Scaling network capacity without added cost

As a full-service telecommunications operator, Bouygues Telecom offers high-quality fixed and mobile services to meet the needs of its 32 million customers. The company reaches 99% of the French population with its 4G network and more than 85% with 5G. In addition, the company has dedicated more than 2,200 employees and 400 certified experts to provide B2B services—including AI, cybersecurity, and 5G mobile fleet management.

Mobile traffic is increasing 10-20% per year—the result of organic growth, new services, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A)—putting intense pressure on critical infrastructure. With the company’s virtualized gateway internet local area network (vGi-LAN) reaching its limits, Bouygues Telecom turned to Cisco to find a solution that would double the company’s network capacity without adding infrastructure that would increase cost and complexity.

Strategically offloading VNF to Cisco Nexus 

Bouygues Telecom wanted to avoid major infrastructure investments until its planned network redesign in 2028 due to equipment obsolescence, when the company will transition from a virtualized network function (VNF) design to one based on bare metal. The company’s vGi-LAN chains together several network functions—including load balancing—providing a gateway between its mobile and IP networks. If the company were able to offload the load balancing function to other infrastructure, it would free up compute resources and avoid the need to add to its existing VNF servers to scale the company’s vGi-LAN to accommodate traffic growth. 

The company worked with Cisco to make this a reality, taking advantage of Cisco Enhanced Policy-Based Routing (Cisco ePBR) on its Cisco Nexus fabric. Cisco ePBR is an advanced extension of Policy-Based Routing (PBR) that enables application-aware traffic forwarding. Using Cisco ePBR, a switch can balance load by distributing traffic across multiple links based on application, user, or performance metrics. Cisco ePBR lets you intelligently steer specific traffic through one or more service devices with load balancing, health checks, and symmetric flow handling—all at line-rate performance.

Cisco and Bouygues Telecom collaborated intensively over a period of 18 months to enhance the Cisco ePBR solution, with the telco submitting numerous feature requests to ensure ePBR met the target design. Regular deep dives with Cisco validated that the solution functioned as expected and that the Bouygues Telecom team understood the technology and its use. The Cisco business unit and local Cisco teams provided support during extensive lab testing and test plan execution at the company for successful validation of the solution.

"We worked together with Cisco as one team to make this project a success,” says Gérard Potorel, manager of the data center networking team at Bouygues Telecom. “Cisco added the necessary enhancements and worked closely with our team over an extended period to make sure the solution works properly and satisfies our goals."

Delivering a smooth rollout

Bouygues Telecom established clear objectives for the transition to Cisco ePBR including ensuring that the solution:

• Works as expected
• Scales to accommodate future growth
• Can be deployed with minimum disruption

Intensive lab testing demonstrated that the native capabilities of the telco’s existing Cisco Nexus infrastructure addressed these requirements.

The timing of this project was critical. “The traffic doesn’t wait,” explains Gérard. “Given our network growth, we had to set a strict time limit. If we couldn’t get Cisco ePBR working on schedule, we would have had to invest in a different solution.” Fortunately, everything came together in time, paving the way for a rollout at six separate locations across France.

Each site was updated during a night-time maintenance window when load could be shifted to other sites. Careful planning and off-peak scheduling allowed the team to meet a strict deployment timeline with zero customer impact. As of late 2025, all of the six locations are complete.

“Now that the project is fully deployed, it has enabled Bouygues Telecom to almost double network capacity using the same equipment without spending additional money,” says Gérard. “We’re also saving substantial space because we don’t have to make room for new compute pods, and we’re keeping power consumption the same, helping us meet our sustainability goals.” 

Preparing for future growth

For Bouygues Telecom, the successful Cisco ePBR implementation demonstrates the flexibility of Cisco Nexus to accommodate unforeseen needs. This enables the company to focus on other critical areas without continuous investment in new hardware. 

The telco is actively exploring the adoption of Cisco Nexus Dashboard for improved telemetry and network automation. To accommodate continued significant traffic growth, Bouygues Telecom is also engaged in discussions regarding adoption new higher bitrate interfaces, with a goal to start acquiring 400G/800G-enabled Cisco products in the near future.

The company is also currently investing in an AI Factory that is dedicated to exploring new AI services, making Generative AI a key innovation priority. As this AI initiative progresses, there will be a need for network products that can handle hybrid workloads—with increasing AI traffic alongside other network traffic.

“Our main goal for the Cisco fabric is to ensure that it can scale to meet future demands,” says Gérard. “Everything we construct in the next year will have to be able to handle the traffic created by AI, and we want to be able to accommodate AI simply, without investing more than necessary.” 

To succeed in an increasingly competitive market, service providers need partners they can rely on. "The Cisco team invested a lot of time to ensure the success of the ePBR transition, working with us in partnership,” adds Gérard. “Bouygues Telecom has worked with Cisco for a long time across multiple segments of our business. We rely on many Cisco products, including data center, campus, core, and Wi-Fi networking as well as Cisco UCS for computing.”