Fiber Available to 70% of French Businesses by End of Year

PARIS - Although deployment of fiber to the home has been relatively slow in France, fiber to the business has made more headway. Orange Business Services, a division of the incumbent France Telecom, announced that it was extending its FTTO (Fiber to the Office) network, which provides businesses with access to dedicated fiber-based services.

As part of the group’s overall strategic plan, Conquests 2015, providing its business customers with access to very high broadband networks is a priority for Orange Business Services.

Currently available as a standardized offering in 3,500 municipalities, “Fiber for Business” will be available in 4,000 municipalities by the end of this year. This means that more than 70 percent of French businesses with at least 20 employees will be able to benefit from the service. By connecting businesses to its fiber network, Orange Business Services aims to provide easier access to a range of network-based services (Business Ethernet, Business VPN and Business Internet).

“Bringing very high-speed access to businesses has been a central part of our strategy for many years,” says Vivek Badrinath, executive VP of Orange Business Services. “With the development of new uses and the introduction of new devices, ramping up capacity is a priority for our business customers. The flexibility gained when speeds are increased from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps, together with our commitment to the levels of security and availability that businesses require, will enable our customers to benefit from the full range of new IP services – cloud computing, videoconferencing, etc. – and will provide them with an exceptional experience free of all capacity constraints.”

New Uses for Broadband
The company says its increased speeds will facilitate the growth of new applications, including:

Video: image integration into collaborative work tools, telepresence rooms, expanded business solutions requiring very high quality real-time video images, such as telemedicine

E-learning and other applications in the field of education

Applications related to cloud computing, where access time and data updates are critical.

In addition, to streamline their spending, businesses are concentrating their computing and administrative sites, which requires dedicated rather than pooled fiber connections. Because it is based on a dedicated infrastructure, FTTO is able to meet the specific needs of businesses in terms of quality of service (with guaranteed network speed), availability (with service restoration in less than four hours in the case of network failure) and security.