Capacity Magazine April / May 2019

VOL 19 ISSUE 3 APRIL/MAY 2019

Big interview Adel Hamed tells Capacity about his digital transformation plans for Telecom Egypt Feature Comms Infra - the new summit that will bring together all corners of the industry for 5G

Business intelligence for the global carrier industry

Capacity

Superhero to unite the

industry

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Global Carrier Awards 30 October 2019, London

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1st June 2019

2nd August 2019

30th August 2019

| 01

CONTENTS Capacity magazine, April/May 2019

NEWS & ANALYSIS

VOL 19 ISSUE 3 APRIL/MAY 2019

Big interview Adel Hamed tells Capacity about his digital transformation plans for Telecom Egypt Feature Comms Infra - the new summit that will bring together all corners of the industry for 5G

57 EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW

06 AFRICA

Alessandro Adriani, managing director, Ngena

10 MIDDLE EAST

58 THE BIG INTERVIEW

INNOVATION SPECIAL REPORT after page 32

Cover image: Adrian Teal, CartoonStock

Business intelligence for the global carrier industry

14 EUROPE 18 LATIN AMERICA 20 LATIN AMERICA – A

Tom Homer, head of EMEA, Telstra

30 NEW SUMMIT WILL

REGION IN TRANSITION

Superhero S u h

22 NORTH AFRICA

36 HOW TO MAINTAIN A

industry

24 ASIA AND ASIA-PACIFIC

capacitymedia.com

STRATEGIES 13 Q&A

ON THE COVER Capacity introduces the Communications Infrastructure Summit, an event converging the different telecoms sectors (page 30)

Cengiz Oztelcan, CEO, GBI

17 SPONSORED Q&A

Guy Willner, CEO, IXCellerate

CUTTING EDGE

43 POWER 100

Capacity lists 100 of the most powerful people in the industry

60 WORKING TOWARDS A

25 SPONSORED INTERVIEW Wu Congcheng, president of the consulting and service solution sales department, Huawei

36

How to maintain a cutting edge

40

Big interview: Rajiv Datta, COO, Colt

42

Sponsored Q&A: Mark Stewart, CEO, IMC

43

Power 100

ZERO TOUCH FUTURE

64 MARKET TRENDS: Network Automation

Capacity 21 EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW PEOPLE & DIARY Chris Coles, CCO - B2B and networks / wholesale, C&W Communications

Executive interview: Kyle Malady, CTO, Verizon

FEATURES BRING THE INDUSTRY TOGETHER FOR 5G

to unite the

35

AUTOMATION SPECIAL REPORT after page 54

66 APPOINTMENTS

The industry’s latest movers

67 A DAY IN THE LIFE

57

Executive interview: Alessandro Adriani, managing director, Ngena

Adel Hamed, CEO, Telecom Egypt

68 THE INNOVATION

35 EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW

5G wireless on the horizon

58

Big interview: Tom Homer, head of EMEA, Telstra

60

Working towards a zero touch future

64

Market trends: Network Automation

28 THE BIG INTERVIEW

THE BIG INTERVIEW pages 28-29

Kyle Malady, CTO, Verizon

Adel Hamed, CEO, Telecom Egypt, talks to Capacity about the company’s plans for digital transformation in line with government initiatives

Rajiv Datta, COO, Colt

40 THE BIG INTERVIEW 42 SPONSORED Q&A Mark Stewart, CEO, IMC

Paul Scott, former president, C&W Networks

REPORT

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editor’s letter | 03

A new intelligent era for 5G T

he countdown to the 5G revolution has truly begun and, with the explosion of data, connected devices, access points, digital content and the internet of things (IoT), the future of communications infrastructure is truly upon us.

The network investment strategy game of chess has already begun and, as such, Capacity has proudly launched the Comms Infra Summit, the first strategic industry meeting and debate for global infrastructure leaders to solve challenges aligned with 5G deployment. Four allied events and publishing businesses – BroadGroup, Capacity Media, Layer123 and TowerXchange – have all come together to host the event in Atlanta, Georgia, on 26 June. So if you want to find out more about it and why it’s imperative for you to attend, go to pages 30-31 for more details.

Capacity’s April/May issue contains our special reports on Innovation (from page 33) and Automation (from page 55). A new addition to our power listings series is the Power 100 (pages 43-53), which is our list of 100 of the most powerful and influential people in the wholesale telecoms sector. It was a difficult task to whittle down the list to a limited number in an industry rife with innovation at the moment.

Features included in this issue look at how to maintain a cutting edge (pages 36-37) and how carriers are inching towards zero-touch networks (pages 60-61). Through our Big Interviews Capacity hears from Telecom Egypt’s new CEO, Adel Hamed, the former head of wholesale, about his plans to transform the company as part of the government’s digital initiative (pages 28-29). Rajiv Datta, COO of Colt (pages 40-41) and Tom Homer, MD of EMEA at Telstra (pages 58-59) tell us how their respective companies are rising to the occasion when it comes to innovation and automation.

Something to add to your diaries right now are the dates for the Global Carrier Awards 2019. It will officially open for submissions on 1 June, with submissions closing on 2 August.

Capacity We’ll announce the shortlist on 30 August, and the winners will be revealed at the gala dinner in London on 30 October.

Capacity’s June/July magazine issue (with special reports on data centres and cloud) is also our International Telecoms Week issue, and it will be our biggest to date. The publishing team will be on-site at the June event in Atlanta putting together our printed Show Dailies and also conducting TV interviews, so if you’d like to find out about how to get involved in any of the above – or have any news to share – don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Follow Capacity on Twitter: @capacitymedia

Jason McGee-Abe Editor-in-Chief, Capacity Media

Follow Capacity on Facebook: www.facebook.com/capacity-media Follow Capacity on YouTube: www.youtube.com/CapacitymagazineTV Follow Capacity on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/capacity-media

Management CEO Ros Irving ros.irving@capacitymedia.com

Sales International sales manager Federico Mancini federico.mancini@capacitymedia.com

Events Product director, conferences Vanessa Barbé vanessa.barbe@capacitymedia.com

Editorial Editor-in-chief Jason McGee-Abe jason.mcgee-abe@capacitymedia. com Twitter: @JasonMcGeeAbe

International sales manager Charles Newman charles.newman@capacitymedia.com

ITW event director Ross Webster ross.webster@capacitymedia.com

Design Freelance designer Barbara Donner

Accounts Administrative assistant Ruby Ward ruby.ward@capacitymedia.com

Editor-at-large Alan Burkitt-Gray alan.burkitt@capacitymedia.com Skype: alanbg Twitter: @alanburkittgray Reporter Natalie Bannerman natalie.bannerman@capacitymedia. com Twitter: @nitnat1989

Graphic designer Samantha Heasmer samantha.heasmer@capacitymedia. com

Marketing Head of marketing Lubtcho Dimitrov lubtcho.dimitrov@capacitymedia.com

Subscription enquiries Customer services customerservices@euromoneyplc. com tel +44 20 7779 8610 fax +44 20 7779 8602 Printer Stephens and George, UK Next issue June/July 2019 Published on 1 June 2019 Directors David Pritchard (Chairman), Andrew Rashbass (CEO), Andrew Ballingal, Tristan Hillgarth, Imogen Joss, Tim Collier, Kevin Beatty, Jan Babiak, Lorna Tilbian, Colin Day, Wendy Pallot Freelance writers Gareth Willmer Guy Matthews

How to contact Capacity Capacity magazine is published by Telcap, a division of Euromoney Global Limited TelCap, 8 Bouverie Street London EC4Y 8AX, UK tel +44 20 7779 7227 (switchboard) www.capacitymedia.com Capacity (ISSN 1471-762X) is published six times a year by TelCap. Annual subscription €250, £210, $340. © TelCap, 2019. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may by reproduced, stored or introduced into any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, manual, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners Although TelCap has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of this publication, neither it nor any contributor can accept any legal responsibility whatsoever for consequences that may arise from errors or omissions or any opinions or advice given.

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With pressure on today’s networks to meet tomorrow’s intelligent world, the Communications Infrastructure Summit is the first strategic industry meeting and debate for global infrastructure leaders to solve challenges aligned with 5G deployment.

For more information contact camela.cuison@capacitymedia.com

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www.commsinfra.com 26 June 2019 // Marriott Marquis // Atlanta

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06 | africa

TELECOM EGYPT AND MICROSOFT EXTEND CLOUD NETWORK TO EGYPT

T

elecom Egypt is to offer low-latency connectivity into and across Egypt to help enhance performance and increase reliability for customers of Microsoft services.

The partnership between the two will increase Microsoft’s reach into the Egyptian market as well as improving connectivity across North Africa and the Middle East.

“We are pleased to partner with Microsoft as it represents one of the first steps toward our strategic digital transformation plan,” said Adel Hamed, CEO of Telecom Egypt. “Telecom Egypt’s geographical position and its digital infrastructure will enable major cloud providers such as Microsoft to enhance their reach to consumers and enterprises in Egypt as well as reach other markets.”

The new enhanced network presence in Egypt will connect through Microsoft’s global network to transatlantic and trans-Arabian paths, which will improve connectivity across North Africa and the Middle East, including enhancing connectivity to the new Microsoft cloud

regions in development in South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

“Through our collaboration with Telecom Egypt, we are extending Microsoft’s global network in Egypt and improving connectivity across North Africa and the Middle East,” added Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president of Azure networking at Microsoft.

“We are continuously investing to increase the size, speed, reliability and intelligence of Microsoft’s global network to help enable the digital transformation of organisations and enterprises locally and abroad.”

The new point of presence (PoP) in Egypt will benefit from a direct connection to Microsoft’s global infrastructure, giving access to numerous services for its customers. Microsoft’s investment in the region will increase capacity and use the latest in network innovation for the delivery of Microsoft services in Egypt.

Amr Talaat, Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, said: “Egypt is moving Capacity forward to become a global digital path

Adel Hamed: Digital transformation

in the light of its unique characteristics, especially its geographical location overlooking the Red and Mediterranean seas. The ministry is committed to the development of the telecom and information technology industry in Egypt, and appreciates partnerships that empower local institutions and drive business development.”

The news comes after Telecom Egypt and Vodafone Egypt signed two ten-year transmission and infrastructure agreements with a total value of 10.85 billion Egyptian pounds ($618 million).

See interview with Adel Hamed, pages 28-29

ALGERIA GOES LIVE WITH $32M MEDEX BRANCH CABLE The government of Algeria has launched its $32 million branch subsea cable called Medex, connecting the country to international data markets.

This is a joint project between PCCW Global and Algérie Télécom, which also operate the branch cable. Algeria has connected its existing optical-fibre network to the subsea cable giving it connections to US and Asia, across the Mediterranean.

Medex joins up with TE North, TGNEurasia, SEACOM and Alexandros, a 3,634km cable system that lands in

Abu Talat, Egypt; Marseille, France; Pentaskhinos, Cyprus and now Annaba, Algeria. Medex was built and installed by Alcatel-Lucent. The branch cable has a total length of 184km.

The entire system is consortium led, owned by Telecom Egypt, Cyta, SEACOM, Tata Communications and now PCCW Global and Algérie Télécom.

The news follows an announcement by Houda-Imane Faraoun, Algeria’s minister of post, telecommunications, technology and digital, while speaking to the member of the council of the nation said that

Algeria’s existing international submarine cables ““will be reinforced, before the end of the year, by two new lines”.

During the launch ceremony in Annaba, Faraoun said that the 8Tbps cable will enable “the country to become a continental hub and a digital portal at the African level in terms of ICT”.

She added that the system will “strengthen the country’s position as a hub of the ICT sectors. This will allow the national network of the internet to be completely secure thanks to three different sea cables.”

NEWS IN BRIEF OneWeb has secured $1.25 billion investment, enabling the company to accelerate the development of “the first truly global communications network” by 2021.

A Juniper Research study claims rich communications suite (RCS) traffic will have an average annual growth of 290% over the next four years.

Synergy Research Group figures show the overall colocation market grew in revenue by 10% in 2018.

Hyperscale operators grew by 24% in the wholesale segment of the market and by 16% in the retail segment.

Inmarsat has accepted a $3.4 billion takeover bid from a private equity-led consortium. The news

comes after Inmarsat joined forces with Microsoft to enable global access to its Azure IoT cloud services via satellite connectivity.

More than 100 operators in 52 countries have already launched one of the main two low-power networks for the internet of things (IoT), according to a Global Mobile Suppliers Association report.

april/may 2019

SPONSORED STATEMENT

| 07

DARE1 SUBSEA CABLE PROJECT ENTERS MANUFACTURING STAGE The marine survey location, Djibouti Telecom, as the incumbent carrier, has been able for the Djibouti to position itself as one of the most important east African telecoms Africa Regional players, able to connect a range of wholesale and enterprise customers Express 1 to diverse areas of the globe. The carrier’s fully resilient international (DARE1) network backs up a complete portfolio of voice, data/IP and capacity submarine cable services. system has been Djibouti Telecom has now augmented this status by putting in completed and the service in a new generation of international infrastructures in the cable route form of the Asia-Africa- Europe-1 (AAE-1) and South East Asiafinalised. The Middle East-Western Europe 5 (SEA-ME-WE 5) systems, adding to project is the multitude of submarine connectivity options in which it already progressing on has a stake. schedule with the Demand between Europe and Asia looks set to grow further as marine survey Asia’s emerging markets keep investing to make internet connections completed on faster and more accessible for the benefit of both fixed and mobile Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed, Director January 21, 2019.Capacity users. It is not all about capacity though, with network diversity of International Business, and Chairman Management Committee DARE1 Manufacturing of being another major priority in network planning today. In order to the undersea cables have continuity of services for security and efficiency, it is vital that and repeaters will a multitude of route options, such as what Djibouti Telecom offers, begin in April 2019 and the system will be ready for commercial can be supplied. traffic in June 2020. The DARE1 cable system is the first step in a The company’s diverse portfolio of services includes IP transit, planned expansion into eastern Africa and it will have a finalised which is now faster and more reliable than ever for the benefit of route length of 4,747km. customers in areas like content delivery, fixed and mobile telecoms.

DARE1, which will deliver up to 36Tbps of capacity to East With a network footprint covering the major locations in Europe and Africa, will facilitate connectivity from Mombassa to Djibouti. It Asia, Djibouti Telecom makes IP transit and backhaul connections will create the shortest route from east Africa to Europe via Djibouti quick and efficient through direct connectivity with all the major and its network topology substantially improves the network latency, internet carriers in Marseille, UAE, Singapore, London and Nairobi. providing a cost-effective, diverse route between Kenya and Europe.

Djibouti Telecom’s ambition is to continue to fulfil its role as a DARE1’s open access and carrier-neutral data centres will have a big unique gateway for millions of customers in the region and beyond, impact in the countries connected to the cable system. meeting the fast growing demand for international bandwidth now DARE1 is a consortium comprised of Djibouti Telecom, Somtel and in the future.

Group and Telkom Kenya, as a landing party in Kenya and a Djibouti Telecom is also connected to Interxion in Marseille, strategic partner for connectivity within eastern African landlocked Epsilon in London, datamena and SmartHub in the Gulf, Global countries.

Switch and Equinix in Singapore, Djibouti Data Center in Djibouti DARE1 is a repeatered submarine cable system providing and the East Africa Data Center in Nairobi. connectivity between Djibouti (Djibouti) and Mombasa (Kenya), with stubbed branches to Bosaso (Somalia), and Mogadishu (Somalia). The solution presented and designed by TE SubCom includes a combination of equipment and technologies to meet the overall objectives for DARE1.

This new cable positions Djibouti Telecom as a regional hub for the operators in neighbouring countries - like Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia - helping to enable the modernisation of their telecom infrastructures. In terms of emerging technologies - 4G, the Internet of Things (IoT) and globalised enterprises - data will definitely fill the network tubes in terms of access and metro networks.

The Republic of Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, is 23,000km squared with a population of just fewer than a million citizens.

Djibouti’s privileged geographical position at the crossroads of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe give it immense significance as a vital hub on the global communications superhighway.

Taking full advantage of the country’s historically important capacitymedia.com

08 | africa

SAFARICOM UPGRADES 500KM BACKBONE TO 400G TECHNOLOGY

K

enya’s Safaricom is to upgrade its 100Gbps fibre backbone to 400Gbps, to cater for the increasing amount of video being transmitted over the network.

Safaricom, a subsidiary of Vodacom which is ultimately part of the Vodafone Group, says it has experienced a fourfold growth in average data usage in just two years – from 160MB to

640MB per customer per month.

Safaricom’s CTO, Thibaud Rerolle, said: “The 400G solution will support the continued growth of our network which is being driven by an explosion in internet usage.”

He added: “Mobile data usage on our network has been doubling year-on-year while our fibre network now reaches more than 220,000 homes and 17,000

MAINONE TO PARTNER WITH FACEBOOK IN METRO FIBRE PROJECTS ACROSS NIGERIA

Funke Opeke: Broadband innovation

MainOne has announced it will build and operate a metro fibre infrastructure project in two states of Nigeria, with support from Facebook.

The infrastructure collaboration is part of Facebook’s efforts to connect more people to broadband internet. As part of this project, MainOne is building and operating approximately 750km of terrestrial fibre infrastructure in the Edo and Ogun states.

Funke Opeke, CEO of MainOne, lauded the collaboration and the

commitment of Facebook and authorities in Nigeria to improve broadband penetration across the country.

“MainOne has always been committed to broadband innovation, job creation, as well as growing the digital economy of west Africa,” she said.

“We believe that this partnership and the open-access network we have developed will be beneficial to improving the quality of access and accelerating the digital transformation in Ogun Capacity and Edo states.”

These open-access transport networks will provide metro fibre connectivity to reach more than one million people in Benin City, Abeokuta, Sagamu and 10 other towns by connecting mobile operators’ base stations, internet service providers, points of presence and public locations including schools and hospitals.

This partnership will leverage MainOne’s strength as a wholesale telecoms infrastructure service provider with investment from Facebook and support from local regulatory and state authorities to further deepen broadband penetration in Nigeria.

businesses across more than ten towns.

It was therefore prudent to invest in the latest network technology to ensure that we can support the demand from our customers for years to come.”

The upgraded network, which is 500km long, will be supplied by Huawei.

Safaricom has also laid more than 5,500km of fibre linking its mobile masts in more than 16 major towns.

WINGU.AFRICA TO EXPAND BEYOND DJIBOUTI AND KENYA Wingu.africa, east Africa’s first multicountry carrier-neutral data centre group, plans to extend its reach beyond Djibouti and the capital of Kenya, Nairobi, through new data centre builds and acquisitions.

Wingu.africa’s expansion will commence with at least $25 million of investment in Djibouti and Kenya, where two new data centres will be built, resulting in capacity of more than 1,000 racks.

In order to satisfy the explosive demand for carrier-neutral data centres, the group intends to make significant additional investment in capacity such that it is present in at least seven key east African countries within the coming three years.

The group is founded and owned by the executive management team of the Djibouti Data Center (DDC). As part of its regional growth strategy, Wingu.africa has entered into a strategic partnership with Kenya’s Safaricom.

Not only does Safaricom have the widest and strongest network coverage, but is also home to the outstanding mobile money service M-PESA.

BICS AND MTN EXTEND BILATERAL PARTNERSHIP BICS and MTN have extended their long-term commercial partnership, which started back in 2009 and was renewed in 2014.

“Over the last few years, MTN has built a pan-African and Middle East network to support MTN customers’ growing needs for data and connectivity,” said Jens Schulte-Bochum, MTN group COO. Under the terms of the extended partnership, which came into effect on 1 March 2019, MTN will progressively insource the transport and management of its traffic within the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, while BICS will remain MTN’s preferred provider for

international voice and messaging services globally.

Schulte-Bochum said: “MTN has been satisfied with BICS’s services over the last ten years. We are very happy to benefit from the market position and expertise of one of the world leading carriers, in full complementarity with the capabilities we are developing.”

In addition, BICS will also continue to be MTN’s primary provider of mobility services until MTN develops a platform of its own.

Both parties will also leverage MTN’s assets and customer base in the MEA region, such as infrastructure services.

