Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:07):
So we're in Barcelona for MWC 25. I'm here with Laurent Leboucher, he's group CTO and Senior VP of Orange Innovation Networks. Laurent, thanks very much for joining us today. Could you just update us on Orange's efforts to enable network automation?

Laurent Leboucher, Orange (00:25):
Thank you, Ray. Thank you for having me. And in this crazy and exciting week, this is a very strategic journey for Orange. We have started to implement AI in different parts of the operations from field operations to improve the energy efficiency of our radio networks. Also to avoid truck roll on field ups to improve the efficiency of network engineers on the network operating center to find the root cause analysis of problems very quickly. And so we are doing that in our different geographies and we are working and bringing all these use cases together in order to be able to replicate them as quickly as possible.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:18):
Now this is something that all Orange has been working on for a long time and studying all the different potential and partnerships and just recently Orange announced partnership with Misra ai. Can you tell us a little bit more about that relationship and what that is going to bring to our,

Laurent Leboucher, Orange (01:38):
So we have a partnership with Mistral. We will have the opportunity to leverage their model in our professional and enterprise offers, but at the same time, in the same partnership, we will work very closely with Mistral from an R&D standpoint to leverage what they're doing in order to help us in our own operations. And especially on the network side, we work on two different streams. One is AI for network and the other one is a network for AI in a way to improve also the new AI multimodal capabilities with the network.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:24):
Right, because that's a really important consideration, isn't it? I mean you are using AI in lots of different ways, but your customers are going to be using more and more AI applications and tools and eventually with multimodal AI, that's probably going to have an impact on the way your networks are used and how you have to plan them. Is that right?

Laurent Leboucher, Orange (02:45):
Definitely, definitely. And we strongly believe that we need to prepare ourselves and our network in order to cope with the new use cases. The usage of AI is exploding today and if you think of generative ai, it's no longer just text-based. Now it's become, as you say, multimodal. It means that video will also become very important and it's not downstream video, it's uplink. And we need to prepare the network for the capacity to do the app applic and also to provide the good quality of service. And this is exactly what we're demonstrating in one of our booths here, one of our stand here we are demonstrating how we can use slicing, dynamic slicing during the time of a conversation, a video conversation. So the use case is for a technician on the field, but there are many different applications. We strongly believe that the network could help as a new ai.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:45):
Now Orange is also at the heart of the network, API action. Where are you in terms of exposing your network capabilities to application developers?

Laurent Leboucher, Orange (03:56):
So first of all, it has become real. Now we have commercial availability of our APIs, camera APIs. We started with two markets, France and Spain. And we have created a business unit called Orange Live net. And this business unit is now delivering those API. We start with easy APIs and we expect also to introduce some more advanced APIs that will leverage a core of our 5G network, 5G as a network in those markets, Spain and France. And also extending to the other European countries.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:42):
Like you said, it's really happening and it's exciting times to watch that happen and move on so quickly. Now something else that Orange has been working on for quite some time is its open ran strategy. Can you just give us a quick update on where you are with open ran?

Laurent Leboucher, Orange (05:02):
As you probably know, we have started to deployed at very small scale, open ran. We've started in Roman Romania in a ranch sharing agreement that we have with and we will have this year and next year the opportunity to extend still at small scale in different areas starting with rural, but also to some cities small scale first and we will prepare wider scale that will start in 2027. And for that we will need to source solutions and this is something that we we'll prepare this year, but the sourcing will happen next year.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:50):
And I guess the longer we go on as well, the maturity of the capabilities and the technologies out there and the models I guess are all much more advanced. Finally, there is talk here and quite serious talk about how six G is going to start to impact the industry. Important discussions upcoming in South Korea. Well, what is orange's strategy for six G?

Laurent Leboucher, Orange (06:14):
First of all, six G has not been standardized yet, so it's difficult to define the strategy for CG if it doesn't exist. But 2025 is very important here because 3G PP starts the studies in order to prepare those, prepared those on us. And we expect that we will have iterations in order to define a release 20 and so on. That will happen in 2020, end of 20, 29, 20, 20, 30. So the way we see it is that up to now we used to think of the evolution of mobile network as big generation each time with a completely new different network. Today we believe that a lot of features which are meaningful for our customers, we come from software evolutions, so we need to have a way to market and explain those features to our customers. At the same time, we'll have some hardware evolutions that will happen less frequently. So we need to work on the two axis, the hardware access, but also more importantly the software access where we bring continuous innovation. And we would like to make sure that there is a large ecosystem working together. And this is really what matters now is really to create that ecosystem leveraging what we're doing today already with 5G.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:55):
Well let's hope we start to see the evolution of that six G ecosystem with the upcoming meetings and the 3G PPP work. Laurel, thanks very much for taking time to talk to us. Really appreciate it and good luck with the rest of MWC 25. Very welcome Ray.