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France Telecom offers to open its ducts to competitors to speed up optical fibre deployment
The Group has asked for reciprocal opening from owners of similar infrastructures
To ensure efficient and fair deployment of new optical fibre networks, France Telecom today announces its proposal to open its ducts to its competitors. The proposal has been officially made to ARCEP, the French Authority on Telecoms Regulation, as part of a public consultation ending in early October. The wholesale offer to use France Telecom ducts will be finalised by the end of 2007.
Access to existing civil engineering structures will include all information relevant to operators (maps, chamber locations, etc.), enabling them to install their own FTTH network by applying appropriate engineering rules. These rules will be designed to optimise the use of the ducts by managing the resources efficiently and avoiding saturation. ?
France Telecom has also asked ARCEP that the same principle of fair competition be applied to other owners of infrastructures needed to deploy optical fibre. This reciprocal opening will allow a fair and regulated framework to be defined based on the principle of non-discrimination between operators, while enabling the emergence of real platform competition and new user experiences.
The Group firmly believes that this step supports the European Commission and Regulatory authorities' plans to quickly enable fair infrastructure competition, for the benefit of the consumer.
Broadband already plays an important role in the lives of Europeans. Consumers benefit from an increasing range of voice, Internet and television offers. The traffic of digital information exchanged on electronic communication networks looks set to increase strongly over the years to come, with more and more images, better resolution, larger files and more exchanges of data. This trend has already been observed on the French market - one of the most innovative in the field. The deployment of FTTH technologies (fibre to the home) will be needed to respond to the huge demand for bandwidth.
This deployment will require wide and reciprocal access to civil engineering infrastructures so that all the market players can invest and make retail offers to customers under the same conditions. By infrastructure, we are not only referring to telecoms ducts, but also the various similar infrastructures such as those owned by cable operators and local authorities.
France Telecom, one of the world's leading telecommunications operators, serves more than 163 million customers in five continents as of June 30, 2007, of which two thirds are Orange customers. The Group had consolidated sales of 51.7 billion euros in 2006 and 25,9 billion euros for the 1 st half of 2007. At June 30, 2007 the group had 102.5 million mobile customers and 10.5 million broadband internet (ADSL) customers. Launched in June 2005, the NExT program (New Experience in Telecommunications) will enable the Group to pursue its transformation as an integrated operator and make France Telecom the benchmark for new telecommunications services in Europe. In 2006, Orange became the Group's single brand for Internet, television and mobile services in the majority of countries where the company operates, and Orange Business Services the brand name for services offered to businesses worldwide. France Telecom is the number three mobile operator and the number one provider of broadband internet services in Europe and one of the world leaders in providing telecommunication services to multinational companies.
