SFR Strengthens Its Network with Cisco to Help Businesses in France

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Cisco and SFR announced major updates to SFR’s network infrastructure to help businesses in France speed their digitization plans and best prepare for a better, stronger internet for the future.  

Businesses continue to operate under challenging conditions amidst the pandemic, and need to strengthen their business continuity plans. This requires faster access to the network and innovative collaboration solutions to connect employees, customers and partners together virtually. To support these new requirements, the network needs to scale to deliver greater performance with resiliency.

SFR, a leading communications provider in France, recently boosted its high-speed broadband internet connections, via fiber, 4G and 5G. SFR owns the country's first optical fiber network (FTTH / FTTB) with 20.7 million eligible FTTx connections, and  was the first operator in France to launch 5G, starting in the city of Nice. SFR has launched three 5G packages available to businesses on a variety of 5G devices.

SFR upgraded its network with Cisco’s most advanced mass-scale networking technologies as part of its commitment to support its business customers with their digital transformations. Powered by the fifth generation of ASR 9000 hardware that provides significant power savings, its business infrastructure backbone is now 400G-ready to cope with the increasing bandwidth needs of businesses today. With Cisco Segment Routing, SFR can provide its business customers with always-on access to their cloud services and support a broader range of service level agreements (SLAs), including low latency, that are foundational for upcoming 5G and IoT services.

“Cisco and SFR share a vision for innovation. We are committed to evolving the critical network infrastructure that businesses rely on to connect everything and everyone,” said Jonathan Davidson, Senior Vice President, Mass Scale Infrastructure Group, Cisco. “With Cisco innovations in silicon, optics and software, we are helping customers like SFR reimagine network infrastructure and change the economics of networking. This ensures that businesses of all sizes can take part in the digital economy.

“Many businesses have realized they need a strong and trusted communications provider to help them evolve to the new operating environment we are faced with today,” said Emmanuel Pugliesi Executve Director B2B at SFR Business. “We are dedicated to helping businesses accelerate their digitization strategies, and our strong partnership with Cisco is key to providing them access to the most advanced suite of services.”

“Transforming our network to support the evolving needs of our business customers is a real challenge, even more so when the network is under immense strain,” said Christophe Delaye, Executive Director Networks, Information Systems and Services at SFR. “Working closely with Cisco and its Customer Experience team, we successfully upgraded our backbone infrastructure with innovative and scalable technologies, in record time and with unprecedented quality and reliability.”