Orange is expanding its Telco Cloud service to provide business and wholesale customer with on-demand Points of Presence including SD-WAN, CDN and 5G with expected latency below ~10 milliseconds. The new on-demand services will allow Orange and partners to rapidly deploy and provision low latency services in weeks rather than months. It will provide greater agility to businesses in logistics, manufacturing, energy and other segments to rapidly set up new private low latency networks to meet rapid demand or ad-hoc requirements.

The new service will also reduce the cost of rolling out new services, as it will be free of up-front CAPEX.

Orange is collaborating with digital infrastructure specialist Equinix to deliver the on-demand Telco Cloud service. The service will use Equinix’s Bare Metal as a Service capability — Equinix Metal. Three locations will be deployed by the end of this year: Amsterdam, Madrid and Seattle.

By integrating with Equinix’s automated dedicated Bare Metal as a Service located in proximity to its existing networks at Equinix, Orange can quickly meet customer demand for growth, deploying in weeks from inception (instead of months).

Courtney Munroe, Vice President for Telecommunications Research at IDC, said: “This partnership between Orange and Equinix is a smart move enabling Orange to enhance its existing platform and its ability to facilitate reliable, agile digital capabilities for its customers—all while being able to more quickly meet customer demand by using Equinix Metal. IDC research shows that enterprises look to Telcos and digital infrastructure providers as key partners for hybrid IT infrastructure and cloud networking requirements. Furthermore, the enhanced Telco Cloud Platform will improve Orange’s operational efficiency, and flexibility, and most importantly will allow it to offer enhanced low latency performance and on-demand requirements for enterprises around the world.”

“We are delighted to partner with Equinix to deploy Orange Telco Cloud PoPs technology on top of Equinix Metal,” said Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Executive Vice President, International Networks at Orange. “By embracing an ‘as a service’ infrastructure model and focusing investment in our SDN and VNF capabilities, Orange can provide a fully flexible and elastic solution to customers, speed up the deployment of our planned 100 Telco Cloud PoPs, and quickly adapt capacity to meet demand. This confirms Orange’s position as a trusted infrastructure partner, optimising application performance with secured and consistent connectivity, regardless of end user location, and supporting cloud management and transformation.”

Orange already has 40 SDN PoPs around the world and is targeted to reach 100+ “Telco Cloud PoPs” by 2024 as part of its eNGINe (New Generation International Network) transformation programme. Each Telco Cloud PoP can host virtualised network service functions such as voice, 5G, CDN, SD-WAN or Security Services, as well as connect customers to key content and cloud service providers. With its Telco Cloud PoP architecture, Orange’s customers can access and manage applications in the cloud with reliable, fast connectivity, and choose from an expanded portfolio with on-demand and adapted services.

“We have a rich 20-year history of collaboration with Orange and are pleased to see them accelerate innovation for their customers by becoming the first provider to combine their extensive global network footprint at Equinix with the new possibilities provided by our investments in automated digital infrastructure capabilities. We’re excited to see them expand this offering into additional markets in 2023,” said Zachary Smith, Global Head of Edge Infrastructure Services at Equinix.