MWC 2025

Jean Louis, it’s so great to be here with you on the MWC show floor. So we’re here at the DriveNets booth. We just had a panel and I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about some of the stuff you mentioned. So what is the main challenge in your network today?

Yeah, so basically our customer requirements are evolving very fast. The traffic is doubling every three years and customers are moving their application to the cloud. They are moving from MPLS to Internet. They also need for very strong SLAs for IoT, for instance, and sometimes they need for bursty traffic, in particular for GenAI. So at the end of the day, they need for programmable networks. So we need to move from a rigid network to a flexible network and to propose network as a service.

So talk to me a little bit about strategy. How are you addressing these problems?

So in order to move from these rigid networks to this flexible network, we have a simple strategy with five pillars. The first one, we invest in our infrastructure in order to absorb the traffic increase. Then we are ‘softerizing’ the IP layer with disaggregation and with segment routing. And we are decoupling the underlay and the overlay thanks to a telco cloud architecture. And on top of this telco cloud, we are virtualizing our network services such as SD wan, such as voice or mobile services. So we move the network from a rigid box to a Lego box. And to play with those Lego pieces, we have the orchestration layer that is going to instantiate the Lego pieces and set up end to end services for our customers.

So I hear you talking about an orchestration layer and also about playing with Lego. Where does DriveNets fit into this plan?

So DriveNets clearly fits at our IP layer. We are ‘softerizing’ the IP layer and it comes with disaggregation. And by the way, two years ago we disaggregated the access of the network and now we think about disaggregating the core. This is why we did this experimentation with DriveNet that was successful.

Talk to me a little bit more about the work you did with DriveNets. So what was your key takeaway from the proof of concept that you did with them?

So we did first, we did a lot of testing and we were quite happy. It was quite easy to understand the product, our engineers and to learn how to configure the product. Then we did some interworking. Basically we were using the basic routing protocols such as ISIS, BGP, LDP, etc. So we did some interworking. And the interworking with other suppliers went very well. So then we deployed in our live network and it was working very well. And it took only 45 days between the start of the project and the deployment, which is quite a record for us.

That sounds pretty fast for a proof of concept. So we’ve talked about trends, we’ve talked about the proof of concept you’ve done. What’s next?

Yeah, what’s next? So we are still experimenting on DriveNets. We are currently doing sustainability, some tests on the cluster mode, how to combine several pieces in parallel. We are doing a study to compare several clustering models and we are launching an RFP in order to generalize the evolution of our core backbone.

Excellent. Thank you so much for your time.

You are welcome.