Jens Schulte-Bochum: Happy with BICS

april/may 2019

africa | 09

LIQUID TELECOM CHOSES NOKIA TO DEPLOY 100G CHANNEL NETWORK IN EAST AFRICA

SEACOM SEALS FIBRECO ACQUISITION

Liquid Telecom Kenya, part of the large African telecoms group, has entered into a two-year partnership with Nokia to upgrade its existing fibre network.

Under the terms of the agreement, the new upgrade will support OTN/DWDM technology with an initial network capacity of 500G. This is turn will result in a faster and more reliable connection along the route from the Indian Ocean to data centres in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and other neighbouring countries.

“We believe that every individual on the African continent has the right to be connected, said Ben Roberts, CTO of Liquid Telecom. “This is the vision that has been driving our network expansion across Africa.

By teaming up with Nokia, we have been able to quickly adapt to the industry’s rapid growth within the region and greater access to our high-speed fibre network and cloud services across east Africa.”

He added: “This comes at a time when more mobile operators are planning to increase their backbone bandwidth as they

SEACOM has concluded an agreement for the acquisition of FibreCo Telecommunications by its South African affiliate.

FibreCo owns and operates a national open access dark fibre network, providing infrastructure, connectivity and services across South Africa. The acquisition is subject to approval by the South African Competition Commission.

This acquisition represents another major milestone towards SEACOM achieving its vision to expand its African footprint through the consolidation of fibre assets. SEACOM believes this is necessary for the evolution of the market, particularly as the industry moves into the 5G era, with its requirement for pervasive fibre networks.

The FibreCo acquisition significantly strengthens SEACOM’s operations in South Africa by creating a platform for the expansion of its business services. It enables the delivery of high-speed internet connectivity and cloud products into smaller cities and towns across the country, which have typically been under-serviced.

Ben Roberts: Rapid industry growth

prepare for 5G, which is driving the demand for high speed city to city internet links.”

The network transformation, which will be powered by the Nokia 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS), enables Liquid Telecom to meet the growing demand from its carrier, mobile operator and internet service provider customers, for high capacity internetwork services.

Additionally, the network will support high-capacity connections from the submarine landing stations in Mombasa, Kenya, to major data centres in Nairobi, Kenya, plus Uganda and Rwanda, as well as surrounding markets.

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10 | middle east

OMANTEL LAUNCHES INTERNATIONAL WHOLESALE UNIT TO EXPAND GLOBAL SERVICE OFFERING

O

mantel Wholesale has launched an international wholesale company called Omantel International (OTI).

OTI will manage the international voice business of Omantel, supporting partners and customers, to deliver simple and streamlined access to new and existing global voice solutions.

It was incorporated with a seamless migration of its customers in Q2 2018 and will see a growing number of voice agreements and other services added to its portfolio in the near future.

“Omantel is growing and there is tremendous momentum behind our

business,” said Baha Allawati, general manager of carrier and roaming services at Omantel. “We have created this international entity to continue supporting our global customers with the best possible service and offerings that address their needs. The creation of OTI is a milestone for our business and demonstrates our commitment to offering global solutions that can adopt, evolve and proactively shape our customers’ demand, and furnish them with differentiated experience.”

He added: “I’m extremely proud of our team. They have been exceptional in delivering the strategy and execution in

ZAIN TO SELL AND LEASE BACK 8,100 TOWERS IN $672M INFRASTRUCTURE DEAL WITH IHS The board of directors of Zain Saudi Arabia (Zain KSA) has signed an agreement to sell and lease back the passive physical infrastructure of its mobile tower portfolio to IHS Holding (IHS) for around SAR 2.52 billion ($672 million).

The deal, which was first announced in November, will see the sale of the Zain KSA’s infrastructure of 8,100 mobile telecommunication towers located in prime and strategic locations across the kingdom.

There will be a leaseback period of 15 years, with a five-year renewal option. It includes the building of an additional 1,500 new towers over the next six years.

“Zain KSA is transforming financially, operationally, and strategically, and this evolution is aimed at the operator emerging as a more successful digital lifestyle services provider and delivering additional shareholder value,” said Bader Al Kharafi, Zain vice chairman and group CEO and Zain KSA vice chairman. “Our agreement

Capacity

Bader Al Kharafi: Pioneering IHS deal

with IHS is pioneering in many respects, not least in the way it allows us to reduce debt and free up capital to invest in other areas of the business focused on customer satisfaction and service delivery.”

He added: “We see this milestone agreement as extremely beneficial to all stakeholders. We are ... among the first in the region to embrace it.”

BATELCO AND AMS-IX PARTNER TO LAUNCH NEW IX Batelco and AMS-IX have entered into a strategic partnership to launch a new internet exchange (IX) in Bahrain.

The new facility will act as a neutral internet traffic exchange platform, interconnecting global networks in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region.

“AMS-IX is delighted to enter into the partnership to work with Batelco, as a leading telecom provider in the region,” said Peter van Burgel, CEO of AMS-IX. “We believe that Batelco is a good fit for AMS-IX as Batelco’s current digital ecosystem makes the company the most viable partner of choice for us and we are

confident that Batelco is capable of making the new internet exchange into a leading IX platform.”

Van Burgel and Adel Al-Daylami, Batelco’s chief global business officer, signed the agreement at officer at Bahrain International Circuit during the Formula 1 event.

Al-Daylami said that Batelco is pleased to sign with AMS-IX to support Batelco’s efforts to contribute toward the development and enhancement of internet services across the region, interconnecting regional internet providers and operators, localising and retaining regional traffic and ultimately enhancing user experience.

Baha Allawati: Supporting customers

such a short pace of time. ... Other services would potentially be also incorporated in the near future.”

ES’HAILSAT, QATAR SATELLITE COMPANY, AND BRIDGESAT TO LAUNCH SATELLITE BROADBAND SERVICES Three companies – Es’hailSat, Qatar Satellite Company and BridgeSat – have entered into a strategic partnership to provide businesses and governments across the Middle East with laser-based satellite broadband services.

The news aligns itself with BridgeSat’s goal of providing global organisations with a faster, less expensive and secure alternative to traditional radio frequency (RF) solutions for low earth orbit (LEO) and geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellite applications.

“Our new relationship with Es’hailSat gives us a critical gateway to the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region and is a major milestone towards our goal of providing organisations worldwide with fast, secure, enterprisegrade broadband services,” said Barry Matsumori, CEO of Denver-based BridgeSat. “Like Es’hailSat, we see partnerships with innovative companies worldwide as key for revolutionising satellite communications,” said Matsumori, a former SpaceX executive.

Under the terms of the partnership, BridgeSat will build its first optical ground stations (OGSs) for the Middle East that will be co-located at Es’hailSat’s new satellite operations centre in Doha, Qatar.

The new OGS will support LEO and other satellite systems owned by Es’hailSat and other companies that are equipped with BridgeSat and other compatible space terminals. april/may 2019

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12 | middle east

CMC NETWORKS PARTNERS WITH DU TO PROVIDE PROTECTED ROUTE CMC Networks has announced a highspeed, low-latency route between Djibouti and Dubai, in partnership with du.

Combining the strengths of CMC and du will create a simple, effective and seamless one-stop-shop for MPLS and capacity services, allowing cost-effective connectivity between Africa and datamena’s DX1 data centre.

“CMC Networks already provides and enables connectivity and solutions across the entire African continent and Middle East region. However, this opportunity with du aids CMC Networks to add vital capacity on to the network, ensuring enhanced quality and low latency in our network,” said Marisa Trisolino, CEO of CMC. “This is a unique occasion in facilitating UAE and African trade and investment.”

Ananda Bose, chief wholesale and corporate affairs officer at EITC, added:

CMC Networks and du executives mark agreement for a new low-latency route

“This commercial partnership seamlessly connects datamena in the UAE to over 78 CMC PoPs across 50 African countries, significantly enhancing datamena as the leading hub for telecommunications within

VIVA BAHRAIN PICKS ETISALAT’S SMARTHUB TO EXPAND GLOBAL REACH

Ali Amiri: Expanding customer portfolio

VIVA Bahrain signed a partnership at Capacity Middle East 2019 to use Etisalat’s SmartHub to establish global connectivity that will further expand its global reach.

Etisalat SmartHub is a carrier-grade data centre, strategically located at Etisalat’s submarine cable landing in Fujairah, offering seamless regional and international connectivity. SmartHub provides IX and

IPX exchanges for carriers and content Capacity providers, as well as mobile network operators delivering high performance and reliability.

“VIVA is honoured to sign this strategic partnership with Etisalat. Such agreements are important milestones to our global expansion strategy where we strengthen VIVA Bahrain’s position as a dynamic carrier with global reach,” said Mohammed Al Khushail, acting CEO of VIVA Bahrain.

Ali Amiri, chief carrier and wholesale officer for the Etisalat group, added: “Etisalat is honoured to have added yet another major telecom services operator into our expanding portfolio of customers, and we look forward to a continued long and mutually beneficial relationship with VIVA Bahrain.

This partnership will add greater value to the SmartHub platform further enriching our global network and connectivity propositions.”

the MEA [Middle East and Africa] region.

We look forward to continuing to develop our relationship with CMC to jointly serve our customers and grow together locally, regionally and around the world.”

LIMELIGHT TO TAKE 100GE PORT TO JEDIX Saudi Telecom Company (STC) and LINX have announced that Limelight has provided a letter of intent that will take the first 100GE port on JEDIX. JEDIX, the KSA Internet Exchange powered by LINX, is situated in Jeddah.

The agreement, which is subject to a final commercial agreement, will also see Limelight deploy its first Saudi Arabian node in STC’s data centre MG1 (MENA Gateway) as part of forming a new partnership with STC. “With the creation of JEDIX we believe this will help increase the flow of internet traffic within the KSA and the surrounding region. Therefore a new CDN PoP will help improve the delivery of internet content,” said Limelight.

STC and LINX said they are looking forward to working with Limelight in support of their new node and a better KSA internet experience.

BATELCO SIGNS AGREEMENT FOR MARSEILLE POP WITH INTERXION Batelco has signed an agreement with Interxion to deploy a new point of presence (PoP) in Marseille. The agreement, signed at Capacity Middle East, is expected to expand Batelco’s presence to accommodate the growing demand for internet bandwidth and content in Bahrain and the region.

“This step forms part of Batelco’s efforts to seek new ways of enhancing customer experience and providing them with innovative solutions, as the company has

always aspired to provide the latest digital and technical solutions to its customers in the kingdom in line with Bahrain’s Economic Vision 2030,” said Adel Daylami, chief global business officer of Batelco.

The agreement will enable route diversity via terrestrial and submarine cables as well as position Batelco as a regional provider for IP transit. Presently, the majority of traffic in demand in Bahrain and the region is content that is available in Europe.

Batelco and Interxion: Marseille deal

april/may 2019

q&a: cengiz oztelcan | 13

- GBI AT THE FOREFRONT OF INNOVATION CAPACITY SPOKE TO CENGIZ OZTELCAN, CEO OF GULF BRIDGE INTERNATIONAL, ABOUT THE COMPANY’S STRATEGIC PRIORITIES IN THE MIDDLE EASTERN REGION Q. What are your strategic priorities over the year, and what major trends do you see occurring in the Middle Eastern market?

Q. What makes the Middle East region an attractive market for Gulf Bridge International (GBI) to operate in?

The Middle East still enjoys a significant year-on-year growth in wholesale data and enterprise services.

GBI’s advanced network in the region puts it in a strategic position to deliver these services with the highest quality and lowest latency for both carriers and enterprise customers. GBI understands the specific dynamics of the Middle East market and tailors its solutions to meet the requirements.

GBI named Cengiz Oztelcan, the former Linxa and TTI executive, as its new chief executive officer in November 2018.

Oztelcan is a 23-year industry veteran, having held senior management roles in sales, marketing and corporate development in the telecoms and IT space.

Oztelcan was CEO at Linxa and has sat on the board of governors for the Pacific Telecoms Council (PTC) for over two years. He spent almost four years as CEO at Türk Telekom International, where he also served as chief marketing and sales officer. He also worked for the

capacitymedia.com

We are focusing on advancing our product portfolio while keeping customer satisfaction and quality at the top of our minds. We also look for ways to further increase our footprint through new routes that provide diversity and choice to our customers. We expect to make several announcements on new partnerships and product launches.

The Middle East region is successfully transitioning fromCapacity being followers to being at the forefront of innovators. We will continue to see global companies’ presence increasing in the region and regional companies’ presence increasing globally.

Q. What are some of the challenges of operating in the Middle Eastern market, and how do you overcome these?

The Middle East has a unique way of doing business which heavily relies upon your reputation and credibility. Many of your customers are also your suppliers and maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship is key to long-term sustainable

Türk Telekom Group and has held roles with Intel and Boeing.

Commenting on his appointment last year, Oztelcan said: “I’m very excited by the opportunity to join a growing and dynamic company with a great potential.

I am confident that with the tremendous support of our shareholders and the quality of the entire GBI team, we will continue to innovate and delight our customers, partners and suppliers. GBI is in a very unique position to shape the industry and deliver end-to-end highquality solutions to our customers. I am honoured to have the opportunity to lead the GBI team at this exciting time.”

business. However, as in any other place, the best way to prevail in business is to make your customers happy and being regarded as a valuable partner.

GBI takes pride in both of these values and strives to challenge itself to continuously improve.

Additionally, the regulatory environment in the region may pose many challenges but maintaining an open communication platform with the local authorities for the benefit of the respective countries help overcome these challenges.

Q. Why did GBI attend the recent Capacity Middle East 2019 event?

We love to see our customers, partners and vendors all in one place over a few days where we not only talk about business opportunities but also work together to contribute to the advancement of the region.

We are also going through some significant transitions at GBI and it was great to inform the industry on these developments.

Lastly, we are fully committed to the Middle East region and would like to reinforce this message to the whole community.

Abdulla Al Rwaili, executive director and managing director of GBI, said: “We are delighted to announce that Cengiz has joined GBI as our new CEO. Under Cengiz’s leadership, we are convinced that the business will continue to grow and GBI will become a prominent player in the global telecommunications industry.

“He will provide strategic vision and operational excellence to keep GBI and our customers ahead of today’s rapid pace of change and will ensure we r emain at the forefront of tomorrow’s connected world.”

14 | europe

TTI PICKS DE-CIX ISTANBUL AS ITS IXP IN TURKEY

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ürk Telekom International (TTI) has expanded its collaboration in Turkey with DE-CIX Istanbul with global internet exchange services.

TTI has become an authorised reseller of DE-CIX Istanbul products and services and joined the DE-CIX Istanbul platform for internet exchange services.

DE-CIX Istanbul, already active in the Turkish market and currently operating within five data centres and more than 20 connected networks, will become the internet exchange point (IXP) of Türk Telekom International in Turkey with its services, particularly in internet exchange and cloud services.

“We believe that the cooperation with DE-CIX Istanbul will provide a valuable asset to further expand our business in the region,” said Mehmet Toros, CEO of Türk Telekom International.

“This agreement also underlines TTI’s commitment to position Istanbul as the regional data hub. In today’s competitive telecommunication market, it is very

important to include alternative services to provide complete commercial offerings, and this is a very good example.”

Türk Telekom International already offers a wide range of services, including wholesale as well as telecommunication service offerings to alternative carriers, mobile operators, cable TV companies, internet service providers and corporate customers such as internet and data services, infrastructure and voice services.

It will now entrust DE-CIX Istanbul with the quality and safety of its internet traffic in Turkey.

Bülent Şen, DE-CIX Turkey regional director, said: “Türk Telekom International is an organisation that operates not only in our country but also from Europe to Asia in internet and data services. With its experience and vision, I am sure that it will play a major role in expanding the DE-CIX products and services as our authorised dealer.” Şen added: “Our global collaboration

Mehmet Toros: Valuable asset to expand

will now expand to Turkey and it is a major step towards bringing the internet services to the quality Turkey deserves.

This move will be the first of many new steps within the region in terms of the internet exchange point services.”

Capacity

EPSILON INTERCONNECTS WITH NETHERLANDS-BASED NL-IX TO EXPAND ITS EUROPEAN PEERING FOOTPRINT

Jerzy Szlosarek: Increased peering choice

Epsilon has partnered with NL-ix, a pan-European interconnect exchange, to provide on-demand access to its internet exchange point (IXP).

Users of Infiny, Epsilon’s on-demand connectivity platform, will get a simple, cost-effective and secure way to peer with NL-ix members across Europe.

“NL-ix makes a fantastic addition to our global interconnect fabric and gives our partners increased choice when peering in Europe from anywhere on our global network,” said Jerzy Szlosarek, CEO at Epsilon.

“The integration of our on-demand

network with NL-ix provides our partners with peering access from global hubs like London, Frankfurt and Paris. We are constantly growing our ecosystem with new IXs to deliver the full benefit of peering remotely from a single platform.”

The news aligns itself with NL-ix’s goal to grow its local internet exchanges (IXs) in the north-western European region.

NL-ix is based in The Hague, the capital of the Netherlands.

The collaboration with Epsilon will enable more peering partners to reach its IXPs from around the world, adding to its existing ecosystem.

TELIA CARRIER AND TELXIUS ENTER MULTI-TERABIT CAPACITY DEAL Telia Carrier and Telxius have entered into an agreement for multi-terabit capacity services joining together capacity from Telxius’s Marea cable and Telia Carrier’s European network.

“This partnership was perfect for us and we’re confident that our combined strengths will contribute to realising the full potential of the Marea subsea cable system,” said Enrique Valdés, vice president of sales at Telxius.

Ivo Pascucci, vice president of sales at Telia Carrier, added: “This is one of the

largest European capacity projects in recent years. By combining our extensive European network across 100 points of presence (PoPs) in Europe with Telxius’s Spanish footprint and the Marea cable system, this is a perfect, end-to-end fit.”

Pascucci added: “Apart from the obvious benefits of additional capacity and lower latency within Europe and towards the US, we are delighted to work with such a strong partner in this and other projects.”

Enrique Valdés: Full potential of Marea

april/may 2019

Capacity

16 | europe

EPIX LAUNCHES NODE IN EDGECONNEX’S WARSAW DATA CENTRE EdgeConneX has confirmed that EPIX, an independent IP traffic exchange node in Poland, has deployed a node in its Warsaw data centre.

“We are honoured to support EPIX as an independent internet exchange point in our Warsaw facility,” said Dick Theunissen, managing director for EMEA at EdgeConneX. “Inclusion of the EPIX node will expand the number of operators available in the data centre, which will in turn increase its availability. As a result, our customers will increase the traffic at EPIX and provide it with new content.”

EdgeConneX’s customer base consists of network, content and cloud service providers that require robust solutions to support their local and latency-sensitive requirements in central and eastern Europe.

“This investment will help further expand the EPIX initiative while providing increased opportunities to potential members,” said Krzysztof Czuszek, a member of the E-Południe Association. “This step also further solidifies EdgeConneX’s standing as a

Dick Theunissen: Increase EPIX traffic

premier data centre and interconnection hub in Europe.”

They said the increased adoption of hybrid cloud, plus data regulations and the ability to be the gateway into neighbouring countries are key drivers of demand in Europe. As a result, Warsaw is well positioned as of the digital leaders in the region. The news also aligns itself with EdgeConneX’s strategic expansion goals in the region.

Capacity

Empowering digital life.

A1 Telekom Austria Group paves the way to a worldwide connection with a comprehensive solution portfolio.

A1.group/wholesale

AVELACOM PICKS INTERXION AS IRISH DATA CENTRE PARTNER Avelacom has selected Interxion, a European provider of carrier and cloud-neutral colocation data centre services, as its data centre partner of choice in its move into the Irish market.

As Dublin’s financial industry continues to thrive with the growth of financial technology, banking and cryptocurrencies, Avelacom says it is launching its latest point of presence (PoP) in the city to meet the growing demand in the Irish market and to extend its low-latency network to the capital.

“The most innovative financial firms around the world need to access Dublin because of its growing cryptocurrency trading platforms,” said Aleksey Larichev, CEO of Avelacom. “At the same time more established financial services companies including banks are increasing or establishing a presence in Dublin.”

In choosing a partner to expand within Dublin, it said Interxion’s international and local experience in the financial industry was a key deciding factor.

