At MWC25, Orange’s Jean Louis Le Roux shared insights into the company’s network modernization strategy. With traffic doubling every three years and enterprises shifting to the cloud, Orange is evolving from rigid infrastructure to a more flexible, software-driven network. This transformation is built on five key pillars: investing in infrastructure, softwareizing the IP layer with disaggregation, adopting telco cloud architecture, virtualizing network services, and deploying an orchestration layer for automated service management.
Le Roux highlighted Orange’s successful proof of concept with DriveNets, which enabled a rapid 45-day deployment of a disaggregated core network. With strong interworking capabilities and simplified configuration, this approach positions Orange to scale efficiently while maintaining high service levels. Looking ahead, Orange is expanding its DriveNets trials and launching an RFP to further evolve its core backbone. Want to learn how Orange is shaping the future of telecom? Watch the full interview now.
Diana Goovaerts:
Jean Louis, it's so great to be here with you on the MWC show floor. So we're here at the DriveNet's 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?
Jean Louis Le Roux:
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're moving from MPLS to internet. They also need for very strong SLAs for IoT, for instance, and sometimes they need for brusting traffic in particular for GNI. 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.
Diana Goovaerts:
So talk to me a little bit about strategy. How are you addressing these problems?
Jean Louis Le Roux:
So in order to move from this rigid network 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 softwareizing the IP layer with disaggregation and with segment routing. And we're decoupling the underlay and the overlay thanks to 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.
Diana Goovaerts:
So I hear you talking about an orchestration layer and also about playing with Legos. Where does DriveNet fit into this plan?
Jean Louis Le Roux:
So DriveNet clearly fits at our IP layer. We are softwareizing 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.
Diana Goovaerts:
Talk to me a little bit more about the work you did with DriveNet. So what was your key takeaway from the proof of concept that you did with them?
Jean Louis Le Roux:
So first we did a lot of testing and we were quite happy. It was quite easy to understand the product for our engineers and to learn how to configure the product. Then we did some interworking. Basically we were using the basic routing protocol such as ISIS, BGP, LDP, et cetera. 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.
Diana Goovaerts:
That sounds pretty fast for proof of concept. So we've talked about trends, we've talked about the proof of concept you've done. What's next?
Jean Louis Le Roux:
Yeah, what's next? So we are still experimenting on DriveNet. We are currently doing some tests on the cluster mode or to combine several PCs. 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.
Diana Goovaerts:
Excellent. Thank you so much for your time.
Jean Louis Le Roux:
You are welcome.