Connecting Orange France's Customers and Devices Throughout COVID-19 | Juniper Global Summit

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0:07 -Hello, everyone. My name is Sally Bament.

0:09 I am vice president of marketing at Juniper.

0:12 Joining me today is Christian Gacon, who' s vice

0:16 president of Fixed Network Design at Orange.

0:20 Christian, let me, first of all, welcome, and thanks for joining us today.

0:25 I know that you have a significant role with Orange in France.

0:31 Maybe if we could start and have you talk a little

0:34 bit about your role and your responsibilities there.

0:39 -Hello, Sally.

0:41 I am in charge of Fixed Network' s design and engineering within Orange

0:48 France, which means that my teams are designing the fixed networks

0:53 of Orange France regarding the fixed access network,

0:58 the transport network both for optical and IP,

1:04 but also the fixed voice network.

1:09 -Christian, the pandemic shifted our world

1:13 from physical to virtual literally overnight,

1:17 and that' s put quite a significant responsibility on service providers

1:21 like Orange to not only keep us connected but also to ensure

1:27 a seamless experience, real-time or near real-time experience

1:32 for subscribers, particularly during peak traffic conditions.

1:38 Briefly, how has the pandemic impacted Orange' s business,

1:44 particularly in terms of things like

1:46 shifts in traffic patents and other things?

1:51 -In fact, as people stayed at home during

1:55 the lockdowns, the mobile traffic decreased quite a lot,

2:01 and the fixed traffic increased also quite a lot during

2:06 the daytime because many people were working remotely.

2:11 In fact, also at peak hours,

2:13 meaning during the evening because people were

2:15 not able to go anywhere, to bars, restaurants, cinema, theaters, and so on.

2:21 They had to entertain themselves at home.

2:24 We saw a huge increase of traffic especially

2:29 related to Netflix, Disney+, and so on.

2:35 We saw, also, and it was quite a surprise because

2:39 it was quite new, a huge traffic related to gaming.

2:43 Not online gaming because it is not that mature yet, but people

2:49 download new games, they download also some new releases.

2:56 When you see that, for example, for Call of Duty, you need

3:00 to download about 245 gigabytes

3:06 just to start playing.

3:08 Then it is a huge load on the network, and that' s quite new.

3:15 The pattern of traffic has increased but also changed during the year.

3:21 Also, we had some issues but not that many.

3:25 We were quite lucky.

3:26 Those issues were mostly located in the interconnections,

3:31 interconnection with other operators,

3:33 but also because our customers wanted

3:38 to access contents, for example,

3:41 in the States, so we had to upgrade our links for the Atlantic.

3:48 -You' ve named some great examples of some of the bandwidth-heavy

3:53 applications that are driving this continued network traffic growth,

3:58 like video streaming media, online gaming, et cetera.

4:01 We' re also seeing a little bit about heightened user expectations as well,

4:06 whether they are residential users or employees working from home.

4:12 How are you actually absorbing this increase in network traffic?

4:18 What areas did you focus on, particularly from a network

4:21 infrastructure perspective to support the need?

4:25 -We are used to manage an increase of about 30% of traffic year on year.

4:32 Our network was ready to take the load.

4:38 We have, also, to improve the automation,

4:41 because it would help us to adapt or react more quickly,

4:49 we need also to work on telemetry to better

4:53 understand the traffic pattern and their evolution.

4:57 We were quite surprised at the beginning that the gaming was

5:01 at such an impact and today we monitor very closely this traffic.

5:07 We also monitor very closely the new releases

5:11 and so on we discussed with gaming companies.

5:21 At first invest in infrastructure, then

5:25 automate as much as possible and at last,

5:29 you need a very good telemetry in order to understand what' s going on.

5:34 -If you could tell us the most critical core infrastructure

5:38 investments that you made, particularly, over the past year or so,

5:43 that would be interesting for us to know.

5:47 -We' re investing a lot in the access network

5:51 and we are deploying fiber all over our country.

5:55 Then you need to support the access network

5:59 to be clear- also a good transport network.

6:02 We are investing heavily in the optical transport

6:06 network, but also in our IP transport network.

6:10 Then we work with Juniper.

6:12 On the platform that we have acquired from Juniper, very easy to scale up.

6:18 -The pandemic has certainly proven that bad actors

6:22 will take advantage of a crisis for their own gain,

6:26 with the massively increased attack surface

6:30 with us all working from home and even, certainly, here in the US,

6:34 we' ve seen threats to online learning initiatives as well.

6:41 Tell me a little bit about what you' ve seen at Orange.

6:43 Have you seen an increase in security threats, and what is

6:47 Orange doing to minimize the impact of those security threats?

6:53 -To be clear, yes, we have seen an increase on security threats.

6:59 That' s for sure.

7:03 In Orange, we haven' t had any crisis related to security internally

7:09 because, you know, we have been investing in security for a long time.

7:15 We have set up, what we call, defense in depth,

7:19 meaning, that we have security features in all our equipment

7:24 including the routers provided by Juniper.

7:28 Some years ago, we were relying

7:29 on firewalls, but today it' s a bit different.

7:32 It' s more complex than that so it' s not so easy to attack Orange Network.

7:37 -Christian, we hear a lot about edge computing,

7:40 moving applications, and data closer to the users,

7:43 and there' s several tech trends and motivation supporting that.

7:47 We' ve talked about a lot of them like online gaming and gaming software

7:50 downloads, augmented virtual and multi-reality, connected cars,

7:56 connected devices, et cetera.

7:58 We' ve also seen some interesting partnerships between service providers

8:03 and some of the larger North American cloud providers, cloud hyper scalers.

8:07 I' d love to get your perspective on edge compute both from

8:11 the view of what applications and services it will enable?

8:16 -We announced the partnership with Google Cloud in July 2020

8:22 and so today we are working with them in order to figure out the new use

8:27 cases that we can manage for edge computing,

8:31 network edge computing to be clear.

8:33 It seems that the most obvious use cases are mostly related

8:39 to the enterprise market but you have

8:43 mentioned online gaming,

8:47 and I' m sure that it could be a use case addressing the consumer market.

8:52 As we have seen today, gaming is becoming more and more important

8:58 for customers, and online gaming could bring some novelties

9:04 as Netflix did for video some years ago.

9:11 Today, to be clear, we are in fact assessing the situation

9:16 partnering with Google Cloud

9:19 to assess the value of new use cases.

9:25 We are also selecting sites because

9:30 to implement network edge computing

9:33 you need to upgrade some sites in order

9:37 to be able to host the servers and all

9:42 the stuff that you need to deliver on network edge computing to ensure

9:48 that it is related to 5G deployment

9:53 and we have just started deploying 5G.

9:57 Everything I would say is arriving at the right time in order

10:04 to be ready when the industry verticals

10:08 would be also ready to use 5G.

10:12 It' s going to take time but it is normal

10:14 as it is almost a new market to address.

10:18 -Christian, thank you, again, for your time today.

10:21 We really appreciate your perspectives on Orange, and also

10:25 your perspectives on your partnership with us here at Juniper Networks.

10:30 Thank you, again, for your time.

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