SPONSORED Q&A

| 17

THE DIGITAL GATEWAY TO RUSSIA AND CIS THE DIGITALIZATION AND INCREASED COMMERCIAL DEMANDS FOR CLOUD PLATFORMS ENABLE FURTHER GROWTH OF IXCELLERATE WITHIN RUSSIAN FEDERATION. SIX YEARS ON FROM ITS FOUNDATION, IXCELLERATE HAS BECOME ONE OF RUSSIA’S TOP DATA CENTRES, MEETING ALL STANDARDS AND PRINCIPLES OF EDGE COMPUTING, PROVIDING ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY AND ǧ

Q. As we know IXcellerate begun work on its second data centre in Moscow as part of a $260 million five-year investment plan. Can you explain this investment plan and what is driving it?

or so but is still small with two points of presence currently. The peak traffic currently is reaching 60Gbit. We have some great plans ahead for this part of our business.

Q. What unique opportunities are there in Russian data centre market and how is IXcellerate capitalising on these?

The demand for secure data storage and processing is increasing After 6 years of operations globally every year and growth in Russia is no exception. For any on Russia we had made a real developed economy, commercial data centers are as important name for ourselves and had Capacity today as railways were for the Industrial Revolution of the 19th over 45 networks connected at century. our Moscow One Datacentre.

A very big and unique situation here is that we can play in both At that point, we reviewed the Highly-Connected retail colocation space and the Hypercloud the burgeoning Russia and wholesale space, as none of the usual players (Equinix, Keppel, CIS market (Russia is Europe’s largest single internet user base, Digital Realty etc) are present in this huge market. Annual DC in excess of 100m) and decided we needed some expansion. Our growth is expected to be at 20%+ for the next 5 years as Russia customers thought so too. catches up with its neighbours.

According to the business plan, IXcellerate’s total capacity will exceed 15,000 racks by 2023, making up to 25% of the local market. The company will operate the existing Moscow One Q. What is the roadmap for the company over the next 12 Datacentre and manage at least 4 additional sites. The largest months? campus will accommodate up to 10,000 racks within its data halls.

Much more capacity as we begin hosting some of the world’s major hyperscalers. More connectivity and increasing use of our valuable ecosystems by our many customers. More peering in both traffic Q. Last year we know that IXcellerate partnered with Telia and locations. And perhaps we will start our expansion path to the Carrier to offer Telia’s portfolio of IP and transport services regions. Russia has 12 cities with over a million population. As a in IXcellerate’s Moscow facility. How is this partnership contract Germany has 3 and France only one. progressing and what was the key driver of this collaboration?

Partnerships have always been key to us and in previous companies I worked with (IXEurope, Equinix, Teraco) this was a key part of our strategy. Telia has a great network presence in Russia and, as one of the few carriers brave enough to extend into this market, has done very well in a number of sectors including hypercloud, banking and gaming.

Q. IXcellerate’s in-house peering platform – Eurasia Peering IX has doubled its peer base since its modernisation in April 2018. What has caused this high uptake of peering services and what is the significance of this milestone?

This was customer-driven; many of our clients look for alternatives to the main Rostelecom-owned peering platform.

Within a country as big as Russia, serious players must have dualoperator peering. Eurasia Peering is growing well at 10% a month capacitymedia.com

18 | latam

NEUTRONA NETWORKS EXPANDS ITS MANAGED CLOUD CONNECT SERVICE OFFERING TO INCLUDE IBM CLOUD ACCESS

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eutrona Networks is partnering with IBM Cloud to offer its enterprise customers access to IBM Cloud’s global network, by IBM Cloud Direct Link to its existing Managed Cloud Connect Services.

“Our customers can now enjoy direct connectivity to the IBM Cloud to access their most important office applications at speeds as high as 10Gbps,” said Luciano Salata, co-founder of Neutrona Networks.

“This reflects our ongoing commitment to provide our customers with the best options available as they choose private network connectivity for their public, private or hybrid cloud ecosystems.”

Since the launch of its Managed Cloud Connect Service in 2018, Neutrona has enhanced its offering, making it easier for enterprise customers to use high-speed network connections to link their existing IT infrastructures with cloud computing environments. This collaboration with IBM means that Neutrona customers who already use IBM services can quickly

expand their data networks anywhere within the Americas while retaining access to the IBM Cloud.

“As businesses enter the next phase of the cloud journey, adopting a hybrid cloud strategy can help generate new business value and optimise critical processes,” said Gabriel Montanti, global offering executive at IBM Cloud. “IBM is collaborating with Neutrona through the growing IBM Cloud Direct Link service provider programme to help enterprises reliably move their data with security between the cloud and onpremises environments.”

Neutrona joins the likes of Colt, SES Networks, Digital Realty, Megaport and Interxion that all offer direct connectivity options to IBM Cloud.

“Our collaboration with IBM offers further proof that Neutrona is committed to ensuring that our customers have access to the latest technological solutions offered in the world,” said Mateo Ward, co-founder of Neutrona Networks. “We will continue to re-write the rules of wholesale data transport

Luciano Salata: Direct connectivity

services in Latin America, so that we can provide international telecommunications carriers and Fortune 500 enterprise companies a bridge into our world.”

Capacity

SPARKLE EXPANDS ITS LATAM FOOTPRINT WITH NEW POP IN BOGOTÁ Sparkle has expanded its network reach with a new point of presence (PoP) in Bogotá, Colombia.

The new PoP will be located at an Equinix data centre, adding to the existing one in Cartagena.

The move with strengthen the performance of Sparkle’s global Tier-1 IP transit service, Seabone, in addition to providing high-speed internet

connectivity to the local market as well as to international OTTs, ISPs, content and application providers.

The company will offer a suite of portfolio services via the new Bogotá PoP. These include a DDoS attack service – which grants Seabone customers the option to protect their network – as well as a virtual NAP solution, which allows customers to access the main internet

exchange points (IXPs) without the need for building any proprietary infrastructure.

Sparkle first launched its Cartagena PoP in January 2019, in response to growing demand for capacity services in Colombia, delivering local and international network providers, ISPs, content players and OTTs with transport solutions up to 100Gb through Sparkle’s City2City service.

NJFX EXPANDS REACH INTO LATAM WITH NETIX CARRIER ETHERNET DEAL

Felix Seda: Strategic partnership

NJFX is expanding the reach of its global ecosystem into the Latin American market, leveraging its partnerships

through global digital infrastructure provider NetIX. Through its partnership with NetIX, a Europe-based carrier class Ethernet exchange, NJFX customers will be able to take advantage of Tier-3 data centre capabilities along with increased connectivity options.

In addition, NJFX will allow businesses to connect to Europe through NetIX’s peering point of presence (PoP).

“NJFX has become a strategic East Coast hub for Latam connectivity to and from the US and Europe, while providing true diversity from Florida as a point of failure,” said Felix Seda, general manager at NJFX. He added: “We are proud to have such strategic partnerships and further leverage

abilities to provide Seabras-1 capacity to and from Latam into the NJFX cable landing station campus; as well as IP transit services for local and international internet breakout connectivity at NJFX and São Paolo, Brazil.”

NJFX’s colocation facility provides access to the Seabras-1 subsea cable system, which links the US directly with Brazil. This means that enterprises can connect from NJFX to business hubs in Latin America.

Additionally, Brazilian ISPs can ride on Seabras-1 capacity to NJFX, whereby they can interconnect with NetIX and take advantage of its robust European reach. NetIX can also bring its peering infrastructure from Europe into the US and on to the Latam market. april/may 2019

latam | 19

AMS-IX CARIBBEAN DEPLOYS POP IN BLUE NAP AMERICAS FACILITY

Left to right: Danilo Zabala, Nico Scheper and Ton van den Berg

AMS-IX is expanding its neutral Caribbean internet exchange (IX) into the Blue NAP Americas (BNA) data centre in Willemstad, Curaçao. BNA will become the second AMS-IX point of presence (PoP) in the Caribbean region after the E-Commerce Park (ECP) data centre, where it has been since 2008.

“Our presence in both BNA and ECP data centres not only adds resiliency to our network set-up but it also creates diversity on

the level of submarine cable connectivity, as submarine cables like the Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS) are now also accessible,” said Nico Scheper, director of AMS-IX Caribbean.

“Furthermore, I would like to emphasise the importance of Curaçao as a connectivity hub and the connectivity opportunities it offers, not only for Curaçao, but for the whole region, due to the presence of a large amount of submarine cables connecting us with the rest of the Latam region.”

Blue NAP Americas, formed by Dataplanet, launched its Tier-4-certified facility in Curaçao in December 2016.

Ton van den Berg, general manager of Blue NAP Americas, added: “The deployment of the AMS-IX Caribbean PoP in our Tier-IV data centre in strengthens Blue NAP Americas’ services towards our customers. With AMS-IX Caribbean, we do not only provide a secure and reliable data centre facility, we can now also offer internet exchange services for the whole Latam region.”

PRYSMIAN TO BUILD €50M SUBSEA CABLE FOR GTD IN CHILE Prysmian has won the contracts to build a turnkey repeaterless submarine cable system for Gtd Teleductos in Chile. The deal, worth approximately €50 million, will connect the entire Chilean coastline from Arica to Puerto Montt.

The contract “is the first submarine telecom interconnection project obtained after the acquisition of General Cable. It marks Prysmian’s return to this business,” said Hakan Ozmen, executive vice president of Prysmian’s project business unit.

“This project is a further proof of the excellent quality of our cables. It not only confirms that Prysmian Group is a preferred partner of choice for submarine projects, but also that it is committed to supporting the development of innovative network infrastructures worldwide.”

Prysmian will design, supply and install more than 3,550km of repeaterless fibreoptic submarine cable, supplied in 11 cable segments of lengths from 135km to more than 400km.

Capacity

MEXICO CONNECT

TO

E M VEN SE OV T PT ED EM BE R

10 & 11 September 2019, Mexico City

UNIT I NG KEY MEXICAN AND IN TERN ATION A L LEADE R S TO DISCUSS NEW GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES AND A DVANCE DI G I TAL TRANSFORM ATION www.capacitymedia.com/events/mexico-connect

20 | analysis: latam

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ith over 600 million people across 26 countries, the needs across Latin America (Latam) are like night and day – no one set rule applies. This was ever apparent at this year’s Capacity Latam conference that took place in São Paulo. While one part of the region suffers from increasing price erosion due to too much connectivity, the other is heading for a period too little connectivity if more investment doesn’t happen.

Kicking off the event was Telefónica’s CEO of International Wholesale Business, Juan Carlos Bernal, who surmised the state of the region in saying connectivity and coverage will play a crucial role in Latam, creating an opportunity for telcos. In Bernal’s view, the wholesale market is undergoing a transformation, as evidenced by the fact that retail operators in the region have 100% mobile penetration driven by the fact that they offer free communications services as well as increased services at a lower cost.

Additionally, the regional wholesale market has also seen the introduction of new players or disruptors such as MVNOs, cloud computing companies, UCaaS providers and multinational corporations, eatingaway at market share.

In order to combat this, he says, carriers must transform on a few levels. These include leveraging new digital tools to improve the way they interact with traditional and new customers, and designing their network and processes towards a flexible, simple and scalable architecture. And they must create an ecosystem of partners to build the complete value chain for global customers. In other words, end-to-end solutions.

One session that was not to miss was TeleGeography’s market overview. This year Anahi Rebatta, part of TeleGeography’s infrastructure and voice traffic team in Latin America and Caribbean, gave the presenta-

tion. According to Rebatta, bandwidth demands in Latam grew by a compound annual growth rate of 39% between 2014 and 2018; bandwidth demands are roughly doubling every two years. As a result, cable construction costs in the region have increased from around $1.4 billion to $2.6 Capacity billion.

Content continues to be a key user of capacity, with a 20% increase in international bandwidth used by content providers. Due to increased competition, the region is experiencing increasing price erosion as regional capacity grows. Following this trend, IP transit price erosion continues as well.

In the subsea space, there was a panel featuring CenturyLink’s Gabriel Holgado, VP of Global Account Division and Wholesale Services, Latam; Antonio Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables; Eduardo Falzoni, CEO of Globenet; Larry Schwartz, CEO of Seaborn Networks; GITGE’s general director, Oscar Ngomo; and Norman Albi, CEO of AFR-IX Telecom.

During the session, several key points were raised. Brazil continues to be the main driver for subsea cables in the region because it has biggest population, and therefore has the biggest demands for increased connectivity.

Second, although the west coast of Latam continues to lag the east coast in terms of the number of subsea cables it has, there are opportunities for smaller regional cables in this area. Cloud is second only to content as the big driver of traffic in the region, the panel noted.

Interestingly the panel acknowledged that, although OTTs are pivotal in development of most cable projects, there are still carrier led systems. OTTs build largely end-to-end for their own purposes. In short, we still need carriers’ cables.

On the topic of price erosion driven by the low transit prices on newer systems, the

Image: Adobe Stock

LATIN AMERICA: A REGION IN TRANSITION feeling from the experts was that it is an opportunity for cables to offer new services and explore new revenue streams.

According to Phillip Marangella, CMO at EdgeConneX, the data demands of gaming, cloud adoption, consumer and industrial IoT, distributed networking and the connected enterprise together mean that everything moves closer to the edge.

Regionally, Miami continues to be the main Latin American internet hub, with four out of the top five highest-capacity routes in the region connected there. However, Marangella notes that there is a continued move from network operators to deploy capacity between key markets in an effort to improve connectivity within Latam. Intra-regional connectivity increased by 32% between 2017 and 2018.

This year’s Capacity Latam also saw the addition of a new conference segment. Prior to the official event was the Latin American Peering Forum – a series of panels and presentations exploring how multilateral peering is taking place across the region.

Taking part in one of the key panel sessions, on facilitating an efficient internet exchange were Ivan Zilic, director of PIT Chile; Tito Costa, corporate development and strategy manager, Latam, at Equinix; and Hernan Seoane, general manager of Cabase.

From their discussions it would appear that, unlike other regional hubs, Latam does little to no peering at an international level.

Instead most remains on a national stage.

Most internet peering activity is happening on the east coast of the continent. In fact countries like Colombia have no functional internet exchange sat present. This could be tied to lack of infrastructure and security concerns.

However, the event heard, this is changing as the digital economy grows and the opportunities are too big to ignore. april/may 2019

executive interview: chris coles | 21

C&W NETWORKS WELCOMES NEW LEADER Capacity speaks to Chris Coles, who has taken over the reins at C&W Networks to lead the company as it enters its next phase of growth and development

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or the past 10 months, C&W Communications has left its commercial activities in the hands of Chris Coles, the company’s chief commercial officer of B2B and networks/ wholesale.

As we venture further into 2019, Coles’s role seems to be expanding, with him now taking charge of C&W Networks, a subsidiary of C&W Communications and a wholesale telecommunications service provider in the pan-American region.

Coles takes the reigns from Paul Scott, former president of C&W Networks, who left the role at the end of 2018.

Speaking on his expanded role, Coles says his new position is one that has “expanded with key lines of business with Liberty Latin America’s operating

a larger world-class regional company already provides C&W Networks access to additional economies of scale, delivering greater cost efficiency for capital projects such as network upgrades,” explains Coles.

From a financial perspective, LLA’s strong corporate governance, capital investment approach and financial positioning has also contributed to C&W Networks’ improved financial performance. The company now expects Capacity strong year-over-year revenue growth and, by leveraging existing vendor relationships, the company expects substantial increases to its bottom-line performance.

Aside from the aforementioned benefits, apparently not much has changed in the marketplace where C&W Networks competes and it’s “business as usual for the

Today Google/YouTube together with Netflix a n d Facebook account for more than half the demand in our region” Chris Coles, CCO of B2B and networks/wholesale, C&W Communications

companies of Liberty Cablevision of Puerto Rico, Cabletica in Costa Rica and VTR in Chile”.

He of course refers to the fact that last year C&W Communications, itself a then subsidiary of Liberty Global, was spun off into Liberty Global’s Latin America division, called Liberty Latin America (LLA). The spilt-off allowed the new company to have access to the capital and resources needed for growth as well as to facilitate the development of technology, scale its operations, launch new services and expand network coverage.

Now over a year since the decision was made Coles says the benefits of the split are already being felt both operationally and for the customer. “Certainly, being part of capacitymedia.com

team”. However, since the formation of LLA the company has “consolidated capacity and IP-transit delivery to C&W Networks”.

Looking ahead, Coles says the company is looking at new retail business acquisitions in 2019. Beyond that “we will continue to leverage our scale and network reliability, benefiting both our own retail units and wholesale carrier customer partners”.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest challenge in the Caribbean and Latin America is price erosion due to increasing competition. But C&W is hard at work to counter that trend with new offerings and services for its customers.

“The decline is offset by increasing

capacity demand from customers, and we have also been working hard to enrich our product offering with tailored wholesale and business solutions, adding value and differentiating services,” says Coles.

Another big talking point for the region, particularly in the subsea space, is the increasingly disproportionate number of submarine cables being built on the east coast of Latin America compared with the west coast.

“The west coast of Latam has not seen the same influx of new cable systems that the east coast has experienced. We do believe additional systems will be deployed in the future,” explains Coles.

“Given LLA investment in VTR.com, along with future Latam development, we are confident C&W Networks will be very much involved in future cable builds in this region.”

Like much of the world, OTTs and content remain the biggest drivers of data, which according to Coles is heavy with video assets.

“Today Google/YouTube together with Netflix and Facebook account for more than half the demand in our region,” he says.

“Increased content resolution and applications continue to drive demand for more data and higher speed connections.”

Though retail is one of the things on the company roadmap Coles says that the company is increasing its current capacity, across the network.

“In 2019 we will upgrade every one of our wholly owned cable systems and participate in mutual upgrades on consortium systems with our carrier partners, such as the jointly owned Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS) subsea cable system.”

Most excitingly, the company expects to announce new acquisitions, “which we are now well positioned to quickly integrate into the expanding fabric of companies under the LLA umbrella”.

22 | north america

WINDSTREAM ADDS 400,000 ETHERNET SERVICE LOCATIONS

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indstream Wholesale has announced that its fixed wireless service will increase its wholesale Ethernet services footprint to customers in over 50 major metro markets.

The new service offer adds 400,000 pre-qualified buildings that serve more than 3 million businesses with Windstream on-net assets by providing primary access or redundant access solutions, complementing and operating in parallel to Windstream’s 150,000-mile core fibre footprint.

“Our fixed wireless is unique in the industry as no other service provider can deliver Windstream Wholesale’s same breadth and depth of coverage with this technology,” said Joe Scattareggia, executive vice president at Windstream Wholesale. “Customers experience faster install times and a more cost-effective alternative to fibre and copper with the same service level agreements.”

The service supports products including Ethernet E-Access, dedicated internet access, and MPLS at bandwidth levels to deliver a guaranteed bitrate over a path-diverse wireless connection at speeds ranging from 3Mbps to 5Gbps with guaranteed 99.99% availability.

Windstream Wholesale has confirmed that more markets and locations will be added during 2019.

FACEBOOK LAUNCHES ITS WHOLESALE CARRIER SUBSIDIARY, MIDDLE MILE INFRASTRUCTURE Facebook has entered the wholesale fibre market as it plans to sell excess capacity on fibre routes via a newlylaunched subsidiary called Middle Mile Infrastructure.

The news comes as the company announced it was deploying new fibre networks in the US and that it was willing to sell any unused capacity on its fibre routes to third parties, including local and regional providers.

“This means you’ll start to see a Facebook subsidiary, Middle Mile Infrastructure, operating as a wholesale provider (or, where necessary, as a telecommunications carrier),” said Kevin Salvadori, director of network investments at Facebook, in a company blog post.

Salvadori added: “We intend to allow third parties – including local and regional providers – to purchase excess capacity on our fibre. This capacity could provide additional network infrastructure to existing and emerging providers, helping them extend service to many parts of the country, and particularly in underserved rural areas near our long-haul fibre builds.”

Capacity He said: “Unlike a retail telecommunications provider, we will not be providing services directly to consumers. Our goal is to support the

Kevin Salvadori: Selling excess capacity

operators that provide such services to consumers. We will reserve a portion for our own use and make the excess available to others.”

