Orange unveils this Monday the plan to close its copper telecom network which provided telephone and ADSL connection to many users. The operator wants to accelerate the deployment of fiber. A heavy, expensive and debatable program that will take several years.
Source: Salvatore – Flickr
Look to the future. This is the message that Orange wants to send as the telecom giant announces on Monday its plan to close its historic copper network, as revealed by The world.
After more than 100 years of meshing the French territory to bring it closer vocally, then digitally, copper will bow out and give way to fiber optics for telephone calls and especially the Internet network. Orange is counting on eight years to complete its monumental project.
Two networks, an economic heresy”
By the end of 2030, more than 30 million households should therefore be connected to fiber optics, thus definitively abandoning the ADSL in force since the end of the 1990s. With the sharp increase in traffic, copper was no longer able to support the heavy traffic and its operating cost estimated at 500 million euros per year is far too expensive for a network that is too fragile and too slow, whereas fiber optics multiplies the speeds of use by 100 or even 1000 in places. A way also to silence critics about the poor quality of the ADSL network pointed out in particular by Arcep, the telecoms policeman.
Exit ADSL, hello optical fiber for all. But on paper, it’s easier said than done. Because it is more than a million kilometers of cables to replace to stop coexisting two networks on the territory. ” An economic heresy, confides Michel Combot, Director General of the French Federation of Telecoms toWorld, in addition to the complexity of managing and interconnecting two technologies in parallel.
If now Orange materializes its plan to close the copper network, the idea is not recent and the program should have already been put in place. The closure was announced in 2019 by Stéphane Richard, recalls the daily. The current boss of the company, replaced at the beginning of April next by Christel Heydemann, had made it the heart of his Engage 2025 strategy. But the Covid has been there in the meantime, with the slowdown in his projects and the strong demand for the installation of individuals confined or working remotely.
The competition is booming
With this roadmap, it is also that of the deployment of optical fiber which is written to accelerate. The Orange program is planned by zone and in stages over several years. Subscribers will be notified in advance of the end of the commercialization of the copper network, whether for their simple telephone line and/or their ADSL subscription, and of the technical shutdown of the network.
The telecom company promised that no subscriber would be left with nothing. But, as pointed outThe world, Orange has also committed to providing universal service until 2023 and this goes through copper, which has the advantage of continuing to operate even in the event of a power cut. With fiber optics, this is no longer the case. What will happen beyond 2023?
There remains the question of competition. While Orange has been responsible for setting up and maintaining the copper network for decades, the company also invoices everything to other operators who want to have access to it via unbundling in the form of rental. This brings in the trifle of nearly two billion euros each year, despite a declining figure with the deployment of fiber. For the competition cited by the newspaper, it is also the fear of seeing Orange try to regain market share with the replacement of ADSL by fiber with the users concerned when they were undoubtedly taking advantage of more attractive offers. with other operators.
Who will pay ?
The question of financing the dismantling of the network must also be studied. Orange does this for all operators, but cannot bear the cost alone. Arcep then considered various solutions, including an upward revision of the unbundling tariff paid by competing operators. But the latter argue that they did not ask for the closure of the copper network and that the latter belongs to Orange, not to the operators. A subject that will inevitably be debated for a long time…
The program is in any case already launched and competing operators do not want to be surprised. Bouygues Telecom has thus begun to warn its subscribers of the coming end of ADSL Internet offers… anticipating the switch to one of its fiber offers.
Closing of the copper network begins. Here is the message that affected Bouygues Telecom subscribers receive ? pic.twitter.com/hCigLWAHh3
— Theo Denoyelle (@theo_denoyelle) February 4, 2022
If the project looks expensive and heavy, abandoning the copper network will nevertheless have some advantages for Orange: reselling tons of equipment, lower environmental bill with fiber which consumes three times less than ADSL, elimination of thousands of telephone exchanges . Savings in sight also for Christel Heydemann and her start of term at the head of the French number one in telecoms.
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