Proximus Group

On an orange Belgium gateway, he pulled the Wi-Fi password off the device over the air and joined the network.

On a Proximus gateway, he opened a remote shell carried entirely over Wi-Fi frames.

Vu's gear is vulnerable too.

Kaiser estimates millions of devices worldwide are affected.

For 30 years, this colossal column has been a blot on the local landscape, but thankfully, it's not going to live to see its 31st birthday.

Until recently, the tower was used by national telecommunications company Proximus.

It helped them transmit data across Europe using microwave technology via a huge network of similar cloud busters.

But advancements in technology and fiber optic cables now move data much more efficiently, and that's good news for us because towers like this are no longer needed, so we get to blow it up.

Jeroen Feneau works for Proximus, the owners of the tower.

It's very, a high building in the center of nowhere.

We don't need any more this kind of technology.

Euh, et une fois qu'on a l'aide de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, ben on a le scénario aussi.

Et là, le scénario part un peu chez tous nos partenaires, euh, habituels, donc du côté de la Belgique, euh, Cinéart, les télés, donc BeTV, Proximus, RTBF.

Cinéart, qui est le, le distributeur historique des films des frères.

Et puis, euh, du côté de, de Denis, ben là, c'est du côté français, c'est lui qui s'occupe de toute la partie, euh, française de la recherche de développement.

Uh, what I admire them for is they, they don't take things so seriously, and I think it makes life easier.

I mean, sometimes it's a bit annoying when, when you wait for the- Yeah, it's the Belga- Belgacom guy that doesn't show up.

Or, I mean, that, that, that stuff that still annoys me, but, um-

There is a big cultural gap between the Netherlands and-

Mm.

And BICS, Belgacom, Belgium, is very close to France, and my sister is living in Belgium.

Okay.

So- Yeah, I say, "Okay, if I want to see the other part of France, I need to join BICS," because I knew that BICS has international POP.

So may- maybe to highlight now your move to BICS, majority of our viewers are non-techies, what did BICS do in particular?

Yeah, very good question.

BICS stand for Belgacom International Carrier Services, so we are a wholesale carrier operator.

What we are mainly selling, BICS core DNA is selling voice, voice minutes inter- interconnection, voice roaming, mobile data, and all these services were built on a network, on a capacity network.

Yeah, I think what's great is we're seeing a digital vending machine and the bundling capabilities that we can provide used to solve lots of different commercial challenges rather than simply just to sell an entertainment subscription.

You look at Proximus in Belgium, basically they replaced an in-house platform with a digital vending machine and went through, I think, quite a traditional sort of evolution that many of our customers do.

And we deploy the digital vending machine, launch new services, migrate some of the services they've done onto the same platform so they can create those complex bundles, and then we scale and add new services.

You look at Turkcell, they're basically using quite big multi-party bundlings, eight or nine different subscription services, a combination of the global leading SVOD services plus some local services, really to support their 5G proposition, giving customers a real way of using that 5G bandwidth rather than just marketing on the bandwidth itself.

We don't have the mechanisms to find out what it is and then to start responding to it to keep society functional.

I'm working on a number of projects in that respect abroad, where you see that people are very receptive to, and maybe we'll address it in a couple of minutes, if they can identify with what is the threat to them in reality, irrespective of whether you believe it'll be Martians or Russians or just an IT guy at Proximus who blew up something.

The fact is that if you start to accept that continuity of everything that we have is not guaranteed, then you can start working on reactivity.

And that is a core element.