Facebook has invested heavily in highcapacity fibre-optic routes to provide much-needed resiliency and scale in the face of surging capacity demands from video and virtual reality. It has also strengthened the long-haul fibre networks that connect its data centres to one another and to the rest of the world.

FCC PUSHING SPECTRUM TO 3THZ AS INDUSTRY BIDS $1.5BN FOR 24GHZ The US telecoms regulator has taken the first steps to license spectrum far upwards from the 95GHz band – as bidding has passed $1.5 billion in the latest auction.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it wants to create a new category of experimental licences for use of frequencies between 95GHz and 3THz – that’s radio waves with

wavelengths from 3mm to only a tenth of a millimetre.

Meanwhile bidding in the FCC’s current auction, for 24GHz spectrum, has passed $1.5 billion. That’s in addition to the $700 million that was bid for 28GHz spectrum. And there are still more rounds to come in the 24GHz auction.

The FCC hopes that the combined

auctions will make available spectrum for 5G services.

FCC chairman Ajit Pai said on plans to go even higher up the frequency bands: “The airwaves above 95GHz – extremely high-frequency, short-wavelength bands of spectrum – were previously thought to be unapproachable (in our case, for wireless applications).”

DIGITAL COLONY INVESTMENT FIRM BUYS COGECO PEER 1 FOR $574M

Susan Bowen: Strong fibre footprint

Global investment firm Digital Colony has reached a definitive agreement with Cogeco Communications to acquire Toronto-based Cogeco Peer 1 for $574 million.

Cogeco Peer 1, a provider of colocation, network connectivity and managed services, will become a standalone business in Digital Colony, which is dedicated to strategic opportunities in digital infrastructure. The company will remain in Toronto and adopt a new brand.

“We are grateful for the support and resources Cogeco Communications has provided as we established a strong fibre

footprint in Canada’s two largest cities, and served customers across the globe with secure enterprise data centre solutions,” said Susan Bowen, CEO of Cogeco Peer 1.

“As we enter our next phase of growth as a standalone company, we will continue to focus on meeting the needs of customers while looking for new ways to innovate and deliver the digital infrastructure solutions they need.”

As a standalone business, Cogeco Peer 1 will have a fibre division and a data centre division in order to assume focus on meeting the needs of customers in each market. april/may 2019

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24 | asia & asia-pacific

RETN EXPANDS ASIA FOOTPRINT WITH POPS IN TAIWAN AND TOKYO

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ETN, an international network service provider, is expanding its footprint in Asia with the launch of new PoPs in Taiwan and Tokyo.

The news follows a period of unprecedented growth for the company in the Asia-Pacific region during the course of 2018.

“As the fast-growing European provider we continuously evaluate new markets and opportunities,” said Tony O’Sullivan, COO at RETN. “Over the past few years, we have been developing our terrestrial links across central Asia to Asia-Pacific. When the first of the links was completed in 2016, we started to launch new offices and hire actively outside of Europe to support this major network investment and rapidly growing customer base. Over the last 12 months we have added additional PoPs in Seoul, Hong Kong and Singapore.”

RETN’s new site in Taipei, Taiwan,

Tony O’Sullivan: Growing customer base

sits at Chief LY data centre, giving access to RETN’s global network and service portfolio, which comprises IP transit, Ethernet and colocation. In addition, the company will also establish an entity in

Taiwan to give companies local billing and support options.

As for Tokyo, Japan, the company is deploying two new sites in the city: Equinix TY4, @Tokyo CC1 and BB Tower.

These new facilities complement RETN’s existing point of presence at Equinix TY2.

These sites are linked by a metro dark fibre ring, which is run on an Infinera DWDM platform overlaid with the Juniper IP platform.

To support this, RETN will also provide a full service portfolio on the Tokyo metro, which includes IP transit, capacity (N × 10/100G), Ethernet and colocation.

Additionally, the company will also offer services via subsea cable into eastern Russia and back to Europe.

The new link will support existing links to the west coast of the US and to Europe via RETN’s TransKZ terrestrial routes across China and central Asia.

ANIL AMBANI ESCAPES JAIL THREAT BUT RCOM FUTURE STILL IN DOUBT The future of Reliance Communications (RCom) is unclear after the troubled group paid off its debt to Ericsson but called off its sale of assets to Reliance Jio. Ericsson had threatened Anil Ambani, founder and chairman of RCom, with jail for contempt of court if the company did not pay up the total debt of 5.5 billion rupees – the equivalent of $80 million.

According to reports from India, Ambani paid the debt with $69 million worth of help from his brother Mukesh Ambani, head of Reliance Jio, and his sister-in-law, Nita Ambani. A few years ago Anil Ambani was worth $31 billion;

today Indian media reports say he’s worth Capacity 1% of that, $300 million. Older brother Mukesh Ambani is worth over $50 billion, say Indian estimates.

But though that part of the long story of the unravelling of RCom is over, the next stage is unclear. The Indian bankruptcy court, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), now controls RCom’s future and is likely to organise a fire-sale of the assets that were due to be sold to Jio. But in a surprise announcement, those deals – agreed in December 2017 and August 2018 – “have been terminated … by mutual agreement”.

Anil Ambani: Help from brother Mukesh

AIRTEL TO BUILD NEW BACKBONE NETWORK WITH CIENA PHOTONICS TO DELIVER FTTH AND GET READY FOR 5G

Randeep Sekhon: Big step towards 5G

Bharti Airtel is to build a new India-wide backbone network to provide high-speed data services over 4G, 5G and fibre to the home (FTTH). The company has ordered the new network, part of its Project Leap, from Ciena, which will use its photonics technology.

Bharti Airtel CTO Randeep Sekhon said this will be “one of world’s largest optical spine and leaf networks, which is also a big step towards 5G readiness by leveraging our huge fibre assets”.

He added: “Airtel has always pioneered the introduction of cutting-edge network technologies to serve its customers.

This will not only scale our network for massive capacity but also protect traffic

and enhance service delivery to all our customers.”

Airtel said that the deployment will enable a network that can quickly respond to simultaneous faults by re-computing and re-routing traffic based on available network resources.

The new backbone architecture will work with data rates of 400Gbps and higher to create a future-proof scalable network, said Airtel. “In addition, the architecture offers lower latency and software-controlled connectivity for cloud infrastructure, faster transformation to virtualised platforms, and 5G readiness.”

The network will support bandwidth on demand and optical VPNs. april/may 2019

SPONSORED INTERVIEW: WU CONGCHENG

| 25

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES LEAD OPERATORS INTO THE 5G OPERATORS FACE A COMPLEXITY CHALLENGE AS THEY INTRODUCE NEW 5G SERVICES. AT HUAWEI’S CONSULTING AND SERVICE SOLUTION SALES DEPARTMENT, PRESIDENT STEVEN WU EXPLAINS HOW THE COMPANY IS HELPING THIS HUGE TRANSFORMATION. INTERVIEW SPONSORED BY HUAWEI

to be monetised. Huawei has a pretty easy solution to bring 5G to reality. We work widely in business innovation,” says Wu. It’s not just those South Korean cell sites he’s talking about.

“We have signed more than 30 commercial contracts,” says Wu. Many of those haven’t started service yet, but the company is Capacity already beginning the preparation work.

Site density We take those issues that Wu listed one by one. Site selection is, of course, key. “The site density for 5G will be more than 4G,” he notes. Wu smiles: “With our digital engineering solution we can reduce time to market by 30%.”

He notes – something that will be surprising to many – that the 4G network will still be integral to the service, for both voice and data. “4G will be crucial to the operators for a long time,” confirms Wu, “and we have implemented 400 4G networks globally.” So what’s the point of keeping 4G? Voice over LTE (VoLTE) will be used for the voice service even when it’s 5G, he explains. “It will last for a long time.”

With 4G co-existing with 5G, drive tests will be hugely important. Huawei is working to make the drive tests as efficient and effective as possible, he says. With optimisation, “we can improve performance two to four times”, he adds. “The 4G network will be a long-term foundation network for voice and data.”

Operators also need to think about power for all those cell sites, adds Wu.

Energy saving The rollout of the next generation of mobile technology has started. “In South Korea they are installing 3,000 sites a month,” says Steven Wu, president of the consulting and service solution sales department at Huawei.

It’s a complex process, and Huawei is bringing all its skills – including artificial intelligence (AI) – to the process. AI can help a physical site become a digital site, can also manage the power consumption of each cell site, can improve operations and maintenance, can improve radio coverage, and can improve time to market, he says.

“We need a good professional service that enables the network capacitymedia.com

So how can operator reduce power? “We can save at least 10%-15% energy per site by dynamically cutting off transmitters when we can,” he says. At the moment, cell sites consume power even when they’re not transmitting any data.

Huawei wants to reduce consumption to zero when a site is inactive. “We have a target of zero bits, zero watts,” he smiles.

“Using AI technology and big data, we can reach zero bits and zero watts,” he adds.

He points to a practical example. Think of a cell site that’s covering a high-speed railway line – and China has around 29,000km of high-speed lines, with trains travelling at 250350km/h.

“Think of a high-speed train passing every 10 minutes,” says

26 | SPONSORED INTERVIEW: WU CONGCHENG

We can save at least 10%-15% energy per site by cutting off transmitters where we can” Steven Wu, Huawei Wu. “Each one takes 30 seconds to pass the cell site. That means for nine and a half minutes it’s shut down.” Do the maths: if you can reduce power to zero watts for that time, you cut consumption to just 5%.

Furthermore, “AI can be used for radio propagation modelling – the Rayce model”, he adds. “We can improve planning accuracy 10%-20%, compared with industry leaders.”

The new 5G base stations will use massive MIMO – multiple input, multiple output – a technique that improves data speeds but adds to the complexity “by 100 times”, he says. More AI can help here.

Steven Wu: Target of zero bits, zero watts

aim is zero intervention, zero outage, and zero risk. We reduce the fault resolution time from six hours to three hours.”

Parallel generations Digital transformation is becoming very important, he notes, Current networks run 3G and 4G services in parallel – some “but it is not an easy journey”. There are three key points: first phones don’t yet have 4G and even many 4G phones revert to culture. “People are afraid of change – you have to change 3G for voice calls (VoLTE is a way of moving voice to 4G, while minds and accept new concepts. You need a change of mindset improving quality and making the service more efficient). And for the whole company.” many operators still have a residual 2G service – inefficient in And digital transformation depends on strong leadership, he terms of bandwidth but necessary for some 2G-only visitors and adds. “We need a clear and firm strategy and strong leadership.” a few early smart meters and the like. “We’ll be able to run the Finally, the organisation and process. “Traditional companies different networks,” says Wu. have a traditional way of working. We need to reboot the “Huawei has developed a new cloud-based platform. We use company process.” That needs the introduction of new skills big data, with AI, and root cause analysis to identify faults.Capacity The into the operation.

asia news continued...

NEC TO BUILD CABLE SYSTEM LINKING OKINAWA TO MAINLAND JAPAN

Okinawa cable system RFS in 2020

NEC has won a contract from Okinawa Cellular Telephone Company to design, engineer, and build a subsea cable system linking the island of Okinawa with Kagoshima, Japan.

The subsea cable system, which will be provided as a turnkey solution, is set to being operation in 2020. It will

span 760km, connecting Nago City in Okinawa to Hioki City in Kagoshima.

NEC said the cable system, which it will fully test and implement from design-phase onward, will offer the latest optical wavelength transmission systems with a maximum transmission capacity of 80Tbps.

It is not the first cable system to link Okinawa Prefecture, which is comprised of more than 150 islands in the East China Sea between Taiwan and Japan’s mainland. There has also been the KDDIowned Miyazaki-Okinawa Cable and Japan Information Highway cable systems.

The new cable NEC is to build will offer an alternative route to these cable systems while also meeting growing demand for communications between the Okinawa, Kyushu and Honshu regions of Japan.

Last year, the company announced a number of new cable contracts. It was picked by Facebook, AWS and China Mobile to build the new Bay to Bay Express Cable System, linking Singapore, Hong Kong and the US.

GPX SUPPORTS HYBRID NETWORK CONNECTIONS TO GOOGLE CLOUD GPX India has announced its support for Google Cloud’s Dedicated Interconnect, a service from Google Cloud that allows customers to connect to the Google Cloud Platform globally.

With Dedicated Interconnect, customers can now choose GPX, an Indian provider of premium carrier-neutral data centres, to provide connectivity from their Uptimecertified Tier-IV facility, located in Mumbai, to the nearest Google edge point of presence (PoP).

“We are proud to announce the combined value proposition of our Tier-IV data centre and Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect services now being available at GPX Mumbai,” said Manoj Paul, managing director of GPX India.

“Existing users of Google Cloud services in India will benefit from Dedicated Interconnect being available at GPX Mumbai, so they can easily transfer large amounts of data between networks cost effectively.” april/may 2019

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28 |

Telecom Egypt focuses on transformation as new CEO takes charge Just weeks after Adel Hamed took over as head of Telecom Egypt, Alan Burkitt-Gray asks the former head of wholesale aboutCapacity his plans to transform the company as part of the government’s digital initiative

A

del Hamed, Telecom Egypt’s chief international and wholesale officer, became CEO of the group in February, in succession to Ahmed El Beheiry.

In the consumer market, Telecom Egypt (TE) now has a licence to deliver IPTV and “we aim to expand our product portfolio to become a quad-play operator”, he says.

“We also aim to launch our mobile wallet in 2019 to take our first steps in mobile financial services.”

When Hamed was appointed the company made much of the Egyptian government’s plan to speed up the national digital transformation initiative, and it linked this to the company’s own digital transformation plans.

“Digital transformation for us is a major priority and relates to our domestic as well as our international business,” says Hamed.

“Locally, we aim to support the government’s initiative for digital transformation, which entails connecting governmental institutions across Egypt to enable economic reform.”

Work has already started on connecting up

schools, “and we have a line-up of projects to work on in 2019”.

Internationally, TE wants to expand the reach of its cables, following on from Hamed’s on work in his previous role.

“We are also expanding the diversity of the international routes across Egypt to attract new cable consortiums,” he says.

Meanwhile Telecom Egypt has quietly adopted a new brand, WE. Look on the website, and you’ll read about WE internet services as well as WE Ardy – a fixed voice service – and WE mobile packages.

“Our commercial strategy entails delivering all our customers’ needs under one monolithic brand, WE,” says Hamed, “capitalising on our leadership in the homes of customers while delivering a premium customer experience. As of 2018, WE’s fixed voice customers grew to 7.9 million, of whom 5.2 million enjoyed fixed broadband connectivity, while mobile customers reached 3.9 million.”

Both mobile and fixed data “are underpenetrated” in Egypt, he says, reaching only 39% of individuals and 27% of households. “This presents an opportunity

for Telecom Egypt, especially in light of Egypt’s favourable demographics with 61% of population below 30 years and around two million entering the market annually.”

Last year the company launched new and revamped existing products, and launched an integrated bundle of mobile and fixed voice plus data under the name Indigo Plus.

“The WE portfolio is not complete yet,” says Hamed. The target is “to go beyond connectivity into providing content as well as tap into mobile financial services”. As a start WE struck a partnership deal with Sony PlayStation to offer content-based solutions.

This was “the first time” in the Middle East, North Africa region, he adds. “With our nationwide IPTV licence in hand, we also intend to offer our customers a quad-play offering in 2019”, to increase its entertainment offer.

TE began to replace copper with fibre back in 2012. “By the end of 2018, 70% of the replacement programme was complete we aim to reach 100% by 2020,” he says.

But the digital transformation initiative is surely part of that? “Digital transformation is a key pillar and enabler of Egypt’s sustainable april/may 2019

the big interview: adel hamed | 29

2008

General manager, international and wholesale business operations, Telecom Egypt

2013

Director of international and wholesale technical and operations support, Telecom Egypt

2015

Domestic wholesale business unit head, Telecom Egypt

2017

Chief international and wholesale officer, Telecom Egypt

2019

CEO, Telecom Egypt

education. “We have also signed a protocol with the MCIT to provision fibre optic infrastructure to all government bodies across the country starting with the city of Port Said as a pilot, which we have completed in the first quarter of 2019.”

TE has set up a number of relationships with other companies. What’s the aim of the recent agreement with Vodafone Egypt and how does it fit in the company strategy? “Our success in the wholesale segment relies on our relationships with domestic and international carriers and customers,” says Hamed.

“The business model is characterised by signing long-term agreements. The domestic wholesale business unit offers local ISPs and mobile operators infrastructure, transmission and access services.”

TE has leased infrastructure to other operators in Egypt since 2009, he notes.

“Telecom Egypt has continuously offered them a more viable economic model. Such models were developed to secure Telecom

The target is to go beyond connectivity into providing Capacity content as well as tap into mobile financial services” Adel Hamed, CEO, Telecom Egypt

development strategy, Egypt Vision 2030,” he says. “The aim is to harness the power of digital technology in order to accelerate development and improve the lives of Egyptians by modernising the economy.”

TE is working closely with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), he says. “Our strategy entails building digital infrastructure, and this starts with higher speed fixed and mobile broadband to all our consumer, enterprise and government customers and moves on to include data centres, cloud, platforms, and finally, applications.”

TE is working with other operators, and he lists systems integrators, government bodies, start-ups, developers, cloud providers, OTT providers and multinational enterprises.

“The deployment of fibre infrastructure provides connectivity with superior quality.”

This will enable the provision of advanced applications to support the country’s development goals, he says, and a climate that’s attracting foreign direct investment.

“In 2018, we have connected 2,530 schools with fibre.” This was part of a project with the Ministry of Education to reform capacitymedia.com

Egypt’s domestic revenue stream and its leadership in the market for the long-term.”

And that business has grown TE’s infrastructure revenue.

“As for the agreement with Vodafone Egypt,” he continues, “we signed in February 2019 two ten-year transmission and infrastructure agreements.”

These were worth a total of 10.85 billion Egyptian pounds ($626 million). One covers Vodafone Egypt’s current and future requirements for domestic transmission services for both fixed and mobile, and the other “represents a new cooperation between the two companies”, with TE providing fibre backhaul to Vodafone.

“The tenure of the agreements proves that we are the partner of choice for domestic mobile operators,” he adds.

This new pair of agreements follows on from a long-term agreement with Orange’s Egyptian business and a framework agreement with Etisalat Misr.

“That said, operators continuously need to invest and expand their networks to meet the growing demand for data driven by the boom in the consumption of content,” he

notes. “Over the past five years TE has developed various products for domestic operators, encouraging the growth in internet and data services by developing its product offering from physical legacy connectivity to speed-based broadband services.” It has moved to consumption based charging – bulk bitstream.

“We have also developed enhanced solutions and symmetrical high-speed digital subscriber line services for the enterprise customers of operators,” he adds.

On top of that TE signed a deal with Microsoft for cloud services. Why Microsoft rather than any other cloud company?

“The collaboration will increase Microsoft’s reach to the large Egyptian market in addition to improving connectivity across North Africa and the Middle East,” says Hamed. Services will include international marine connectivity, he adds, “capitalising on Telecom Egypt’s huge investments in the submarine infrastructure”. And the company will provide hosting services to Microsoft’s global network, for services including Bing, Office 365, Microsoft Azure and Xbox Live.

“This agreement is one of Telecom Egypt’s first steps towards its vision of turning Egypt into a digital hub and we are looking to expand this business line further,” he adds.

“Our geographical position and digital infrastructure will enable major cloud providers such as Microsoft to enhance their reach to consumers and enterprises in Egypt as well as reach other markets.”

Hamed explains that TE’s global network “was built over the years through investments in international submarine cable systems with consortiums and in privately owned cable systems”. Ten years ago, there were six submarine cables landing in Egypt with two landing stations.

“Today, Telecom Egypt has 13 submarine cable systems landing in six landing points in Egypt, 11 of which are crossing Egypt over seven diverse routes.”

There are new submarine cable projects in the pipeline, he adds. “Three new landing points and new trans-Egypt routes are in the plan to provide more diversity and resiliency to our network.”

