Orange, one of the world’s leading communications providers, has been working with Equinix for over 20 years leveraging Equinix infrastructure to expand its services and presence across the globe.

This week, Orange expanded its partnership with Equinix for its cloud points of presence (PoPs) to deliver essential services such as SD-WAN, CDN, 5G roaming and voice services, with an expected latency of ~10 milliseconds.

What’s exciting about modern PoPs is that they are done in a virtualized manner. Over the past few years, Equinix has been investing very heavily in its digital services. Equinix is active in over 240 data centers across almost 70 markets. The physical and global reach of the platform is immense.

“Our digital services allow our customers, and partners like Orange, to deploy and leverage the Equinix platform in minutes versus months or years,” said Zachary Smith, Head of Edge Infrastructure at Equinix.

As Orange is trying to move to over 160 locations for their next-gen network, they needed to create these virtual points of presence (PoPs) in so many places very quickly. They reached out to Equinix to see how they can leverage the digital infrastructure primitives that Equinix has been creating to do that programmatically in a fully virtualized manner.

In short, Orange is building virtualized PoPs, so they’re able to build a point of presence for their network without ever stepping foot in an Equinix data center.

I sat down with Smith to learn about not only how Orange and other telcos can leverage its technologies, but also the challenges that are there for telcos, especially in the hybrid, multi-cloud world and what direct impact new PoPs will have on user experience.

I hope you will enjoy the discussion in the video above.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Equinix has been working together with Orange Telecom for over 20 years. Equinix, the largest platform for digital infrastructure, aims to provide neutral ecosystem access to different networks, clouds, and enterprise customers which Orange has been able to leverage.
• Equinix has been building digital services to enable its customers to deploy and leverage the Equinix platform quickly. Equinix Metal allows customers to virtually deploy the physical infrastructure they need in Equinix locations. Smith explains how Orange has been leveraging Equinix to build virtualized PoPs for their next-gen network.
• Equinix has helped Orange enable their virtual PoPs in many locations including Amsterdam, Madrid, and Seattle. They aim to support them to go to 160 markets around the world. Smith discusses how Equinix is supporting Orange to help them scale in those markets efficiently.
• Network service providers (NSPs) and carriers are facing challenges with moving trillions of packets and hundreds of gigabytes of mission-critical traffic. Smith describes how Equinix is helping network providers by providing physical single tenant digital infrastructure, and using their APIs to spin up physical infrastructure. He explains how network providers are moving their interconnection and virtual services to the edge to lower latency.
• There is a trend of moving intelligence to the edge closer to the end user instead of bringing data to a core location. Smith discusses Equinix’s strategy to be closest to the end users with all the partners and networks around them. He explains that Equinix is currently in 70 markets and how they are making it easier for customers to access the platform Equinix.
• Equinix has always had an ‘as-a-service’ model so that customers can partner up and Equinix can help them with their data center needs, and now also with their digital services. Smith goes into detail about how moving to an as-a-service creates a more circular economy and the benefits of this.
• Smith discusses how Equinix finds a balance between how they offer a fundamental advantage around infrastructure operations and long tail deployment around the different aspects of energy and physical infrastructure yet still allow customers to have a choice. Smith takes us through the different options customers have in Equinix’s portfolio.
• There is a movement toward cloud adjacency allowing customers to put their data-heavy applications in the middle of their clouds and partners. Smith explains how this can be more cost-effective and still provide easy access to all the cloud and networks.

Connect with Zachary Smith (LinkedIn)
Learn more about Equinix (Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.