The rollout of 5G represents a significant advancement in the telecommunications industry, offering the potential for markedly enhanced speeds, reduced latency, and improved connectivity. Considering these anticipated advantages, it is interesting to understand the progressive adoption of the new technology by operators and their subscribers. In this paper, we analyze the evolution and current operation of the nation-wide 5G network of Orange, a leading mobile operator in France. By inspecting longitudinal data about (i) the over-five-year-long development of the country-wide 5G radio access infrastructure and (ii) the last two years of 5G traffic demands, we unveil how the operator has planned the deployment of the 5G radio access and characterize the actual usage patterns of the available 5G infrastructure. We also investigate the recent introduction of a 5G Standalone (SA) commercial service and its adoption by the mobile subscribers. We show that by mid 2025, the 5G network under study has achieved substantial coverage of populated areas and the operator has very recently started adding capacity layers to its 5G radio access. However, our investigation reveals that such massive infrastructure deployment efforts are not matched by a commensurate adoption of the technology by the end users, as the 5G capacity -especially for SA- stays largely underutilized.

The rollout of 5G promises major improvements in speed, latency, and connectivity over previous-generation radio access technologies. Our study analyzes Orange's nationwide 5G network in France, combining longitudinal data on infrastructure deployment with data traffic patterns. Early results show that while 5G coverage has steadily expanded and is presently reaching the vast majority of the user population, adoption by mobile subscribers remains limited, leaving much of the new capacity underutilized.

Summer Olympic Games are one of the major sports and social events worldwide, attracting global media attention, thousands of athletes, and large crowds to the hosting country.As such, the Olympics also represent a moment of severe strain for local infrastructures, including the telecommunication one.Yet, very little is known about how this large event affects demands for telco services.In this paper, we explore how the 2024 Summer Olympics hosted by Paris, France conditioned local mobile data traffic volumes and dynamics.We do so from a privileged vantage point by analyzing measurements collected in Orange's production network, largest mobile operator in the country and the official communications partner to the event organization.Our results shed light on a variety of aspects, including how Olympic Games affect consumption of mobile services, the burden that the event imposes on the local mobile network infrastructure, and how operators prepare for it.

Smartphones and mobile applications are staple tools in the operation of current-age public demonstrations, where they support organizers and participants in, \eg scaling the management of the events or communicating live about their objectives and traction. % The widespread use of mobile services during protests also presents interesting opportunities to observe the dynamics of these manifestations from a digital perspective. Previous studies in that direction have focused on the analysis of content posted in selected social media so as to forecast, survey or ascertain the success of public protests. In this paper, we take a different viewpoint and present a holistic characterization of the consumption of the whole spectrum of mobile applications during social protests. Hinging upon pervasive measurements in the production network of the incumbent network operator and focusing on the 2023 French pension reform strikes, we unveil how large masses of protesters generate a clearly recognizable footprint on mobile service demands in the examined events. In fact, the footprint is so strong that it lets us develop models informed by the usage of selected mobile applications that are capable of (i) tracking the spatiotemporal evolution of the target demonstrations and (ii) estimate the time-varying number of attendees from aggregate network operator data only. We demonstrate the utility of such privacy-preserving models to perform a-posteriori analyses of the public protests that reveal, e.g., the precise progression of the marches, alternate minor routes taken by participants or their dispersal at the end of the events.

The roll out of 5G, coupled with the traffic monitoring capabilities of modern industry-grade networks, offers an unprecedented opportunity to closely observe the impact that the introduction of a new major wireless technology has on the end users. In this paper, we seize such a unique chance, and carry out a first-of-its-kind in-depth analysis of 5G adoption along spatial, temporal and service dimensions. Leveraging massive measurement data about application-level demands collected in a nationwide 4G/5G network, we characterize the impact of the new technology on when, where and how mobile subscribers consume 5G traffic both in aggregate and for individual types of services. This lets us unveil the overall incidence of 5G in the total mobile network traffic, its spatial and temporal fluctuations, its effect on the way 5G services are consumed, the way individual services and geographical locations contribute to fluctuations in the 5G demand, as well as surprising connections between socioeconomic status of local populations and the way the 5G technology is presently consumed.

Among all Internet Quality of Service (QoS) indicators, Round-trip time (RTT), jitter and packet loss have been thoroughly studied due to their great impact on the overall network's performance and the Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived by the users. Considering that, we managed to generate a real-world dataset with a comprehensive contextualization of these important quality indicators by passively monitoring the network in user-space. To generate this dataset, we first developed a novel Periodic Passive Ping (PePa Ping) methodology for Android devices. Contrary to other works, PePa Ping periodically obtains RTT, jitter, and number of lost packets of all TCP connections. This passive approach relies on the implementation of a local VPN server residing inside the client device to manage all Internet traffic and obtain QoS information of the connections established. The collected QoS indicators are provided directly by the Linux kernel, and therefore, they are exceptionally close to real QoS values experienced by users' devices. Additionally, the PePa Ping application continuously measured other indicators related to each individual network flow, the state of the device, and the state of the Internet connection (either WiFi or Mobile). With all the collected information, each network flow can be precisely linked to a set of environmental data that provides a comprehensive contextualization of each individual connection.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical component of Internet infrastructure, as almost every activity on the Internet starts with a DNS query. Given its importance, there is increasing concern over its vulnerability to attacks and failures, as they can negatively affect all Internet-based resources. Thus, detecting these events is crucial to preserve the correct functioning of all DNS components, such as high-volume name servers for top-level domains (TLD). This article presents a near real-time Anomaly Detection Based on Prediction (AD-BoP) method, providing a useful and easily explainable methodology to effectively detect DNS anomalies. AD-BoP is based on the prediction of expected DNS traffic statistics, and could be especially helpful for TLD registry operators to preserve their services' reliability. After an exhaustive analysis, AD-BoP is shown to improve the current state-of-the-art for anomaly detection in authoritative TLD name servers.