It’s time to take off for Prizz Telecom. Born in October 2021 from the alliance between the civil engineering group Infra-Corp and the Quaero Capital fund, the new Ile-de-France infrastructure operator now claims a network of around 2,500 km of fiber in the inner suburbs and intends doubling its turnover in 2022, which will involve the construction of 100 km of additional optical fiber each year.
To do this, the operator is relying above all on its network based on a new 100 Gb/s MPLS backbone. The latter must offer symmetrical speeds of 10 Gb/s, as promised by the operator’s management, and currently has 12 collection points in Ile-de-France. The management of Prizz Telecom now claims a customer portfolio of more than 1,000 companies on its FTTO offers, which includes service operators such as SFR, Voip Telecom and Adeni.
“What makes us different from some competitors is that our delivery activity is internalized within our teams,” explains Denis Hauser, Ile-de-France director at Prizz Telecom. A singularity which the latter wishes to make a strength while the excess of subcontracting in the sector has led in recent years to an explosion in the number of “noodle dishes” in the fiber pooling points.
Call for applications
However, this is not without difficulty. “We are faced, like all our competitors, with major recruitment difficulties in cutting-edge professions. Recruiting shooters, we get there, but the big problem for us is on specific functions such as qualified welders, ”he says.
And to appeal to the good will of potential candidates: “we welcome all profiles without distinction of age, sex or origin, and offer to train them in our workshop in Verrières-le-Buisson, in Essonne “. On the program, three weeks of theoretical training. Then it’s time for practice, where the apprentice pullers-welders are supervised by two Prizz Telecom trainers to learn how to pull the fiber between the different rooms housing the fiber optic splitters to weld it afterwards in order to connect the various neighboring premises.
“Now that we have modernized our tool, we now want to move forward in 2022 by pursuing our objective of expanding the network beyond the inner suburbs,” explains Denis Hauser. “We are also going to work on the regular opening of new collection points on our network, in order to reduce the distance between the connected customer and the nearest POP and to reduce the risk of cuts for our customers”, notes the latter. He also specifies that he is also looking for commercial profiles to boost the activity of Prizz Telecom… with the ambition of enabling the young operator to fulfill its objectives during this first full year of existence.