2023-10-09 08:30:10
After passengers and goods, SNCF is developing a new activity: the transport of digital data. Launched in 2021, its subsidiary Terralpha “is no longer entirely anecdotal” on the French chessboard, believes Gabriel Chenevoy, the company’s general director. It should approach 10 million euros in turnover in 2023, twice as much as in 2022. This remains tiny compared to the 41 billion euros in revenue of the SNCF group in 2022.
The 10 million euro loan granted to it by its parent company upon its creation is used to finance the development of two fiber optic networks, rented to large companies or telecom operators to transport their data. A digital spider web which, almost two hundred years after the arrival of the train in France, replicates the railway map.
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The first network, called express, connects the major French metropolises. “It’s the TGV of fiber optics”, illustrates Mr. Chenevoy: deployed along high-speed lines, therefore most often in a straight line, fiber optic cables offer the best reaction time (latency) on the market for the transport of digital data. Approximately 80% deployed, this express infrastructure will be completed at the beginning of 2024. The second network, omnibus, serves secondary routes, like the TER. Terralpha is giving itself two more years to complete this regional project started a year ago, by connecting around fifty cities by 2025, particularly in Brittany, Burgundy or along the Limoges-Toulouse axis.
Regional network
“With these 20,000 kilometers of lines, we will have a single network, from north to south, from east to west, without the data leaving the network”explains Mr. Chenevoy, who wants to use this argument to make Terralpha an alternative optical fiber operator to the lines proposed by motorway groups or to those deployed along waterways.
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The idea of creating this telecoms activity was born at the end of the 2010s. Arriving at SNCF in 2015 to work on issues of improving performance, Mr. Chenevoy noted that the SNCF had overcapacity in optical fibers. These had been deployed along the railway lines by the railway company for the signaling and communication needs of its railway workers. It was also a way to save money, as copper wires cost more and more. Since the mid-2010s, SNCF has deployed 1,000 to 1,500 kilometers of optical fiber per year along the rails.
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