Aveyron, Lozère, Lot: 40,000 km of optical fiber, a winning alliance for very high-speed rural areas

Il a fallu dérouler plus de 40 000 km de fibre optique à travers les trois départements. G.I.

To attract an optical fiber deployment operator, Aveyron, Lozère and Lot have launched a common market. With success. Their territory is one of the most advanced.

The mobile telephony white zones have long been a bitter battle for the elected officials of Lozère in the early 2000s. So, before many other territories, the departmental council understood the challenge of quickly committing to its digital opening up in order to make it a tool of attractiveness. In 2007, a joint union was created with neighboring departments to deploy 340 km of optical fiber along the A75 and make the motorway the backbone of very high speed.

100,000 shots minimum

But in 2015, when it was necessary to bring it to each home, decision-makers encountered a major problem. "The operators estimated at the time that 100,000 sockets were needed to be connected for the operation to be profitable and Lozère only had them 59,000", remembers the president of the Department Sophie Pantel. It therefore proposed to its counterparts in Aveyron and Lot to launch a common market, in the form of a public initiative network (RIP). Bank. With 787 municipalities and a target of 330,000 sockets, Orange responded favorably and created the subsidiary ALLiance THD in 2017. Cost of the operation: 588 M€ including 128.7 M€ for communities.

Seven years later, its general director Didier Ricaud is holding more meetings in the villages, to inform the population that they can take out a fiber optic subscription and benefit, even in the depths of the Margeride, with the same flow as on the Place de la Comédie in Montpellier. Contract soon fulfilled. "As of February 1, we deployed 314,500 shots, or more than 95% of the objective. We should even reach 320,000 during the first half of the year", he congratulates himself. Of the hundred or so public initiative networks in France, that of "the’alliance" is now 7th in terms of advancement.

Didier Ricaud, director of Alliance THD. DR

An emulation

The matter was not simple, however."It’was a complex territory to cover, particularly because of its much more dispersed habitat than elsewhere and a harsh mountainous area. Lozère is fortunate to have an inhabited national park in its center, but for us it was additional regulatory and environmental constraints, lists Didier Ricaud, who speaks "of a gigantic construction site". "We relied on the existing copper network when possible, but to do so it was necessary to upgrade it, in particular by changing around 40,000 poles. We also created thousands of kilometers of underground, as many civil engineering sites as the inhabitants were able to see throughout these years, he further describes. If the schedule was able to be kept, it was thanks to the choice to increase the number of subcontractors. "This generated emulation".

Around the Earth

One figure alone sums up the scale of the work."We have rolled out more than 40,000 km of optical fiber… In short, we have circled the earth". However, the adventure is not ;rsquo;is not finished yet. We must first complete the work, "on the 2-3% of still complicated sockets". These are either extremely isolated "for which we will establish a connection procedure on demand", or paradoxically as in a very urban environment, buildings where the trustees refuse for time to authorize an intervention.

Above all, another challenge awaits the Alliance THD teams, a commercial one. "Currently 114,000 customers have taken out a subscription to the ;one of the access providers, i.e. a penetration rate of 36% when the average for other RIPs is 45%", regrets Didier Ricaud. Who, faced with this observation, took his fibered pilgrim's staff to carry out work of evangelization of rural areas at very high speed.

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