France's telecoms system can cope with the huge surge in demand sparked by the coronavirus outbreak, one of the country's top providers Orange said.
Orange chairman and CEO Stephane Richard said that the system, under massive pressure from home-working and people locked down using the internet, “can hold up” and was designed to cope with such increases.
“We have a system which was designed to absorb considerable fluctuations” in demand and which was built on the expectation there would be a “regular increase” in users, Richard said on RTL Radio.
Mobile phone systems for example carried 40 percent more data each year and companies had to always anticipate that increase several years in advance, he said. Richard also urged people to use Wi-Fi when they could to reduce the pressure.
“If you want these systems to hold up, and they can hold up, the first thing to do is use Wi-Fi mostly,” rather than fixed-line connections, he said.
Richard said Orange has seen home-working demand increase seven-fold because of the crisis while voice traffic had doubled as people switched to video-conferencing and messaging service use had jumped five times.