Two landing points will be on Mediterranean Sea, one of which is already built in Sidi Krir, while the other point will be further east and designed to cater for the requirements of large OTTs. “A new site on the Red Sea, further south from the current Zafarana landing station, is also being planned. This landing point is characterised by its remoteness from the busy marine activities and the Suez Gulf’s shallow waters and it will be economically attractive for new subsea business cases.”

In addition, TE is planning new terrestrial routes connecting existing and new landing stations – such as the one that will be extended along the north coast of Egypt.

30 |

New summit will bring the industry together for 5G Capacity

CAPACITY AND ITS SISTER COMPANIES HAVE COME TOGETHER TO CREATE A NEW EVENT TO HELP ALL SECTORS OF THE BUSINESS BENEFIT FROM 5G AND DEVELOP BUSINESS IN THE NEW MARKETS.

ǧ INTRODUCES THE COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE SUMMIT

T

he world is about the start on the biggest investment programme in telecoms for – well, probably ever.

Driven by the development of 5G wireless technology, the industry will be completely rethinking and rebuilding telecoms infrastructure to deliver a complete new range of services.

The first 5G services are going into operation now, which is why 2019 is the perfect time to bring together all the providers of this new infrastructure to discuss how they’ll work together.

That’s why four allied events and publishing businesses, Capacity Media, which publishes Capacity and runs Capacity Conferences, along with BroadGroup, Layer123 and TowerXchange are holding the first Communications Infrastructure Summit on 26 June at the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, Georgia.

To help us with this and future Communications Infrastructure events, we

have asked a number of senior executives from across the industry to become members of a Communications Infrastructure Leaders’ Forum.

I spoke to some of them, and some other significant people in the industry, to help put 5G into context.

First, what services? Well, did you predict the huge importance of text messaging when 2G phones arrived in the 1990s? Did you know how important mobile versions of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and WeChat would be when 3G and then 4G arrived?

Did you ever think you’d see people tapping into and out of Tube stations or onto buses in London using Apple Pay or getting on planes with boarding cards on their phones? Or using their phones to find their way round cities or to share so many pictures of cats? Me neither.

So, while we will be surprised by some of the new 5G-powered services, we already

have an idea what a few of them might be.

For a start, automated factories, autonomous vehicles and AI-assisted surgery. Just that small selection tells you why the networks will need redesigning – you can’t beat physics and the speed of light.

For accurate control with tight tolerances you need a fast response – and that means tiny cell sites almost everywhere with computing power and data storage at the very edge, close to where it’s used.

That leads automatically to a need for dense fibre networks to connect them all together – or perhaps millimetre waves linking the same small cell sites.

To achieve near-universal coverage, we’ll need a mixture of tiny cell sites in plastic boxes on the wall to even more of today’s macro towers. They’ll be operating on a wide range of spectrum, from the bands that were a few years ago delivering TV chat shows and sports matches to whole counties to those that engineers were still playing with april/may 2019

Image: Adobe Stock

feature: comms infra | 31

on lab benches – still are in some cases.

Think of the nifty software you’ll need to control that.

At the June event, executives from the different sectors of the industry we serve will meet to carve new relationships for the services that will be enabled by the 5G era.

“I think this 5G event is very timely,” says Carl Roberts, the former Epsilon executive – before that, with Verizon.

Trichur – better known as Vish – Vishwanathan, CenturyLink’s senior director for the Asia-Pacific region, agrees.

“I think one of the most interesting aspects of what Capacity Media is doing with the Communications Infrastructure Leaders’ Forum is igniting a discussion within the industry on the importance of 5G rollout and how this could be more effective in its implementation and application through collaborative efforts by the various players in the ecosystem.”

This will have an effect at all levels, says Roberts. “At the basic level lots of new subsea cable systems are going into service.

And 5G will move content to the edge of networks.” High bandwidth will be needed for autonomous cars, he adds. “We need software to operate at various levels.”

Software defined networks (SDNs) will enable users to turn services on and off more easily, he notes. But software will have other uses – because it’s not just autonomous vehicles that will be controlled by 5G. There will be drones under 5G control that will be used to deliver goods. Some people are even suggesting drone taxis.

“Calls drop off today,” says Roberts. “You don’t want that with a drone or an autonomous car. You’ll need huge changes in the reliability of networks. That extra infinitesimally small percentile uptime gets to be more crucial. That’s where the software will come in, because humans can’t react quickly enough. Drone taxis will need air traffic control.”

Over at CenturyLink, Vishwanathan agrees. “Some of the crucial success factors are high-speed, ultra-high reliable networks and network slicing, especially when it comes to certain critical applications using both mobile and fixed 5G wireless technology to maintain on-demand response for business needs.”

He adds: “Today, the digital economy runs on applications and the data they contain – applications that demand real-time data processing and continuous, uninterrupted availability. 5G certainly represents an opportunity for CenturyLink to deliver that end-to-end user experience for our customers in a secure, cost-effective, high performing connectivity manner.”

Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO of Telus, warns that “we seem to be buried with speeds and all over the place” on the various bands, with 3.5GHz being the key. “There are a whole capacitymedia.com

Capacity is igniting a discussion within the industry on the importance of 5G rollout and how this could be more effective through collaborative efforts by the various players in the ecosystem” Vish Vishwanathan, senior director for the Asia-Pacific region, CenturyLink

bunch of things that are not there yet in production to provide data and metrics.

Mobile edge piloting has not been done yet.”

With the need for low-latency services, “all of us have to start looking to the edge”. The edge is where small cells will communicate with autonomous vehicles or with machine tools or next generation 5G IoT. “Cloud has to have edge functions,” says Gedeon, but “telcos have a big advantage – the central offices can be used to provide a mobile edge”.

It’s back to the fundamental physics of the speed of light. If you need to grab your data from a data centre 500km or 1,000km away, that will inevitably add to the delays that Capacity might in some cases be dangerous. Every 150km adds a millisecond to the round trip time. Keep your data in what used to be the local telephone exchange and you slice the latency to microseconds.

Many of the key performance indicators (KPIs) for 5G are about reducing latency, says Dan Warren, who is head of 5G research at Samsung’s R&D Institute in the UK – but is a former senior director of technology at the GSMA and even earlier was a network architect at Vodafone.

With 5G there are “very broad shifts in terms of what you’re trying to do”, he says.

KPIs and service level agreements will become a key part of future contracts for 5G services. Commercial and legal teams will look at these contracts “with fear”, he notes.

It’s not just that production processes will be hit if things go wrong, “but people die”, he warns. “We are building something unlike any operator has built before,” he adds. “It will have to be fully reliable for days and you are integrating new technology into vertical industries that operate on long lead times.”

Roberts picks up a similar point. “Layered over all of this is a legal perspective,” he says.

“There will be increasingly legal issues.Who’s responsible for what? If taxi goes into a wall, there will be ramifications.” Networks will be expected to operate with ultra-high reliability – putting new demands on all elements, including the terminals, the radio network, the network equipment, the fibre infrastructure, the edge computing and the software that’s behind it all. “You’ll need disaster recovery. If there’s a fault, back-up

solutions will have to be rerouted. That means operators will need to have visibility over routing – so if one route is down they will be able to use another that’s still operational,” says Roberts.

“You will need completely new set of parameters.” But that’s a positive, he adds.

“It’s a huge opportunity for a new set of premium services. This is why all the actors in the communications infrastructure world need to be aligned and understand the work role they play.”

Warren picks up another point.

“A key benefit of 5G is that it will give operators access to new spectrum bands.

This new spectrum will be used to increase capacity, to give a higher level of bandwidth.

And one significant difference of 5G over LTE is reduced latency.”

Yes, it’s not just to avoid autonomous vehicles killing their passengers and other road users, but “as an enabler of consumer games”, says Warren. “This is quite a big tick. It’s a market that’s been growing for some time now.”

He quotes a figure that he’s been given by a senior technology executive of a major UK operator: in the late afternoon and early evening in the middle of the week fully 20% of the traffic on this company’s network is generated from Fortnite, the online video game released in 2017. “It’s comparable with the impact of YouTube on the early days of 3G,” says Warren.

So, just as neither you nor I predicted the impact of SMS on 2G networks, or Facebook on 3G, or digital ticketing on 4G, almost no one so far has looked at the potential impact of high-speed multiplayer games on 5G. People will pay for fast, reliable, low-latency connections to edge data centres so they can play Fortnite and its 2021 or 2022 equivalent. Drones, vehicles and machine tools will be important to the 5G economy, but perhaps it’s games that will get all the elements of the telecoms industry to work together to exploit the next generation of mobile.

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special report

INNOVATION April/May 2019

CONTENTS 35 Executive interview: Kyle Malady, CTO, Verizon

36 How to maintain a cutting edge Capacity investigates the growing demand for processing data at the edge and its impact on networks

Capacity

40 Big interview: Rajiv Datta, COO, Colt

42 Sponsored Q&A: Mark Stewart, CEO, IMC

43 Power 100 The Capacity Power 100 is our list of one hundred ofthe most poweful and influential people in the wholesale telecoms sector

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executive interview: kyle malady | 35

VERIZON PIONEERS 5G WITH FIXED BROADBAND Mobile 5G isn’t quite here yet, but Verizon is in the market early for fixed wireless access, expanding fibre to customers’ premises.

CTO Kyle Malady talks to Alan Burkitt-Gray

V

erizon has found a use for 5G wireless technology, says Kyle Malady. And it’s nothing to do with mobility, at least at the moment.

He smiles: “5G is fibre with tails hanging off.” The company is using millimetre-wave frequencies to extend fibre broadband networks to users without having to lay fibre right through the door.

Verizon is using a pre-standard version of 5G for its fixed-wireless services. “We have our own 5G spec, V5GTF,” says Malady. “That’s the Verizon 5G Technology Forum.”

That was formed just over three years ago to use 28GHz and 39GHz spectrum for trials and deployments of fixed wireless access (FWA). Verizon’s infrastructure partners are Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, LG, Nokia, Qualcomm and Samsung.

“5G is where we’re spending a lot of our time,” says Malady. “It’s so we can start working with millimetre wave specifications – learning how millimetre waves work, building tools around it and learning a lot.”

The points about starting with FWA are that, first, because Verizon controls both ends of a fixed 5G link, there’s no need to adopt worldwide standards for terminals. Second, if it’s fixed, no one is moving from one cell site to another.

“Because there’s no handover that’s the easier use case,” he adds.

“We have a lot of bandwidth there, so we can learn and understand millimetre waves. We offer a fixed broadband capability – but underlying our work on 5G efficiency is dependable fibre. We have 25,000 miles of fibre in the US in addition to what we have outside. That’s a lot of density.”

Malady has “been there for all the Gs”, he adds. When he started it was called Nynex but became Verizon when it merged with Bell Atlantic in 1997. capacitymedia.com

“I formally trained as a mechanical engineer, but then took a summer job at Nynex Mobile.” That was in the analogue era. We’d call it 1G today, though no one had any concept of a succession of mobile generations. “I thought this was pretty cool. I built a cellular network in upstate New York – for an engineering person I couldn’t be luckier.”

He started out as a cell site technician, Capacity but now has an MBA in finance and he’s executive vice president and chief technology officer at Verizon.

“It’s always been a dream how we can do home broadband with wireless,” says Malady. “Ten years ago if you’d asked if we could do millimetre wave, I’d have said No.” But now, Verizon is “putting in fibre and putting small cells in. It will be very dense.” You can feel his enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen so much technology innovation at once – so many cool things. The use cases are just fantastic.”

Verizon is “starting with a lot of industry”, he says. “The future factory will run off 5G. You can set the factory up in days and there is lots of flexibility.”

These factories of the future will bring “edge computing and 5G together”, and the combination is “going to give developers a whole new platform”, he says.

FWA 5G networks will be dense, he says. “Just so much density, with hundreds and hundreds of megahertz.”

There’ll be public-safety uses, too.

“Think of a future where all communications in a city are 5G, and police officers who can all come together in real time with computer vision.”

If a child is missing, TV cameras will be able to track where they’ve been.

“You’ll be able to see a missing kid walk down the street. All of these use cases become possible. We’re showing what the art of the possible is,” he adds. “We have

a bunch of 5G labs with people who are seeing what can be innovated. It’s cool stuff.”

Where are the skills coming from?

“I’ve been lucky because we bought Yahoo and AOL,” says Malady. That’s not something you often hear Verizon people say. “From a talent perspective these guys do webscale,” he explains.

“There are incredible data scientists over there. We’ve brought these folks in.

That’s why the world of the future is a world with different skills.”

Meanwhile what Verizon is doing is “modernising and bringing all our networks together – mobile, fibre and wholesale”, he says. “We’re in the middle of a multi-year journey, virtualising a lot of things.”

The company runs three mobile standards – 3G, 4G and now 5G, but “2G is gone”, he says. “We’ve still got 3G, and we’re going to keep it around for a few years and then re-use the spectrum.

Spectrum is so valuable you need to keep iterating,” he notes – re-farming spectrum from 1G to 2G to 3G and then to 4G and 5G. “We’ve been doing this a long time.”

But 4G will live alongside 5G for many uses, just as today 3G lives alongside 4G – if you have a 4G phone but don’t use voice over LTE (VoLTE) then every time you make a voice call your phone reverts to 3G. And when will there be mobile 5G? “This year,” says Malady. But it looks as though FWA – tails on fibre networks – will be a killer app for some time to come.

36 |

How to maintain a cutting edge Capacity

WITH 5G ON ITS WAY, DEMAND CONTINUES TO GROW AROUND PROCESSING DATA AT THE EDGE ǧ ǥ ǧ Ǥ GARETH WILLMER

E

dge computing, already gaining momentum with the internet of things (IoT), raises a question of how carriers will need to change their models and whether it means less transit needed over their backbone networks.

But carriers believe the massive rise in data traffic will counteract this higher proportion of processing at the edge, with Cisco forecasting a tripling in annual global IP traffic from 1.5 zettabytes (ZB) in 2017 to 4.8ZB by 2022. On top of that, they say, data processing will still be needed in the core network. “The pie is growing for everybody,� as Phillip Marangella, chief marketing officer at edge data centre provider EdgeConneX, puts it. “A growing part of data can be processed directly at the network borders,� elaborates Walter Fresen, SVP for wholesale at Deutsche Telekom. “But the overall volume of transported data will still rise and hence preserve the transit business.�

However, carriers and their partners are also looking to adapt their models to cater for the need for greater distribution that edge brings. Access networks will grow faster both in “capillarity� and speed upgrades, says Chris Roy, vice president

of AT&T wholesale solutions – pointing out that high-speed links above 100G on carriers’ backbones and among data centres are predicted to grow rapidly in the next few years.

Roy says AT&T is testing how to bring edge computing capabilities into the operator’s 5G network with Microsoft Azure, as well as improve latency and user experience by deploying advanced cloud services closer to business sites.

Edge partners Carriers are also teaming up with specialist edge data centre providers, such as EdgeConneX, and putting points of presence (PoPs) in their facilities. In the past couple of years, EdgeConneX has struck partnership deals with players including Telia Carrier, Colt Technology Services and Tata Communications.

This means a closer relationship with carriers to build edge infrastructure together and grow the number of customers connecting, says Marangella. “We’re trying to enable them to have more points of presence in a distributed fashion,� he says, in line with a need for networks and data centres to “re-architect the internet�.

EdgeConneX, which has the vast

majority of its PoPs in its home market of the US, has also been expanding its presence in Europe, recently acquiring data centres in Munich and Warsaw.

Furthermore, it has expanded to Buenos Aires in Argentina, where it has an edge data centre due to open in the second quarter. “This all sets up the global edge platform that we continue to build out,� says Marangella, adding that the company will carry on looking at opportunities for expansion as ultra-lowlatency requirements grow. Much of this will be defined by where EdgeConneX’s customers want to go.

From a network provider perspective, a benefit of working with a player like EdgeConneX is that it knows where the demand is and it’s easy to follow them where they go, says Mattias FridstrĂśm, vice president and chief evangelist at Telia Carrier. “They do a lot of analysis of where they need to build their next data centre and for us that’s perfect,â€? he says. “It takes away a lot of uncertainty.â€?

Telia Carrier is also talking to other providers in the edge space over potential partnerships, including striking a deal with TierPoint last September that will see Telia Carrier offer its Cloud Connect april/may 2019

feature: cutting edge | 37

CBRS spectrum is going to create a lot of competition around cellular, creating more and more data for wholesale carriers”

Image: Adobe Stock

Matt Trifiro, chief marketing officer, Vapor IO

services across 25 of the data centre provider’s facilities in the US. The crux of the carrier’s overall edge strategy, says Fridström, is “how can we be more relevant in more places?”

Innovation Meanwhile, trends towards edge give carriers room to innovate and create new revenue streams.

With carriers having such extensive networks, it gives them the opportunity to supplement these with edge cloud locations – or “cloudlets” – at network borders and sell infrastructure-as-aservice (IaaS) to both existing and new customers, says Fresen. He says Deutsche Telekom already has four edge cloudlets in its German network and will expand in line with usage demands.

Potential target customers include both carriers and companies such as MobiledgeX, an edge computing company that Deutsche Telekom founded last year, which can then add value with intelligent software on top and sell the package to companies such as developers and gaming operators. “On top of that, carriers can consider the option of engineering their own intelligent software to address developers,” says Fresen.

MobiledgeX itself shows the potential for innovation, with its aim to help players in the ecosystem maximise the potential of edge by building a global marketplace of edge resources and services. The start-up is already working with SK Telecom, with more operators to be announced soon – and, among other things, has struck a partnership to develop augmented reality edge gaming.

In addition, MobiledgeX is part of the newly-created Kinetic Edge Alliance (KEA), formed by edge micro data centre provider Vapor IO to create platforms and aid wide-scale deployments in this area.

Matt Trifiro, chief marketing officer at Vapor IO, says new developments in edge will open up fresh opportunities for carriers, especially given the need for mesh networks and connection between many micro data centres. “This will drive a significant amount of new business potentially, because every one of those data centres is going to need a lot of long-haul connection,” he says. capacitymedia.com

And to aid wireless players seeking a distributed footprint, Vapor IO last year launched a 5G-as-a-Service offering, allowing players to lease 5G capabilities to accelerate rollouts at lower cost.

Trifiro says new competition may meanwhile stem from developments such as the opening up of so-called Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum in the 3.5GHz band in the US, which could potentially allow a whole host of businesses to introduce new IoT-based edge services. “That’s going to create a lot of competition around cellular,” says Trifiro. At the same time, he says, “it will create more and more data for wholesale carriers”.

Network slicing

Capacity Eric Bozich, senior director of product management at CenturyLink, believes there will be many interesting business cases for carriers as “wireline and wireless start to mesh” and the idea of network slicing comes into place with 5G. He suggests an MVNO-type model could emerge whereby businesses focusing on a particular market segment can offer specific services using network slices. “I believe there are a lot of new opportunities for wholesale services that operate on more of a utility-type model,” he says – adding that CenturyLink is doing lots of proofs of concept and tests to see what might work.

Bandwidth infrastructure provider euNetworks similarly talks of the advantages of network slicing. “This leaves the door open for innovative mobile network operators to offer slices bundled with edge computing facilities to enterprises or other virtual network operators to own a mobile service network with distributed computing capability,” says head of products Toby Williams.

The company says it is working on the 5G “fibre fronthaul” opportunity in Europe’s capital cities, with the expected “densification” needed for long-term traffic growth on 5G networks needing this type of metro fibre distribution.

Making changes A running theme among carriers is the need to have a more distributed approach to infrastructure to meet the future

customer requirements that edge brings.

A challenge for carriers is to create a dense metro network rather than just having a backbone, says Andrew Edison, vice president for wholesale at Colt Technology Services.

“For 5G, the next-generation mobile network promises much in terms of revenues and new use cases, but for this to be realised it will require an evolution in network architecture, and this has significant implications for access to the metro and core network,” adds Edison.

“Distributed architecture brings in more complexity, fuelling the need for wholesale carriers to simplify the integration and migration of services between endpoints,” says Srinivasan CR at Tata Communications. “True value” is realised when endpoints span across a wider scale with the ability to communicate and exchange data, he says.

With edge, meanwhile, he sees opportunities for Tata to grow the capacity of its metro, IP transit and content delivery networks, as well as PoPs and cloud offerings, driven by new applications such as VR, IoT and high-definition video consumption.

