Neptune: a LTE network in Paris
Méhand Guiddir joined Altran in 2006 as Chief Technical Officer. His responsibilities include the coordination of innovative R&D activities related to French competitive clusters. He is a member of the Telecom Steering Committee of the SYSTEM@TIC cluster.
Méhand Guiddir graduated from the Ecole Central Paris, a Tier-1 engineering school in France, and holds a Master’s Degree in Networks & Telecommunications. He began his career in 1984 and held several management positions with various global telecom vendors and operators.
What is NEPTUNE?
NEPTUNE is an LTE network dedicated to testing, currently being implemented in the south of Paris. This network will offer high-speed Internet access of 700Mo per minute, which means that a movie can be downloaded in a minute. This technology should be available on the mass market in 3 to 4 years.
LTE’s huge capacity enables new services. Live broadcasting, for example, allows people to use their mobile terminals to film and instantly share the content with others and upload it on the net or send it to a TV channel. It will also revolutionise existing services. For instance, we will be able to access films in the car that have been downloaded at home, and let the children watch them when we’re driving on holiday.
The objective of NEPTUNE is to offer service providers real conditions to test their ideas. They can test not only the technical and functional aspects of their innovation, but also the business model. NEPTUNE has indeed identified 200 beta-users, including students, families and professionals, who will provide feedback on the applications. Service providers stand to benefit from this LTE network in several ways, including reduced time-to-market, business model optimisation and ROI improvement.
What is your role on this project?
There are 13 partners involved in the project, including Orange, Alcatel-Lucent and TDF, as well as some universities such as the “Polytechnique” and HEC.
Altran’s role is two-fold.
Firstly, the Group is in charge of managing the project, ensuring on-time delivery and the efficient use of the resources allocated. NEPTUNE will, in fact, be financed by the French government, once the certification phase has been carried out with the SYSTEM@TIC competitive cluster.
Secondly, Altran is directly responsible for marketing the testing offer. Once the network is available, Altran’s sales teams will contact service providers throughout the different sectors. My role is to ensure the overall governance of the project; I coordinate with the French government, SYSTEM@TIC and the 12 other partners.
Does this mean that the project is designed for French users only?
No. All service providers can come and test the services; in fact, we are currently setting up similar Neptune projects in other countries. Tunisia started a NEPTUNE project in 2009 which is organised along the same lines as the French project, with an eco-system of partners and state sponsorship. It is based in Sfax and its partners include universities, companies, research labs, etc. The network should be ready in 2011 and we want to connect it to our platform so that we can carry out more elaborate tests.
China is also interested. During a presentation at Tongji University, we received very positive feedback. We are now working with them to see what can be done.
Sweden and Austria are the only countries that have implemented LTE networks and it looks like ROI is taking time. What future do you foresee for LTE?
LTE is an essential step. It is what truly enables the ‘Always On’ concept that we have been talking about for years. With LTE, we get the mobile capacity necessary to access the same content and applications that Internet offers today. Of course, this new technology presents several major challenges. Handsets remain extremely expensive despite their poor ergonomics. Traffic congestion and topics such as net neutrality are of course becoming major concerns. Issues on security, privacy, data management and customer ownership are also arising. In a services-driven market, one characteristic of new application development is that it is at the crossroads of several industries. Players need to learn to work together in order to develop the market. This will take time. However, all of these challenges offer a great opportunity to design the world we want for tomorrow. We must look to the future!
