What are the main challenges for the global wholesale market at present?
To start with, use of traditional voice and messaging services is continuing to decline. The challenge here is to manage and preserve profitability in these lines of business, requiring strong transformation to our operating models and the provision of more value to users.
Secondly, there’s a huge demand for connectivity. When Covid hit, it triggered a massive move to the cloud that changed requirements for reliability and diversity. We’re now experiencing a second wave, with a huge need for more capacity on both the subsea and terrestrial sides to deliver a quality network for AI today and tomorrow.
The third consideration is the challenge of softwarisation and digitisation of our networks. As part of this, we need to see increased cooperation within the industry to make sure we continue interoperating in an effective and more automated way.
How is Orange Wholesale International approaching the market to meet such challenges and make the most of growing opportunities?
We structure our priorities around a number of strategic pillars. One involves the transformation of our voice and messaging businesses to deliver more value to customers. For example, we’ve worked a lot on bringing HD quality to voice interconnections internationally. We’ve also been fighting both as Orange and across the industry against fraud in voice and messaging.
Meanwhile, we’re surfing on the wave of connectivity by building new submarine and terrestrial cables, as well as bringing new services to market. For example, we’ve developed a content delivery network [CDN], and are creating a number of offerings around network-as-a-service that leverage our network transformation and telco cloud.
Furthermore, at the Mobile World Congress, we presented our new 5G core network-as-a-service [5G CNaaS] offer. This unique proposition consists of a fully as-a-service core network hosted in our telco cloud that enables MNOs and MVNOs to provide 5G standalone with very limited investment, a rapid rollout time and Orange’s expertise in managing the service.
With the new mobile paradigm around the likes of 5G, IoT and eSIMs, we see a lot of opportunities to develop ‘telco-in-a-box’ propositions, bringing together different ‘bricks’ of solutions that enable players to easily launch a new mobile network on the market. We believe that in the future, mobile players will not only have a single core network, but also other dedicated networks to address specific customers or use cases.
How do you see AI affecting the buildout of cables worldwide to meet the related surge in capacity demands?
Clearly, the submarine and terrestrial cables we’re building now are much higher-capacity than previously. However, the driver for deploying more cables today is not only capacity, but also diversity to provide redundancy and make infrastructure secure. In mature markets like the US and Europe in particular, all hyperscalers and cloud providers have strong diversity requirements, so we’re focusing on finding and delivering new, interesting, latency-driven routes for them.
But even in less mature regions like Africa, where cloud implementations are not so dense today, the demand for capacity is really increasing and dark fibre is becoming part of the conversation. There, we foresee the creation of high-capacity and cross-border terrestrial backbones, which are not that widespread when it comes to single end-to-end networks in the region today.
In West Africa, we have our Djoliba network, which connects eight countries together via a mix of terrestrial fibre and submarine cables, and which we will expand further.
What are the company’s plans to further develop infrastructure globally?
We have three areas of infrastructure in which we invest. The first is submarine cables, for which we’ll continue to focus on some critical routes for us, including Europe to Asia, and the connectivity of our French territories in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean.
We also see continuing opportunities in Europe because France is a major landing country for submarine cables coming from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas. In addition, we have our Orange Marine ship fleet, which lays and repairs cables. It’s therefore clear that we will continue to have a strong presence in the subsea industry.
The second area is terrestrial fibre. In Europe, we have a strategy to deploy this to support hyperscalers via unique and diverse routes.
The other area is satellite, which we’re embedding more and more as an extension of our terrestrial networks. We now have a complete solution of low-, medium- and geostationary-Earth-orbit options in our connectivity portfolio for carrier and enterprise customers. We partner with all significant satellite players and provide ground stations for them too, such as with our recent signing of a multi-year deal with Telesat at a teleport in France.
What effects are the rapid developments in the industry having on the security environment and how is Orange Wholesale tackling these challenges?
Security concerns are growing in all areas of communications businesses and increasing even further with the advent of AI. As attacks become more and more sophisticated, in turn we need to develop more sophisticated tools to fight against them.
Of course, one of the answers is to bring more diversity and resiliency to our networks, but we also need to work on specific solutions. At Orange, our Cyberdefense business unit is a European leader in protecting against cyberthreats, so we work a lot with that team to build new security features for our network and customers.
Furthermore, we gear services towards countries’ and regions’ data sovereignty principles to answer the growing concerns of carriers, other companies and governments today about where data is located and who has access to it. Our CDN offer, for example, is operated by Orange, relies on European technologies, and adheres to the region’s stringent privacy and security legislation.
You were elected chairman of the Global Leaders’ Forum [GLF] late last year. What do you see as the most important things you need to address in that role and as an industry?
At GLF board level, we’re focusing on making sure we identify the levers we can pull to bring collective benefits to the whole industry and customers. We look to come up with concrete actions and deliverables, seeing where cooperation is required to speed the pace of transformation in the race to support the development of the digital world.
One thing that remains critical is to preserve interoperability between networks at the same time as each of us is transforming our own models. We need to think about how we’re creating platforms that enable carriers to innovate and develop new services that bring more value to customers.
The key here is to make sure we provide some general building blocks for these roadmaps, helped by the fact that there are also other industry bodies we work with like the MEF and TM Forum creating elements we can use like standard APIs and open digital architecture frameworks.
A further aim that remains key for us is to continue to be trusted partners for our customers by fighting fraud, improving the security of networks and building a sustainable industry.
What changes are needed within wholesale organisations to support the transitions in the industry?
There’s a significant skills and talent challenge that we need to meet to support this transformation. When you talk about the move from traditional voice and messaging towards new 5G, cloud and other connectivity services, it requires a reskilling of people from one domain to another, adding new IT and development skills across activities.
That’s a big change for us as carriers, with the challenge of both keeping existing talent to retain the old carrier skills in our teams, and bringing in new talent to support new skills and be more consistent with the potential structure of tomorrow’s industry.
At Orange Group, we benefit from having a large volume of employees that we can leverage in reskilling and upskilling, numbering well over 100,000 worldwide. We’re investing a lot and building scalable programmes to support this process, as well as doing a lot around data, AI and cybersecurity to meet the needs of the future.
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