Data centres Moves towards edge will also mean changes and opportunities for carrierneutral data centre providers. At Equinix, VP of business development Jim Poole says there will be a role in helping enterprises and operators to monetise the change in architecture and connect their distributed IT environments.

To aid this, Equinix developed its ECX Fabric service, an SDN-enabled offering that allows customers to interconnect entities within the data centre player’s global platform of nearly 10,000 customers. “Provisioning network capacity to tie distributed IT environments spanning tens of data centres in multiple countries is a nontrivial task,” says Poole. “We make it possible within minutes.”

Equinix is also opening data centres in new markets, with a fourth German site set to open in Hamburg this year, as well as a facility in Oman.

Given the multiple potential directions for edge in these early days, it is hard to predict how the landscape will ultimately look, though. “I don’t think anybody really has a good enough crystal ball to predict where all that will go,” says CenturyLink’s Bozich. But as platforms and services start to emerge, he thinks it will be “a snowball effect”.

“I think the next five years will be really interesting, with some dramatic changes in the wayin which services are offered and the way they’re consumed.”

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40 |

Colt and the culture of innovation Rajiv Datta, chief operating officer at Colt, speaks to Natalie Bannerman about the culture of innovation and automation Capacity in the telecoms sector, and how Colt is rising to the occasion

I

t’s not often that we come across a person who neatly slots into both of our special report categories – but Rajiv Datta, COO of Colt, is one of those people. During his time as CTO, Datta is credited as one of the main people responsible for Colt’s automated SDN-based network, while throughout his career he has been at the centre of various innovations and new product offerings.

These traits are mirrored over at Colt.

Only last year the company in partnership with Verizon demonstrated the industry’s first two-way inter-carrier SDN network orchestration. As a result, both companies were able to make real-time bandwidth changes in each other’s networks.

Entering the test phase Speaking about that particular demonstration and Colt’s work within that space, Datta says it’s nothing new, as the company was also first to demonstrate inter-carrer on-demand capability with AT&T over two years ago. Colt has offered an on-demand capability on its network for

a couple of years now. “Ours is the first commercial product that’s been widely deployed, and it’s available across our entire footprint. To us, on-demand provides the kind of agility that some customers need for certain use cases and this automation offers that kind of agility,” he says.

However, the Verizon demonstration is not the most recent trial; Colt has also participated in the MEF LSO demonstration – a set of specifications for lifecycle of services across multiple networks.

“This is important because, once we started to talk about the work we’re doing in the on-demand space, we got a lot of interest from wholesalers to do more work in this area – but it’s much more effective if we actually commit to an industry standard for this kind of automation,” he adds.

Speaking to Datta, one thing becomes clear: ultimately, Colt is on a journey, changing world of connectivity from things being static and manually managed to everything now shifting to the cloud.

“To us, we’ve been on a multi-year path to build out infrastructure that facilitates that level of network automation, and that has

required a great deal of innovation,” explains Datta. The result of those efforts is the Colt IQ Network. As Datta puts it, “you can add automation and innovation from a customer-facing perspective, but it has to have a foundation of the actual network capability”. So as well as the entire Colt IQ Network being designed to support a range of next-gen capabilities, all while being 100G optimised, it is also distributed, and that’s crucial, according to Datta. “It’s not just a traditional telco network that fits in a traditional node or point of presence (PoP), it is distributed to data centres, cloud aggregation points and places where increasingly traffic originates or terminates.”

Trying out blockchain Colt has also participated in a number of trials with emerging technologies – including blockchain, in a collaboration with PCCW Global to demonstrate a proof of concept (PoC) for the inter-carrier settlement of wholesale international voice services. “We thought that there were a number of things that happen between telco service providers that could be improved if we had this april/may 2019

the big interview: rajiv datta | 41

1996

Senior development engineer, Alcatel

1998

Chief operating officer, AboveNet

2014

Chief technology officer, IP/data network, Jio

2015

Chief technology officer, Colt

2017

Chief operating officer, Colt

essence of the question we’re trying to answer. And whether we could use AI to do that,” he says.

The drivers of automation from an enterprise perspective are based on two things. Aside from cost-efficiency and the fact that enterprises don’t have budgets that are progressively increasing, the first is simplicity. “The enterprise network is getting quite complicated, much more complex than it used to be,” says Datta, “especially as enterprises as navigating an IT environment that is undergoing its own transformation with new applications being deployed in the public cloud that have varying security requirements.”

The second driver is agility, because Datta believes that customers are simply trying to understand what the dynamics of their needs and use cases are going to be. “It’s harder to predict for enterprises how things are going to manifest themselves.”

The answer to both these needs, however, is SD-WAN. “Fundamentally, what

Innovation requires you to believe inCapacity a future that’s not apparent today”

Rajiv Datta, COO, Colt

seamless, trusted network amongst carriers to settle things that have been done manually for many years,” explains Datta.

He says that the company is exploring ways to use blockchain in a customer-facing way. “We’re looking at other interesting use cases where we could leverage our connectivity, global reach and capabilities to offer an enterprise solution that would benefit them.”

Impact of robots Colt is also working in the area of robotic process automation (RPA). “It’s already had an incredible impact within Colt,” he says.

Effectively RPA is about taking steps, which are manual, and automating these steps using robots so that you can actually use your human resources where they are most needed. The company has already deployed close to 20 RPAs within Colt, and they are already providing value.

As if that weren’t enough, the company already has an artificial intelligence (AI) project that is under way right now. “We’ve been looking at network health prediction.

So, could we predict an outage? That is the capacitymedia.com

SD-WAN offers is simplicity, like the ability to go to a portal and manage various access sites,” he says.

No matter how many innovative trials and PoCs the company is involved with, Datta maintains that Colt’s entire strategy is focused around high bandwidth connectivity. In order to do that, you need to have the right network platform, something Colt has invested heavily in – including optical DWDM systems, Ethernet platforms and IP platforms, all of which make up the Colt IQ Network. “It’s very easy to say I have this incredible piece of new network equipment in my node or PoP. That’s what telcos typically do, but what’s harder is to distribute that so that customers can feel that scale and capability,” he says.

But Colt has managed to do it in two ways. Firstly it has taken the Colt IQ Network and deployed that to more than 300 key data centres, carrier hotels and cloud aggregation points. Secondly, it has invested in fibre, which is a key requirement in delivering high bandwidth services.

“You can deliver incredible amounts of capability to some core nodes, but if the

customer wants to feel that capability, you have to have fibre to the end. What we have is an asset base built up over a 27-year period focused on heavy distribution within the densest urban enterprise environments.”

Innovation is cultural So what makes Colt the innovative environment many telco struggle to replicate in their own organisations? “I think innovation is a cultural dynamic”, he says.

“It’s all about what you place value on.

Innovation – and spending time and resources, which is always the case with these types of things – requires you to believe in a future that’s not apparent today. They tend to be things that have longer cycles, in terms of return on capital. That’s always a challenge,” continues Datta.

In terms of automation, the biggest challenge many companies face is the shift in mindset from hardware to software focussed.

“That mindset shift from hardware to software might sound straightforward, but it’s not. It’s something that has to be managed,” he adds.

Another challenge Datta has noticed for telcos is how you take automation beyond what he calls the “water’s edge”. In short, if you want to create a solution for the customer that goes beyond the core network – one that needs to leverage a partner network – that partner has to have the same level of innovation and automation as Colt does; otherwise, it becomes the weakest link.

“That’s why the work we’re doing with on-demand standards is so important, because if we need to leverage a part of the network from a partner, we can still deliver that agility and innovation,” he says.

Beyond the work already done, Datta says that Colt is on a very clear journey towards helping customers navigate the surge in bandwidth requirements, while internally aiming to be a “best of breed connectivity provider to both enterprises and wholesale players”.

Denser metro fibre The company will also be making some further public announcements this year around how it is investing in densifying the metro fibre in key cities.

“The goal in this space is not about fibre to the end; it’s about fibre to the edge,” explains Datta. Overall, the company is investing in having “all the tools in the toolbox required to manage a raft of dedicated connectivity needs.”

Both Datta and Colt show no signs of slowing their journey of innovation and automation. He says: “I’m excited for the year ahead to see how The Colt IQ Network continues to evolve to ensure it is the connectivity backbone required for the transformative business landscape of today.”

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Malta after IMC signed with Melita, Malta’s only purpose-built BoTCoin Market is run out of IMC Malta, a wholly-owned data centre, to host our servers for the minting of our settlement subsidiary of Internet Mobile Communications Group, that has token, BoTCoin. We have opened up a Maltese office and revenues of over $100 million p.a. and is regulated by the Maltese appointed our anti-money laundering officer, finance director and compliance teams. We have our account management and customer Financial Services Authority. As a result, it adheres to the 5th Edition European Anti Money Laundering Directive. It is also a full member services team in place who are ready to serve our customers. We of the International Compliance Association (ICA). That coupled are delighted to have expanded our company infrastructure and footprint and look forward to welcoming more customers every day, with our payment partner, Western Union Business Solutions, a Forbes 500 company with $8 billion market capitalisation, has as they progress through onboarding. helped give our customers reassurance that their money is in safe hands. When a customer credits their BoTCoin account, we mint BoTCoins to the equivalent US$ value (the BoTCoin token, is Q. What are the main benefits carriers should be aware of when pegged against the US$). The customer’s US dollars remain in a using the BoTCoin Market settlement service?

Western Union Holding account so when they withdraw BoTCoins, we debit their account and pay out using their deposited funds held BoTCoins are changing the way the telecoms industry pays and at Western Union. saves. BoTCoin users can make international settlements that clear The account holder is very much in control. BoTCoins can instantaneously to any other BoTCoin account holder for a flat only be exchanged from one verified account holder to another. fixed-rate transfer fee of 10 BoTCoins (US$10) representing an They don’t sit on open exchanges and only the customer can 87.5% average saving on Bank wire fees. If you stop and think for a deposit, transfer or withdraw BoTCoins. Our finance, anti-money moment the amount of international B2B invoices that need to be laundering officer and compliance team police our accounts just like settled in the carrier industry on a monthly basis who, up to now, were only able to use Banks to transfer, the financial and operational a Bank does. Our legal entity identifier 549300QERJPNXPFSN296 legally identifies us an entity that engages in financial transactions. benefits of using BoTCoins to settle speaks for itself.

BoTCoin is also a registered trademark of IMC. Settling in seconds brings many cashflow benefits and with it So all of the above has proved that security hasn’t been a barrier being online, there are no cut-offs, no weekends or Bank holidays – of adoption and in fact, only reassures customers to the point that BoTCoin account holders just settle whenever they want to. they are happy to take that leap of faith into this technological world Customers can withdraw BoTCoins back to their registered Bank account, or even pay other another Bank of Telecom Member’s (over of blockchain where real financial and operational benefits prevail.

So far, no one is closing their BoTCoin account, moreover, they are 1,100 carriers) Bank account within 2 hours for a fixed-rate fee of busy referring others to join so they can continue to benefit with 20 BoTCoins (US$20) which can be paid out in 130+ currencies more of their own suppliers! Hence the onboarding backlog‌! to over 170 countries via Western Union Business Solutions. This

capacity

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| 43

Power

100 Capacity

elcome to Capacity’s first ever Power 100. This global index is made up of 100 of the most influential people in the wholesale carrier community. The participants of this list are not only powerful people in their respective fields, but are also innovators, critical thinkers and agents of change – pushing the conversation forward in some way or another.

As always, the Capacity editorial team had a difficult task in whittling down this list to only 100 as there is a vast number of individuals worthy of this index. However, what we have ended up with is a nice mix of voice, data, messaging, subsea, data centre, cloud, tower and satellite players, from all corners of the wholesale telecommunications world.

W

Compiled by Natalie Bannerman

capacitymedia.com

44 | power 100

Christopher Roy

Ajay Chitkara

VP

Director and CEO

AT&T Global Public Sector and Wholesale Solutions

Airtel Business

Ajay Chitkara’s leadership style is described as ‘simplify and transform’.

As a result of this approach, and since his appointment in June 2018, he has helped Airtel’s global business grow to over 1,200 customers, achieve a high customer satisfaction score and develop a team with the highest productivity index.

Roy was recently named as vice president of AT&T Global Public Sector and wholesale solutions division, transiitioning from role as VP of AT&T Global Public Sector. As the one spearheading all the company’s activties in the wholesale space, Roy is at the heart of the divisions most recent successes.

Daniel Kurgan

Abraham Smeke

CEO

VP Carrier Services

BICS

C3ntro Telecom

Daniel was appointed CEO of BICS in 2007 after being named COO the year prior. Since then BICS has welcomed a number of successes, which includes closing its $230 million acquisition of TeleSign, entering into a strategic partnership with Fastweb, partnering with Ooredoo against fruad and joining the France-IX maketplace.

During his time as vice president for C3NTRO Smeke has orchestrated and participated in several partnerships with many of the world’s biggest companies in order to add to C3ntro’s portfolio of solution sand become a true carrier enabler. As a result the company has seen significant growth over the past 12 months.

Jeffrey Storey CEO CenturyLink

Li Feng

Capacity

Jeff assumed the position of CEO of CenturyLink in Q3 of 2017 overseeing the extensive integration of Level Communications into the CenturyLink workflow and ushered in a period a growth at the company with the launch of a new data centre in Chile and a security operations centre in Singapore.

Chairman and CEO China Mobile International

Feng has served as chairman and CEO of China Mobile International since August 2016 and as such is responsible for overall management of the company. With over 24 years’ experience in the telecom sector, he previously held various senior level roles at China Mobile Group Jiangxi Co as well as China Mobile Group Yunnan Co.

Joe Han

Carl Grivner

EVP

CEO

China Telecom Global

Colt

As executive vice president of China Telecom Global (CTG) Han is responsible for global sales, solution development and innovation business. A regular speaker at numerous industry conferences, he is regarded as a thought-leader in the telecom space. CTG recently partnered with Tata Communications on global IoT connectivity.

Carl Grivner was appointed chief executive officer of Colt in January 2016. Under his leadership, Colt has expanded the reach of its Colt IQ network and developed its SDN platform. During his tenure the company has also successfully completed a number of innovative proof of concepts with Verizon and MEF.

Rolf Nafziger

Jean-Yves Charlier

SVP, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier

CEO

Deutsche Telekom

Digicel

Nafziger has played a vital role in transforming Deutsche Telekom’s international wholesale business into a leading global wholesale providers with a double-digit growth rate over the last four years. Under his direction, the company has implementated the use of big data and AI to improve processes and combat fraud.

A recognised leader in the global telecoms industry, from 2015 to 2018, Charlier served as chief executive officer of VEON and prior to that, he served as chairman and chief executive of SFR. Charlier was chief executive at Promethean World and Colt and held senior roles with British Telecom, Equant and Wang.

april/may 2019

power 100 | 45

Abou Moustafa

Jerzy Szlosarek

VP of fixed business & ICT commercial

CEO

du

Epsilon

Moustafa leads has helped to build du’s datacentre business from the ground up and positioned it to bceome one of the leading data centre hosts in the Middle East region. One of the more exciting projects is a partnership with CMC Networks to create a new low latency route between Djibouti and Dubai.

Since becoming CEO in 2015, Jerzy has led the transformation of Epsilon to become a global connectivity provider. He has grown the Infiny by Epsilon on-demand connectivity platform and interconnecting SDN fabric with DCConnect, a leading Chinese ondemand connectivity provider.

Ali Amiri

Bill Barney

Chief carrier & wholesale officer

CEO

Etisalat

GCX

As group chief carrier and wholesale officer Amiri continues to lead the evolution and development of Etisalat’s global service portfoiio and network. Ali serves on the board of directors on a number of Etisalat’s subsidiaries and was previously chairman of the GSM Arab World as well as a member of the GSMA Executive Committee.

Under Barney’s leadership, GCX has continually expanded its network footprint. At the start of 2019 the company completed a 100Gbps upgrade of its HAWK subsea cable system, partnered with PacketFabric to expand eacjh others footpring and was named as the Best Asian Wholesale Carrier at the 2018 Global Carrier Awards.

President and CEO GTT

Calder has lead GTT through a extensive period of acquisiton and growth. In 2018 alone, the company has completed the acquisitions of Custom Connect, Interoute, Accelerated Connections (ACI) and Access Point. Despite the large spend, the company still managed to bring in approximate d $1 billion in annualised revenues for 2018.

Andrew Kwok Wing Pong

Capacity

CEO HGC Global Communications

Kwok joined HGC in 2002 as the president of international business, spearheaded its establishment, operation and development. Since then, HGC has expanded from a Hong Kong-based local carrier to a global player in the telecoms arena. Under his direction HGC has ventured into network digitisation and new business models.

Nic Rudnick

Frederic Schepens

CEO

CEO

Liquid Telecom

MTN GlobalConnect

Rudnick was at the centre of one of the largest network developments in Africa. In partnership with Telecom Egypt he oversaw the 60,000km ‘One Africa Network’a pan-African terrestrial fibre network from Cape Town, South Africa, to Cairo, Egypt. He is also supporting the integration of Neotel, now known as Liquid Telecom South Africa.

Scheppens joined MTN from Vodafone where he was a senior vice president of the company for four years. Since entering the role in 2017, he has been focused on the commercialisation and operation of MTN’s global whosale, carrier and infrasturcture and roaming activities in Africa and the Middle East.

Luciano Salata

Michael Wheeler

President & co-founder

Executive VP, Global IP Network

Neutrona Networks

NTT Communictions

With 20 years of experience in the industry, Salata has been described as a leader of innovation and results in Latin America. Since co-founding Neutrona Networks he had helped the company scale ten-fold and overseen the launch of Neutrona’s enterprise sales team. He is considered to be a thought-leader in the SD-WAN space.

capacitymedia.com

Michael Wheeler has helped transform NTT Communications and its Global IP Network business unit into one of the leading wholesale IP providers in the world. Additionally he has overseen the expansion of the Global IP Network into more than 20 new markets, including Toronto, Sao Paolo, Boston, Bangkok, Dublin and Marseille.

CARRIER

Rick Calder

46 | power 100

Anne Morel

Dino Andreou

SVP, global carrier sales

CEO

Orange International Carriers

OTEGLOBE

Anne Morel has been vice president of global carrier sales at Orange International Carriers since 2012. She oversees the global sales and business development of wholesale services for voice, data and mobile data. Morel has held numerous positions of increasing responsibility within the International Carriers management team.

Before entering the role of CEO in 2007, Andreou joined OTEGLOBE in 2000 while it was still a startup and contributed significantly to the creation, development and establishment of OTEGLOBE’s business in South East Europe. He spearheaded the company’s network regenertaion in 2017 with the large scale quisition of dark fibre.

Marc Halbfinger

Maxim Akinin

CEO

Director, carrier business department

PCCW Global

Rostelecom

Since his appointment in 2007, Halbfinger has cemented his position as a though-leader in the wholesale carrier community. A member of the Global Leaders Forum, Halbfinger has successfully seen the company through a number of proof of concepts, most recently in the area of blockchain. He has also active in the GLF’s work on fraud prevention.

Akinin has over 20 years’ telcoms experience having previously served as country amanger for Level 3 Communications business in Russia and CIS. Under his tenure, Rostelecom has completed a considerable upgrade to its transit Europe-Asia (TEA) Cable and is reportedly expanding its facilities with a new data centre in Russia.

Abdullah Al Samhan International cable system GM Saudi Telecom Company

Mario Di Mauro

Capacity

Al Samhan has been active in the submarine cable space for over 30 years, as such he acts as chairman, on behalf of STC for such cables systems as SEA-ME-WE 4 and SEA-ME-WE 5. He has been at the forefont of planning international infrastructure for STC as well as the development of broadband infrastructure in Saudi Arbia.

CEO Sparkle

Formerly the chief innovation and customer experience officer at TIM, Di Mauro has recently been named as the new CEO of Sparkle. He has been TIM since 1998 progressing from such roles as EVP of strategic projects and deep involvement in the company’s Latin American subsidaries. He will now lead Sparkle through its next stage of growth.

