Orange Business has been selected to provide the backbone for TESTA-EIRIS, the European Union’s next-generation communications network for moving sensitive information between institutions, agencies, and national public administrations without relying on the public internet.

The contract puts the French telecoms group inside a piece of infrastructure that rarely attracts the visibility of a cloud region or AI data centre, although it supports cross-border systems through which European administrations exchange operational data. Orange will provide the Layer 2 and Layer 3 backbone while working with the Commission’s Directorate-General for Digital Services, or DG DIGIT, which is responsible for the wider network design and operation.

According to Orange, the backbone will connect at least 12 points of presence across five European regions and is being designed for availability of 99.999%. It will combine private networking, cloud connectivity, virtual private network technology, network and security operations, and software-based services delivered through Orange Business’s Evolution Platform.

TESTA-EIRIS is not a new network created solely for the current wave of sovereignty policy. It is the next iteration of TESTA, the long-running European administrative communications infrastructure used to connect EU bodies and public authorities across national borders, with migration expected to progress as new services become available.

Modernising infrastructure beneath public services

The existing TESTA environment is deliberately separate from the public internet and has supported cross-border exchanges where security and availability are central requirements. Commission material describes applications spanning administrative collaboration and policy systems, making the network less visible than citizen-facing services but fundamental to the infrastructure on which those services can depend.

TESTA-EIRIS changes the technical model as well as the underlying contracts. DG DIGIT has designed the new architecture around modular layers covering connectivity, services, and security, while the Commission intends to retain control over design, procurement, implementation, monitoring, maintenance, and compliance rather than buying a single opaque managed network.

Orange’s role therefore sits inside a deliberately multi-layered architecture. Its backbone is one component of a larger system in which the Commission acts as an integrator, buying different network, security, hardware, and software capabilities while maintaining responsibility for how they fit together.

That approach mirrors a wider shift in European infrastructure procurement. Sovereignty has often been discussed as a question of which company owns a cloud platform or where data is stored, but public bodies are also paying closer attention to operational control, supplier concentration, network visibility, incident response, and the ability to replace individual components without rebuilding an entire service.

Software enters the network equation

Orange says its Evolution Platform will replace dedicated hardware functions with virtualised software services, allowing network capabilities to be delivered and changed more flexibly. Software-defined infrastructure can make a large public network easier to adapt, although it also concentrates importance in orchestration, identity, configuration, monitoring, and the software supply chain.

The project’s sovereignty argument is therefore less about avoiding technology from outside a particular jurisdiction and more about retaining control over the architecture and operating model. TESTA-EIRIS is being designed so that DG DIGIT can determine how services are assembled, monitor their operation, and broker them to European institutions and national administrations.

Orange’s selection also adds a major European telecoms operator to an infrastructure layer beneath several policy areas in which reliable data exchange is already essential. The Commission has described TESTA as supporting interactions between Member States, EU institutions, the UK, EFTA countries, and candidate countries, giving the replacement programme a reach beyond a single institutional network.

That breadth makes migration risk as important as the target architecture. Systems carrying administrative information cannot simply be switched off while a replacement is built, so TESTA-EIRIS has been designed around continuity during transition. Orange’s five-nines availability target reflects the expectation that the backbone will function as critical infrastructure rather than ordinary enterprise connectivity.

The development sits alongside a wider European attempt to put more strategic infrastructure under operating structures that can be governed locally. Techopia recently examined the same theme in ESA’s move to place Earth-observation data on sovereign European cloud infrastructure, although TESTA-EIRIS addresses another layer of the stack: the networks through which administrations themselves exchange information.

As migration progresses, the practical test will be whether the replacement network maintains interoperability while changing the technology underneath it. A pan-European backbone has to work across old and new systems, multiple jurisdictions, cloud environments, and security domains, and the Orange contract gives one of Europe’s largest network operators responsibility for a central part of that transition.