In westerns, you need a sheriff to keep order. Also in telecoms. Exhausted by the incessant fiber optic cuts in his town, Jean-Pierre Blazy (Socialist Party), the mayor of Gonesse (Val-d’Oise), ended up calling his municipal police officers to the rescue. Their mission: to verbalize the technicians who would not have filled in a declaration of intervention on the telecom equipment of the city. The city councilor knows that this document, created by municipal decree in March 2021, suffers from a questionable legal value. But the mayor of this town of 26,000 inhabitants no longer knew how to restore the situation and calm the anger of his constituents, “ready to go to court”according to Nicole Top, treasurer of the Association for the Defense of Fiber Optic Users in Gonesse.
This city of Val-d’Oise is not the only town in France embarked on the fiber galley. Survilliers and Montigny-lès-Cormeilles in the Val-d’Oise, Saint-Priest, in the Rhône, Gordes, in the Vaucluse, among others, voted for the same decree. “The fiber causes very strong tensions”, said with a sigh Grégoire de Lasteyrie (Les Républicains), mayor of Palaiseau (Essonne) and president of the Paris-Saclay conurbation. The joint union in charge of fiber in this department, Sipperec, launched on April 4, with 27 other local authorities, a warning to operators, in which they say they are ready to “take any action” for “preserve the integrity of the common good that constitute the new fiber optic networks of [leurs] territories”.
Saclay may be the epicenter of the French quantum industry and host the Ecole polytechnique, but the quality of its fiber is anything but high-tech. Some of its inhabitants have not had the Internet for a hundred and fifty days. ” In October [2021]I brought together commercial and infrastructure operators, Sipperec, the telecoms regulator… Everyone passed the buck”, says Mr. de Lasteyrie. Alas, he opted for the hard way: “With each degradation, we will file a complaint against X.” The first files are being compiled.
“Some take risks”
To understand the reasons for the nightmare that strikes, according to estimates, from 15% to 20% of fiber subscribers in France, it suffices to open the doors of a concentration point, the street cabinet in which are connected neighborhood fiber subscribers. Direction Osny (Val-d’Oise), on a Monday morning in April. Simon and Aurélien, two technicians from Orange, who wished to remain anonymous, are working on a “noodle dish”, an indigestible knot of fibers. Unraveling this pile of multicolored spaghetti will take them five days. However, they had already intervened in the same place in December 2021. Five months and the hundreds of visits by subcontractors from commercial operators (Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues Telecom) were enough to put the mess back in the cupboard.
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