Sally O’Brien

Anthony Bartolo

Head of global service providers

CPO

Sprint

Tata Communications

Before being named as head of global service providers at Sprint in April 2018, O’Brien was head of global wireline wholesale, where she managed the commercial relationships with over 400 international carriers to enable global roaming, international long distance and IP data services for Sprint.

As chief product officer, Bartolo is repsonsible for the development of the company’s product strategy and commercial architecture.

Most recently, Bartolo was actively involved with the IPX network collaboration with Syniverse to give operators better visibility and control of the data flowing across their interconnected networks.

Juan Carlos Bernal

Staffan Göjeryd

CEO of international wholesale business

CEO

Telefónica

Telia Carrier

Having joined Telefónica in 2000, Bernal has cemented his postion as thought-leader in the wholesale telecoms sector. A member of the Global Leadership Forum, Bernal has led the company through a period of digital transformation particularly the softwariation of services and the cosolidation of new services like cloud, security, IoT and big data.

After a long standing career at Telia Carrier, Göjeryd was named as CEO in 2016. Since then the company, under his guidence, has launched new points of presence in Tokyo, Hong Kong Mexico, Serbia Michigan and Rome, partnered with the likes of Cable ONE, Telxius and EdgeConneX on various projects.

april/may 2019

power 100 | 47

Oliver Camplin-Warner

Amar Huzaimi

International CEO

EVP

Telstra

TM Global

As Telstra’s International CEO, Oliver is responsible for wholesale and enterprise sales and services in more than 20 countries across Asia-Pacific, EMEA and the Americas. In the past six months under Oliver’s leadership, Telstra announced a series of major investments and upgrades to its international connectivity infrastructure.

Huzaimi oversees the group’s global and wholesale business operations.

Speaking to Capacity back in 2018, he decribed how the company plans to propel Malaysia as the regional gateway interconnecting the world and the ASEAN region, while accelerating digital opportunities in domestic and international telecommunications.

Alexandre Pébereau

Memhet Toros

CEO and founder

Group CEO

Tofane Global

Türk Telekom International

A 25-year veteran, Pébereau has worked for such companies as Orange, Maroc Telecom and Bolloré. As well as this Pébereau also created and chaired the ITW Founders’ council, now the GLF. Since founding Tofane Global he has led the company through major acquitions, including iBasis, which was relaunched under Tofane earlier this year.

Mehmet Toros took over as CEO of Türk Telekom International (TTI) Group from Cengiz Oztelcan in November 2016. Since then, has focused on growing partnerships and enhancing cooperation.

More recently TTI extended its collaboration in Turkey with DE-CIX Instanbul with global internet exchnage services.

CEO Ufinet

Garcia del Cerro has acted as CEO of Unfinet since 2009 having held numerous positions in the company since 1998. He is hailed as one of the key players responsible for business development in Spain and Latin America. Under his guidence the company has expanded throughout Central America with a presence in over 20 countries.

Ursula Burns

Capacity

Chairman and CEO VEON

Burns has served as chairman and CEO of VEON since 2017. Under her direction, VEON has undergone a simplification of its management structure to enable a focus on emerging markets with a flatter structure.

Previously the CEO and chairman of Xerox, Burns is also a director of the boards of Exxon Mobil, Nestlé and Uber.

Eric Cevis

Brian Fitzpatrick

SVP and group president

CEO

Verizon Partner Solutions

Vodafone Carrier Services

Eric joined Verizon Partner Solutions in 2014 and is responsible for Verizon’s global wholesale strategy, marketing, sales, IT and operations.

He has quickly led the team to success with his inspiring and innovative approach to the wholesale market. Cevis has also led the team to play an active role in industry organizations such as MEF.

Fitzpatrick has been with VCS since its inception in 2013, responsible for the end-to-end management of Vodafone’s carrier customers and suppliers globally. Thanksa to his leadership VCS was recognised as the winner of the Best SMS/A2P Provider Global at the 2018 Messaging and SMS Awards in London.

Dan Caruso

Victoria Lamberth

Chairman and CEO

Co-founder and CRO

Zayo Group Holdings

ZenFi Networks

Caruso founded the business back in 2007 and has nurtured it from the startup it was to the multi-billion dollar business it is today providing mission-critical bandwidth to some of the world’s biggest companies.

Zayo recently annouced plans to separate into two publicly traded companies, Zayo Infrastructure and EnterpriseCo, later this year.

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As chief revenue officer of ZenFi Networks, she is described as an innovative leader in infrastructure solutions who leverages a combination of ambition and deep industry expertise to drive results.

Not only was Lamberth the lead on the Cross River Fiber acquisition but has overseen the company’s fibre network expansion in NYC.

CARRIER

Iñigo García del Cerro Prieto

48 | power 100

Bob DeSantis

Peter van Burgel

CEO

CEO

365 Data Centers

AMS-IX

DeSantis was formerly the co-founder and managing partner of Xand, a data centre, managed services and cloud services operator.

Since becoming CEO at 365 Data Centers he has led the company to launching enterprise managed services as well as a new channel partner programme as the company transitions to a hybrid services provider.

AMS-IX achieved a number of milestones in 2018-19, under the watchful eye of its CEO van Burgel. One of the biggest being the internet exchange reaching 6.3Tbps in throughput. At the time van Burgel said that the achievement “makes AMS-IX one of the most costeffective technical platforms for networks to exchange internet traffic”.

Oliver Jones

Tesh Durvasula

Co-founder and CEO

President of Europe

Chayora

CyrusOne

Originally a qualified chartered surveyor, Jones focuses on complex outsourcing transactions and property operating related investment.

His focus on property hasn’t stopped since founding Chayora and at the start of the year the company began work on the first of its planned nine data centre builds on the 300MW, 80-acre Chayora campus.

In his role as president of Europe, Durvasula is responsible for creating a European organisation that is inclusive of the company strategy, site selection, sales, construction, design, operations, finance, HR and legal.

Since his appointment in 2012 the company’s revenues have more than tripled, thanks in part to sales growth and various acquisitions.

Tom Brown President and CEO DataGryd

Harald A Summa

Capacity

At the time of Brown’s appointment in 2018, he said that company plans on leasing an additional 60,000 sqft of usable data centre space over the next 18 to 24 months. To date, the company has annouced plans to build MegaSuite 6, a high-density and high-performance data centre suite, at the 60 Hudson Street facility.

CEO DE-CIX

Summa has three main goals: first to enable our shared digital ecosystem to flourish, second to encourage young people in their fascination for technology and third to ensure that technology serves people. Recognised as a leader in his field, Summa is also the founder and CEO of eco – the Association of the Internet Industry.

Chris Sharp

Randy Brouckman

CTO

CEO

Digital Realty

EdgeConneX

Before his time at Digital Realty, Sharp was reponsible for cloud innovation at Equinix where led the development of innovative cloud services solutions. One of his most recent accomplishments at Digital Realty has been the expansion of the company’s IX platform to new data centre facilities in Ashburn, Virginia, and Chicago, Illinois.

Starting in 2009, Randy developed and led the development of EdgeConneX’s global strategy to build the world’s leading global platform of Edge data centres. Brouckman also led the development for EdgeConneX to build its own DCIM platform rather than an off-theshelf DCIM that had limited capabilities.

Sara Baack

Franck Simon

CPO

President

Equinix

France-IX

Baack, joined Equinix in 2012 and recently served as chief marketing officer. In her new position she will take on the role of chief product officer, leading product marketing, management, development and engineering across core colocation and interconnection offerings, as well as overseeing the company’s edge services portfolio.

In recent years, Simon has steered France-IX on a course of rapid expansion with a focus on markets outside of its European footprint.

Towards the end of 2018 France-IX celebrated a number of milestones in Africa with an 90% increase in traffic from African ISPs connecting to France-IX.

april/may 2019

power 100 | 49

Josh Simms

Mike Leber

CEO and founder

Owner and CEO

H5 Data Centers

Hurricane Electric

2018 has been a great year of growth for H5 Data Centers, from the launch of a new internet exchange in San Antonio to the acquistion of a San Antonio carrier hotel and the expansion of its Denver facility.

Simms comes from a property background with experience in investing in a variety of assets through his investment company H5 Capital.

As owner and CEO of Hurricane Electric, Leber has been deeply invested in the success of the company since its inception in 1994. One of the companies biggest annoucements to date has been that it is now the first internet backbone in the world to connect over 200 unique internet exchanges.

Mike Hollands

William Meaney

Director of marketing and business development

President and CEO

Interxion

Iron Mountain

As well as president and CEO, Meaney also sits on the company’s board of directors. Formerly the CEO of the Zuellig Group, the company saw it sales triple during his tenure. Over at Iron Mountain, he has ushered in the acquisition of GRM’s Chinese operations, expanding the company’s presence in China.

Guy Willner CEO IXcellerate

Willner began his career as co-founder of IXEurope that was later acquired by Equinix for $555 million, after this he created Ixcellerate in Russia. The company has recently started construction of its second data centre in Moscow as part of a larger $260 million five-year investment plan for the country.

John Souter

Capacity

CEO LINX

Souter has been focussed on devloping a fair pricing policy for LINX, encouraging membership growth from all sectors of the Internet industry. As a result, LINX membership more than quadrupled. He is also a board director and treasurer of Euro-IX playing a major role in ensuring that European Internet Exchanges share knowledge.

Dean Belev

Gil Santaliz

VP of services

CEO

NetIX

NJFX

Winner of the Best Internet Exchange at the 2018 Global Carrier Awards, NetIX has been on a journey of business development. One of the champions of this process is Belev who leads the company’s product management and development. He is described as a ‘peering enthusiast’ and co-creator of the NetIX concept.

As the founder and CEO of NJFX, Santaliz is the driving force behind developing NJFX as North America’s leading international hub for data centre and subsea communications. He developed ‘Tier 3 by the Subsea’, a purpose-built facility for high and low-density data centre space as well as colocation of subsea systems.

Bruno Lopez

Brian Cox

CEO and SEVP

CEO

ST Telemedia Global Data Centres

Stack Infrastructure

Lopez is considered a veteran in the data centre industry with more than 20 years of experience. Before joining ST Telemedia, he served as executive director and CEO of Keppel Data Centres, where he was instrumental in building up and leading the company and its business expansion in Asia and Europe.

capacitymedia.com

An industry veteran, Cox stepped into the role as CEO of Stack Infrastructure, formerly Infomart Data Centers, back in October 2018.

With over 20 years of industry and operational experience, he previously served as chief operating officer at Cologix, where he was responsible for market positioning, strategy, marketing and commercial management.

DATA CENTRE / IX

With over 20 years’ experience in the communications sector, Hollands has held a variety of marketing and business development roles at Colt Technology Services, Cable & Wireless and Mercury Communications.

Most recently he oversaw the partnership negotiations with Batelco to deploy a new point of presence (PoP) in Marseille, France.

50 | power 100

Tyson Lamoreaux

Joseph Goodyer

VP of networking

Managing director

Amazon Web Services

Brodynt

Lamoreaux joined the company in 2000 transitiioning from systems engineer, manager of network engineering, then to director of networking and now vice president of networking. As the company plans on expanding its range of services in the areas of AI and machine learning, Lamoreaux and his team will support this development.

Since joining GTT in 2009, to CMC Networks in 2015 and most recently Brodynt, Joseph has been focussed on driving change in the telecoms industry. Mentor to many, he has been successful in expanding International telecom network service providers operations into to new customer verticals in new countries which continues to grow

Gal Hochberg

Cara Mascini

Co-founder and CEO

CEO

Clear

EdgeInfra

Gal Hochberg is the co-founder and CEO of Clear. In 2018 Clear, under the leadership of Hochberg and his co-founder Eran Haggiag, completed a blockchain trial in partnership with Colt and PCCW Global, believing that blockchain technology will reduce fraud and settlement times and increase efficiency.

Cara Mascini is described by her peers as ambitious, eloquent and a knowledgeable entrepreneur who founded a company called EdgeInfra.

The company is built on innovative concept to improve end-user experience at lower costs for all by building micro data centres to better serve and interconnect the MNOs with geo-relevant content.

Bevan Slattery Founder Entrepreneur

Luis Jorge Romero

Capacity

SubPartners, Megaport, Superloop to name a few, were all founded, nurtured cultivated by Bevan Slattery. A native of Australia Slattery continues to act as chairman for a number of the companies to helped to build, using his vast knowledge and experience to help these businesses continue to grow.

Kevin Salvadori Director, network investments Facebook

It’s exciting times over at Facebook, at Salvadori is at the centre of it.

The company recently announced that it is entering the wholesale fibre market and plans to sell excess capacity on fibre routes via a newlylaunched subsidiary called Middle Mile Infrastructure. A networking veteran, Salvadori has also worked for the likes of Telus and Vodafone.

Director general ETSI

Since his appointment as ETSI director general in 2011, Luis Jorge Romero has led the steady charge on the much-needed development of technology specifications across the industry. These include the oneM2M global standards initiative for machine-to-machine communications and the internet of things (IoT).

Michael Francois Technology lead manager of global network infrastructure, EMEA Google Cloud

Francois currently works the on global network infrastructure development at Google Cloud, which includes cloud, subsea, terrestrial fibre, data centres, colocation, peering, content distribution and global latency optimisation.

A networking executive since 1987, Francois is leading Google’s future networking projects in the EMEA region

Philippe Millet

Mark Stewart

Chairman

CEO and founder

i3forum

Internet Mobile Communications

Philippe continues to lead the i3forum into new directions, supporting transformation and collaboration in the industry. Together with the ITW Global Leaders Forum (GLF), the i3forum chaired by Philippe, launched a code of conduct to combat fraud in international telecoms.

The Code of Conduct gives carriers the steps to protect their business.

Stewart founded IMC in 2012 after a 30-year career with companies such as BT and Cable & Wireless. Last year, IMC launched BoTCoin Market, the world’s first regulated settlements service using blockchain.

The service has the potential to save the industry close to $13 billion, because as Stewart puts it “we’re cutting out the dead money”.

april/may 2019

power 100 | 51

Pascal Menezes

Vincent English

CTO

CEO

MEF

Megaport

The work of the MEF and in particular its new global services framework, MEF 3.0, has been transformative in its impact on telecoms moving beyond carrier Ethernet to look at automated and virtualised services. At the heart of that work is Pascal Menezes, MEF’s first-ever CTO who has helped to develop a number of new standards.

After a nine-year stint at Digicel, English joined Megaport three years ago as CFO, before progressing to COO and now CEO. Megaport as a concept defies traditional networking, leveraging software-definded networking to cloud infrastucture. This aligns with Vincent’s personal philospy which is to be “the person who helps improve, expand and consolidate”.

Frank Rey

Dave Temkin

Director, global network strategy

VP of Networks

Microsoft

Netflix

As the one responsible for the design, deployment, and operations of all elements of networking at Netflix, Temkin literally takes terabits of content from script-to-screen. With well over 20 years’ networking experience Temkin has previously worked for the likes of Yahoo and was formerly chair of the board of directors at NANOG.

Brynn Fowler

Hunter Newby Owner Newby Ventures

Newby, during his tenure at Telx (now Digital Realty), created the concept of the zero cross connect fee. When he left Telx he spread this idea throughout the industry. He continues to innovate from the convergence of wireline and wireless solutions to the Continental Edge, a concept that helps to bridge the connectivity options between the US and Europe.

Capacity

Director, OCI Networking Business Governance & Planning Oracle

Fowler runs the business operations team for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Network Engineering organisation. Outside of this, Fowler is also president and co-founder the Women’s Tech Forum (WTF), which was founded in 2016 to support a global network of women working in the network, data centre, and cloud industries.

Drew Kelton

Mohit Lad

CEO and Managing Director

CEO & Co-founder

Superloop

Thousand Eyes

Kelton’s CV reads like the who’s who of the telecoms sector. He has had stints at the likes of DocuSign, T-Mobile Business, Bharti Airtel, Telstra International, Saturn Global and IXNET. He entered his current role back in 2018, earning the appointment beacuse of his “global perspective and significant understanding of ICT and telecommunications infrastructure”.

Alongside CTO Ricardo Oliveira, Lad co-founded ThousandEyes back in 2010. Born of two key concepts - the power to see things not ordinarily possible and the ability to collect insights from a multitude of vantage points - ThousandEyes has grown to become the network solutions provider of choice for the likes of Equinix and CenturyLink.

Kelly Ahuja

Tom O’Hagan

CEO

CEO

Versa Networks

Virtual1

Ahuja spent 18 years at Cisco, most recently as SVP of service provider business, products & solutions. Thanks to his leadership over Versa Networks, the company has partnered with the likes of BringCom on its SD-WAN deployment in Africa and California Telecom as its SD-WAN solutions provider of choice.

capacitymedia.com

O’Hagan started Virtual1 in 2007 and quickly scaled the company into one of the key players in UK software-defined networking. The recipient of Best Data Innovation in a Mature Market - Global Carrier Awards 2018, O’Hagan and his team are pushing the envelope with their 1Access, 1Portal and 1Cloud product offerings.

DISRUPTOR

Rey has been apart of the Microsoft since 2013 progressing from principal strategic network negotiator to director of the Global Network Acquisition Group. Rey is also a member of the board of directors at the Open-IX Association. Before his time as Microsoft he also held the position of VP of capacity management at Hibernia Networks.

52 | power 100

Philippe Piron

António Nunes

President and CEO

CEO

Alcatel Submarine Networks

Angola Cables

Piron joined ASN from GEA Batignolles Technologies Thermiques back in 2016. He started his career in 1994 at Total Chimie after studying both engineering and business. As of late ASN has been one of the main design-builders of subsea cable, building such future systems as EllaLink, HKA and SAEx.

Nunes has been CEO of Angola Cables since 2012 and has over 15 year’s experience in the telecoms industry. In 2018 Nunes ushered in the launch of Angola Cables’ South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) linking Angola to Brazil. Before the year was out, Nunes was partnering with Silica to extend the system to Argentina and Chile.

Nigel Bayliff

Chris Coles

CEO

CCO of B2B and networks/ wholesale

Aqua Comms

C&W Communications

Bayliff joined Aqua Comms in October 2016, having previously provided consultancy services to global telecoms companies through SIN Medida.

Under his leadership Aqua Comms has cultivated the North Atlantic Loop, which is the combination of all of Aqua Comms’ current and inconstruction assets in the Northern Europe region.

Coles is repsonsible for improving market penetration, pricing as well as cost-effective customer acquisition and retention across all C&W’s markets. Prior to joining C&W, he was managing director for business markets at Liberty Global in Amsterdam. He began he career at AT&T in its management development programme.

Suresh Sidhu CEO edotco

Eduardo Falzoni

Capacity

Appointed CEO of edotco in August 2014. Sidhu has overseen the company’s transformation resulting in what they describe as one of the fastest growing tower companies in terms of towers and tenancies. He served as chief corporate and operations officer of Celcom and has held senior roles at Axiata and Dialog in the Axiata Group.

CEO GlobeNet

Before joining GlobeNet, Falzoni held executive positions across the US and Latin America such as CEO of Latin American Nautilus, VP of Americas region for Sparkle, and director of marketing and later director of strategy for Telecom Argentina. Falzoni recently celebrated the opening of GlobeNet’s new interconnection point in Fortaleza.

Rémi Galasso

Kash Pandya

CEO

CEO

Hawaiki Submarine Cable

Helios Towers

The founder and CEO of the 15,000km Hawaiki cable, Galasso has over 20 years’ experience in subsea, having worked for the likes of Intelia and Alcatel-Lucent. As the Hawaiki system continues to develop, it’s the people aspect that drives him most. “My dream is to see what the Hawaiki cable can do to improve quality of life for Pacific islands people,” he says.

Following eight years with Aggreko, where he served on the board, Pandya joined Helios Towers in 2015. During his time with Aggreko he oversaw a doubling of its international business. At the start of the year Helios Towers entered into South African market after striking a deal with Vulatel to create an infrastructure platform in the country.

Mike Constable

Bimal Dayal

CEO and board director

CEO

Huawei Marine Networks

Indus Towers

Constable held the poisition of corporate development director at Global Crossing before the company joined forces with Huawei to create Huawei Marine. Since joining the company in 2014 he has been at the helm of approximately 13 new cable builds globally and 14 cable upgrade projects.

