Placing Lyon on the digital world map

One of the most exciting things for us about expanding our network backbone and the services we can offer is the wider story it tells about how digital communications is changing.  On a global scale we are seeing the expectations from enterprises and consumers increase: they want access to new content and services – with greater network transparency, low latency and a best-in-class customer experience.

Sometimes though it is the more localised changes that can be just as exciting.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ON A GLOBAL SCALE

Known as the capital of gastronomy and the birthplace of cinema, Lyon is the second-largest urban area and digital hub in France and has a fast-growing digital story.  Market demand for digital services in the area is high and a number of providers, including Telia Carrier, have provided low latency capacity for some time.

But for businesses in and around Lyon, capacity is only part of the story.  Lyon is home to an incredibly vibrant industrial sector with many world leading companies from areas including automotive, health, biochemicals and electronics to name but a few.  The Lyon metropolitan area hosts some of the most advanced pharmaceutical industries in the world and has been ranked #1 in France for tissue engineering and one of the top vaccine production centres in the world.

Lyon’s digital sector alone is growing at an incredible rate, with 25% job growth over 5 years in software, data processing and content. With five areas of excellence, including big data, robotics, software and programming, Lyon is in the top 20 most attractive European cities for digital developers.

France itself is located at a crossroad of network connectivity between Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.  Within the French territory, Lyon offers a strategic location where one network can reach Milan, Geneva, Zurich, Marseille, Paris or Strasbourg within a couple of milliseconds inside a radius of 400 km (250 miles). At Telia Carrier, we wanted to make sure that enterprises and regional carriers could take advantage of that unique geographical position to elevate their competitiveness on the international stage.

A CONNECTIVITY JOURNEY ONE STEP AT A TIME

We’d already upgraded our equipment in Lyon to deliver 100G waves in record times during the fall of 2020.  Built using DWDM technology, 100G wavelengths offer dedicated, high-capacity transport for high volumes of traffic across long-haul stretches.  Our latest IP deployment takes things even further – now customers in the Lyon region can exercise their demand for resilient carrier and IP Transit services, along with the full range of capacity, connectivity and security capabilities that Telia Carrier can offer:

• Customers in the area now have direct access to our globally ranked #1 Internet backbone, AS1299. It provides exceptional connectivity directly from Lyon across Europe, US and Asia with very low latency.
• Organizations can run their applications with a direct access from Lyon to hybrid and multi-cloud solutions from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Oracle cloud across the Americas, Europe and Asia.
• Customers can protect their website, applications and networks with our DDoS Mitigation service, which provides continuous, host-level protection against cyberattacks that scales across our global IP backbone.

Digital transformation is happening across the world, and the recent development that is now live in Lyon means that we help customers in the region achieve their digital aspirations on a global scale, not just now, but far into the future.  Our extensive portfolio of services is yet another evidence of how organizations can partner with us to increase their competitiveness on a global and international scale.

EXCITING TIMES AHEAD

In the network world, France has always been strategic as a direct or diverse terrestrial path to reach 275+ million people in France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Luxemburg and Belgium, and as an international capacity highway thanks to the landing of more than 20 submarine cables through its access to the Mediterranean Sea, the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean.

Today, a new wave of capacity is rolling in from the French Atlantic side, something unheard-of for the past 18 years. With Google’s completion of their Dunant transatlantic subsea cable earlier this year and the announcement of Amitié’s new transatlantic submarine cable, due to go live in Q1 2022, it is certainly an exciting time for future network and digital ecosystem developments in France.

A bientôt!

Delphine Masciopinto
Sales & Business Development EMEA

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