A new teleport facility, Euroteleport de Roubaix, has been opened in France. It covers 14 hectares near Euralille, a business centre in the metropolitan area of Lille, and close to the Belgian border. The first beneficiaries are the local enterprises that have big communications needs because they get the best rates. The secondary beneficiary is the region surrounding the teleport, because the facility will help to attract investment, said Philippe Eric, the teleport’s community relations liaison officer. The third beneficiary is the teleport itself, which the operators pay to rent our systems facilities. France’s regulatory authority granted the teleport a 10-year experimental licence last November to operate a satellite network. Its technical partner for the satellite network, which uses Eutelsat, is GTE Corp’s GTE Spacenet, Eric said. Currently, the teleport houses only US Sprint Corp’s international transit node and the satellite service of the teleport itself, which both provide speech, image and data transmissions. By the end of the year, Eric says he expects British Telecommunications Plc and Cable & Wireless Plc to transfer over from their current sites at Villeneuve d’Ascq. The teleport is also experimenting with Belgacom and some Belgian cable network operators on a trans-border network. The teleport does not directly market the services of the operators it houses, he said, but helps customers choose the one best suited to their communication needs. Each operator has its own sales activity, we just house them, Eric said, adding that he could envision a day when the operators pay the teleport for bringing in new clients. The private company formed to establish the teleport includes public and private shareholders, among them the region of Nord Pas de Calais, the communities of Lille and Roubaix and their chambers of commerce, as well as private companies Thomson Direction d’Assistance et Service SA, Compagnie Generale de Chauffe (a subsidiary of Compagnie Generale des Eaux SA) and retailing giant Auchan, among others. On another track, adding to a growing interest in teleports in France, France Telecom’s subsidiary France Cable & Radio last week took a 49% stake in Monaco-Teleport, the operator of a new teleport in Monaco. Monaco Teleport, which is a privately held by a group of financiers, was created in March 1993 to offer high-level value-added communications services to major multinationals.
