo.

This strategy has paid off, since 67.5% of Cellnex's revenues are now derived from infrastructure services to mobile operators. The Spanish giant has announced that it has exceeded the one billion euro revenue mark in 2019, with 36,471 sites now operational in Europe.

The group recorded overall revenues up 15% for the year and Ebitda up 16% compared to the previous year. And with an order book that now stands at 44 billion euros, this is not likely to stop.

This performance owes a lot to an extraordinary investment by the Spanish ogre. It has injected no less than 8 billion euros into growth operations in 2019.

"2019 will undoubtedly have been a year of transformation with a prodigious leap in size and a qualitative leap in strengthening the group's position in its key markets, as well as an expansion of our geographical presence in Europe," said Franco Bernabè, the group's chairman.

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Source : ZDNet