Dayal joined Indus as chief operating officer in 2010 and since then has led the company to reach a number of milestones. At present Indus is having discussions with Bharti Infratel, the tower unit of Bharti Airtel, on a possible merger. Dayal’s past experience includes working for the likes of Ericsson and BT Global Services.

april/may 2019

power 100 | 53

Rupert Pearce

Steve Spengler

CEO

CEO

Inmarsat

Intelsat

Pearce has been Inmarsat’s chief executive officer since January 2012.

He joined Inmarsat in January 2005 as general counsel and senior vice president, Inmarsat Enterprises. Previously, he was a partner in Atlas Venture and Linklaters. Inmarsat is currently in discussions over a $3.3 billion takeover bid from a private equity-led consortium.

Intelsat is one of the key satellite players, having been formed as an intergovernmental organisation in 1964, with the first satellite going into orbit a year later. Stephen Spengler, CEO since April 2015, has been in the industry for 30 years, and the company has launched a number of satellites, most notably across the Epic range.

Funke Opeke

Greg Wyler

CEO

Founder and executive chairman

MainOne

OneWeb

Wyler founded OneWeb in 2012 with the stated aim of enabling internet access for everyone via a fleet of low-orbit satellites. Five years earlier he had founded O3b Networks, now owned by SES. In February, the company sucessfully launched the first six of its planned 650 loworbit satellites with Talia and Intermatica as customers.

Dagan Kasavana CEO Phoenix Tower International

Having founded PTI in 2013, Kasavana, now its CEO, guides the strategic direction of the company. Most recently the company has purchased 215 wireless communication tower sites from Digicel and acquired Syscom Telecom, adding over 80,000 small-cell wireless communication sites to its US portfolio.

Rosalind Thomas

Capacity

Managing director SAEx International

Thomas is the MD of SAEx International and also CEO of SAEx SA in South Africa. SAEx is a planned fibre-optic subsea system between South Africa, the US and Brazil. She has been managing the project since 2014 investing personal funds, time and resources in taking it forward. The new system will provide much needed route diversity and reduce latency

Larry Schwartz

Mario Martín

CEO

CEO

Seaborn Networks

Telxius

Schwartz pioneered the developer-owner-operator model for submarine fibre optic cable systems. Most recently the US Secretary of Commerce appointed Schwartz to serve on the US-Brazil CEO Forum, which brings together American and Brazilian leaders to develop recommendations on how to increase bilateral trade and investment between the two countries.

Martin recently served as Telefónica’s group director of the COO’s office, but now leads the company’s communications infrastructure business. During his tenure the company saw the completion of its MAREA and BRUSA cables. Martin has told Capacity that he is focussed on commercialising assets and building relationships with OTTs.

Mark Dankberg

Amy Marks

Chairman and CEO

CEO

Viasat

XSite Moduar

Mark co-founded Viasat in 1986, serving as chairman of the board and chief executive officer since inception. Under his leadership, Viasat has consistently been one of America’s fastest growing technology companies. In February the company struck a partnership with Facebook to offer high-speed internet services in rural Mexico.

capacitymedia.com

Dubbed the Queen of Prefab, Marks is the CEO of Xsite Modular the design-builder of modular critical infrastructure buildings. Marks is known for being an outspoken advocate of women in telecoms and is one of the co-founders of Women in Subsea, an initiative that creates networking opportunities to women working in the sector.

COMMS INFRA

Funke Opeke is one of Africa’s most impressive women. She spent more than 20 years in the US where she was executive director of Verizon’s wholesale division. She returned to Nigeria, and formed MainOne in 2008.

The company built west Africa’s first privately-owned subsea cable system, connecting Nigeria to Portugal.

The SDN NFV World Congress will be returning to The Hague in October for its 8th edition.

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special report

AUTOMATION April/May 2019

CONTENTS 57 Executive interview: Alessandro Adriani, managing director, Ngena

58 Big interview: Tom Homer, head of EMEA, Telstra

60 Working towards a zero touch future Capacity

How near are we to the dream of zero touch automation, Capacity examines

64 Market trends: Network Automation

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executive interview: alessandro adriani | 57

JOINING THE DOTS BETWEEN 25 SD-WAN SERVICE PROVIDERS The global Ngena alliance has expanded from four carriers to 25, providing SD-WAN access to 200 countries and territories.

Its chief, Alessandro Adriani, tells Alan Burkitt-Gray how it is enabling member companies to offer services around the world

M

ore than two dozen carriers have come together over the past three years into an association to deliver SD-WAN and other solutions to enterprises worldwide.

Deutsche Telekom founded Ngena three years ago along with CenturyLink, Reliance Jio and SK Telecom. Today there are 25 members in all, from A1 Telekom Austria and Altice to Veon and Viettel.

“Companies need to interconnect sites and workforces around the globe with greater flexibility and agility than ever before,” says Alessandro Adriani, the managing director of Ngena. “New cloud-based applications are driving demand for greater connectivity and higher bandwidths with premium network performance and security.”

We’re sitting in a Starbucks coffee bar.

“Enterprise connectivity needs are changing at a much faster pace than ever before,” says Adriani. “Increased flexibility and agility in a cost-effective manner are the new name of the game.”

People need “to be effective in a secure manner irrespective of whether they are at the airport, or in a coffee shop – like us today – or on a ski slope. People are always on the move.”

Adriani is a classic example of an executive on the move – not only in his current role, which he’s held since 2016, but in past jobs in TIM, Bouygues Telecom and Vodafone. In 2012 he began three years at the Bridge Alliance, a partnership of 17 mobile operators in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with a couple of associations in Europe and the Americas.

Adriani clearly likes global alliances in the telecoms industry. “I have lived, studied and worked in eight countries across three continents,” he says. “And my two kids were born in two completely different locations thousands of kilometres apart: one in Oxford and one capacitymedia.com

in Singapore.”

Enterprises “are missing business opportunities because their connectivity does not allow innovative network solutions”, he warns. At the same time those enterprises are “under pressure to optimise their spending, both in terms of opex and also in terms of capex”.

Meanwhile, “bandwidth demand is continually increasing”.

He looks around Starbucks. “A Capacity relatively simple coffee shop like this” needs a range of services, “to allow credit card transactions, to send consumption data to their fulfilment centre, to monitor the performance of the coffee machines, to regulate the level of indoor lighting based on the external daylight”. He continues: “To monitor unwanted presence during night downtime for insurance reasons, to monitor functioning and temperature of the fridges based on the outdoor temperature.” And so on.

Enterprise connectivity needs are changing at a much faster pace than ever before” Alessandro Adriani, MD, Ngena

A software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) “allows you to perform all of that with flexibility and agility”.

All this has to be delivered quickly when someone sets up a new store, with a virtual private network (VPN) and multiple sub-VPNs, “in order to avoid losing business opportunities – revenues and ultimately cash flow”, says Adriani.

“They need it up and running in matter of days – and this is possible with an

Ngena SD-WAN solution – and not in months.”

With Ngena and its partners have connectivity between them in more than 200 countries or territories, “in almost every corner of the world”. It works on a platform from Cisco’s Viptela, Comarch, Equinix and Zscaler. “The platform is cloud native and completely scalable.”

Ngena is a wholesale operator that runs the global platform and backbone and the alliance partners deliver it via their local access networks, says Adriani.

“Ngena does not sell to end-customers: our carrier partners sell Ngena SDWAN-as-a-service to their enterprise customers.”

Some will flag the relationship to their enterprise customers. He lists KPN in the Netherlands, StarHub in Singapore, Sunrise in Switzerland and Telus in Canada as examples of companies that brand their solution as “Powered by Ngena”.

Nearly all steps are fully automated using a zero-touch process via Ngena’s central portal, he adds. “We reduce the complexity to deliver a ready-to-use global network to the enterprise customer. Ngena’s service thus differs significantly from all other solutions on the market. The enterprise customer will enjoy a secure, stable, scalable and easy-to-use global corporate network that comes with a high-quality local customer care.”

As a wholesale carrier, Ngena buys and sells to carriers at the same time, “within a hub-and-spoke framework”, he explains. “The inter-carrier relationship is something I’m very passionate about. In fact, over the last 20 years, I have always been focused on ‘joining the dots’ among different carriers in very diverse geographies.”

And now, he has lots of dots around the world that are being joined up by Ngena.

58 |

Telstra: ‘Always On’ Point To realise the power of digital transformation, automated nextgeneration networks are critical today. Jason McGee-Abe spoke to Tom Homer, MD for EMEA, Capacity to find out more about Telstra’s innovation and automation strategy

T

elstra is the envy of many of its competitors today as a result of its successful and ongoing investment plans, so it was great to catch up with Tom Homer, who is responsible for developing and driving the business strategy across Telstra’s EMEA portfolio, at our Capacity Middle East event in March.

Business in the Middle Eastern region is almost nearly 100% done through the wholesale channel, he tells me, and to put this into perspective the European business he runs is 60:40 enterprise. But the conversation then focuses on how international business has really accelerated over the past five years.

The arrival of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN), the government-owned organisation that is taking over the local loop to go to homes and businesses, has really driven Telstra’s growth businesses internationally, organically and inorganically.

Its IP network is now ranked in the top ten Renesys Internet Index Ratings. “As a

result of NBN, Telstra has become a big reseller of landline infrastructure in Australia and it’s going to reduce our EBITDA by around 30% because the asset is now owned by the government,” Homer tells Capacity.

“It’s been happening for 10 years and it’s around 80% rolled out now, so we’ve been looking for new areas of growth.”

The power of TPN One of the biggest drivers for innovation for Telstra has been the Telstra Programmable Network (TPN), he tells me. The TPN came from the Pacnet acquisition, which was completed in April 2015. It was a significant example of Telstra’s inorganic growth plans in recent years and it not only almost doubled the size of its international business but gave Telstra two key things, Homer says.

“Firstly, Pacnet was a very early mover in software-defined networking (SDN) and its SDN platform, Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN), which has now been renamed to the TPN, is a data centre-to-data centre SDN, so literally bandwidth on-demand,” he says.

“We now have around 300 customers on

the platform. If you’re a carrier and you want to turn up 10Gb of capacity for a week, because of a cable break for example, customers can go straight through the platform in a very flexible fashion, rather than having to sign up to an archaic long-term contract.”

This SDN-driven technology was just one of the strategic imperatives of buying Pacnet. The other was Telstra’s ownership of a very significant business in China, called Pacnet Business Solutions China (PBS). It was the first and is now the largest foreignowned IPVPN provider in China.

“We have over 200 people in China now and we’re running very significant networks for large European and US multinationals in Asia. It’s big-scale IPVPNs and big multinationals that are selecting us, as they want a partner that really understands China – but also they perhaps want to use a non-local player to assist them,” he says.

“Pacnet gave us significant scale. We are now the leader in Asia-Pacific networking and carry about a third of the internet traffic in Asia.”

Telstra is the leader in terms of US-toapril/may 2019

the big interview: tom homer | 59 1990

Manager, global accounts, AT&T UK

2000

Head of sector, Energis/Cable & Wireless

2007

Director, client management, Reliance Globalcom

2009

Managing director, UK & Nordics, Reliance Globalcom

2011 – present

Member, Board of Directors, AustraliaUK Chamber of Commerce

2011

Head of EMEA, Telstra

2013

Head of EMEA and the Americas, Telsra

2015 – present

Managing director, EMEA, Telstra

company has strategically invested in additional capacity and infrastructure to meet the increasing demand for data right across the Asia-Pacific region, carefully mapping its international paths and investment. Capacity demand on Telstra’s international network has almost doubled over the past two years to over 200Tb, which has been driven by the explosion of cloud computing, video streaming and e-commerce.

“We’re the leaders in subsea cable for intra-Asia and inter-Asia between the US and Asia, which is a very significant part of our business,” adds Homer. “A lot of what we do for our carrier customers is IPVPN and the purpose of our cable systems is high capacity links for heavy users like carrier backbones, big financial services and IT businesses. A big tranche of our carrier business is helping those carriers that don’t have an Asian network get to their customers.”

Telstra is growing and investing in the capacity and new cables but also new automated products which it’s overlaying on

We’re Capacity the envy of a lot of our competitors as we’re still investing” Tom Homer, MD, EMEA, Telstra

Asia connectivity and it works with all the big OTTs, financial services companies and IT service providers, and all the carriers.

“TPN has given us burstable bandwidth that enables someone to buy capacity by the minute, hour, week, as much or as little as wanted on-demand through a portal,” he says. “That’s been very successful as we can connect to all the cloud players and also to our TPN-enabled 35 PoPs, which are well spread across our global footprint.”

Investing in cable systems From a subsea and undersea point of view, Telstra has added substantial capacity and invested in a number of cable systems, which has reaffirmed its network, which now stands at more than 400,000km, as the largest in the Asia-Pacific region.

“We’re the envy of a lot of our competitors as we’re still investing. We talk to them about the sorts of new investments we’re making, whether that be in Southern Cross, INDIGO, HKA, PLCN. We’ve invested over A$300 million in the last two years in undersea cables,” Homer says.

Following Telstra’s purchase of Pacnet, the capacitymedia.com

the top. In the carrier space, it’s just launched an exciting offer called Always On. This is an optional EPL feature and Homer believes this is “market-leading and I don’t think that anyone else is doing this”.

The hot triangle It’s an automatic service that has nearseamless restoration of services in the event of a cable cut or damage due to a natural disaster. “It’s live now and is using some really cool software to make things easier for our carrier customers,” Homer tells me.

With its diverse, high capacity subsea cable network, Telstra is capable of offering a top level of resiliency and assurance across Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. “This route is also known as the hot triangle,” Homer says. “It’s the busiest route in Asia and Asian cable systems are some of the most unreliable in the world – due to them being more likely to be affected by a natural disaster or from fishing. Telstra, with our diversity and resiliency, coupled with our Always On service can reroute traffic very quickly,” he notes.

“Traditionally what would have happened

was that you’d see an outage and ring up and then you’d be at the mercy of the carrier to see how quickly they could reroute the traffic – within a few minutes, hours or days.”

Keeping its customers continuously connected and removing the pain of an extended outage from its customers, with almost seamless restoration of their services, is helping to propel Telstra to another level.

The solution offers increased visibility of the network, improving resiliency and provides flexibility and agility. This has helped Telstra to not only scale its network and boost capacity but also protect traffic and service delivery.

Game-changing tech Telstra has also gone early on 5G and it already has over 100 base stations in place in Australia and “we’re just waiting for the handsets to catch up,” Homer says. The internet of things (IoT), alongside the accompanying applications, is another focal point that is growing in prevalence for Telstra. “With IoT, we’ll see a massive volume of small deals, almost like a consumer small and medium businesses (SMB) play.”

The market for SD-WAN has grown by 40%, but Homer says Telstra has seen over 80% growth in requests for proposals (RFPs) for SD-WAN, which is driving a significant increase in its internet traffic.

Telstra doesn’t launch its own satellites but Homer does think the evolving satellite communications space is an intriguing area of innovation. “Satellites are going to connect a lot of things that haven’t been connected before, such as planes.”

We’ll all have access to and experience much more connected live content – and there’ll be huge amounts of opportunity for the industry as all the base stations will have to be connected to something. “There’ll be lots of network opportunity for connecting the earth stations,” adds Homer.

Innovation and investment is engrained in Telstra’s company and culture but it’s also looked externally. It’s embraced it so much that it also has its own branded venture fund: Telstra Ventures.

“We’ve invested in 50 interesting software businesses, typically first and second-round funding.”

Some of the businesses it’s invested in include DocuSign, mobile security application Zimperium, and VeloCloud, the SD-WAN provider which Telstra subsequently sold to VMware in 2017. An Innovation Hub is also used internally and staff can submit ideas and they go to a vote.

“It creates and stimulates innovation within the business,” Homer says.

It’s clear to see how innovation and automation are at the heart of Telstra’s DNA.

60 |

Working towards a zero touch future Capacity

CARRIERS ARE INCHING TOWARDS THE DREAM OF ‘ZERO TOUCH’ NETWORKS, WHERE EVERYTHING FROM PROVISIONING TO TROUBLE SHOOTING IS AUTOMATED. GUY MATTHEWS EXAMINES HOW CLOSE WE ARE TO THIS REALITY

T

here is no single, reliable definition of what constitutes a ‘zero touch’ network. Most would probably agree that we’re talking about a network where high availability, reliability and services delivery are all automated, leveraging the principles of NFV and SDN. In other words it’s a network that monitors, manages and heals itself, and lets its customers pay for what they need with no human intervention, all through the power of software.

Not all are agreed that such a thing is even achievable, not at any rate in the near future. “I’m not sure there will ever be anything that is totally, 100% zero touch in terms of an end-to-end hybrid-cloud network,” says Atchison Frazer, worldwide head of marketing at SD-WAN vendor Versa Networks.

“There are way too many legacy devices and technical debt architectures out

there, in addition to increasingly complex security requirements, for that to happen in the next five years.”

Opportunities exist to go some of the way, not least in the provisioning of wide area network services, believes Frazer.

“You’ve got the zero-touch provisioning [ZTP] aspects of SD-WAN,” he points out. “Other than physically plugging in a WAN device, the turn up of features, functionality, policies, monitoring, reporting and analytics of every WAN device is zero touch, and that is applicable to 100 sites or 1,000 sites.

Then once ZTP is established, ongoing policy updates and enhancements can also be zero touch, or at the very least minimal touch.”

Zero touch networks are still a relatively new concept, agrees Steve Foster, business solutions architect, UK and Ireland, at vendor Riverbed Technology.

“As a fully automated and orchestrated network, that modifies and adapts itself based on carefully constructed ‘intent’, they require complex capabilities and network architectures with cloud at the core,” he claims.

“As such, the only companies currently capable of successfully utilising zero touch networks are those who have built their data centres from the ground up and have the need to accelerate network transformation to take advantage of new technologies such as 5G.” Even the biggest network players face significant challenges here, says Foster.

“While they can deploy zero touch networks today, they can only do so in silos, and upon interaction with any other providers’ equipment, the networks will falter and will have to revert back to traditional network systems,” he adds.

“This is because successful zero touch networks will require an open standard april/may 2019

Image: Adobe Stock

feature: zero touch networks | 61

between vendor infrastructures which still hasn’t been fully ratified. For zero touch networks to be widely adopted, we believe there needs to be a shift in the next generation of equipment in order for it to natively support new types of management system.”

There are, notwithstanding the absence of definitive and universal standards, a number of carrier names in the wholesale space who have made progress towards a hands-free goal.

“We’ve come quite far with zero touch,” says Mattias Fridstrom, vice president and chief evangelist with Telia Carrier.

“But we’re not quite there yet. There’s still a certain amount of manual intervention to check it’s going to be right. We do let machines configure services, but just before we release them into the network we look to see everything is correct. What every carrier struggles with here are the inventory systems. When can you really trust machines to handle all that? It’s been really hard too to keep track of cross connects without manual intervention.”

François de Malartic, senior director of marketing data for the international carriers division at Orange, says his organisation has also been busy working towards zero touch, particularly on the all-important cross-connect side.

“We’re working with the world’s major carriers, through the MEF, to establish standards here,” he comments. “We’re directly working with others who are advanced in this area – people like Telefonica, Colt, AT&T. We’re doing PoCs with them.”

He says Orange has recently carried out a soft launch of zero touch services with 20 or so of its customers, called Internet Now. “This makes connections on our network possible in two or three minutes – that’s real-time ordering,” he explains.

“If this goes well, we’ll launch it to all our customers in May.” Orange’s ultimate aim is to develop APIs on its ordering system for interconnection with all its main carrier partners, along with further APIs to interconnect with data centres. The goal is significant.

“Ultimately by making our entire offer available from a portal will enable to us to sell where we can’t reach today,” outlines de Malartic. “Zero touch is key to us in terms of future development.

For us it’s a way to access a larger customer base. Today we’re mainly about Tier 1, but in the future we’ll reach out to Tier 2 and 3. We’ll be able to sell to small ISPs and operators, in places like Africa. Without this kind of thing, carriers will lose market share.” capacitymedia.com

It appears that most carriers initially approach the zero touch concept with the aim of internal efficiency, then branch out from there. Fahim Sabir, director of architecture and development for network on demand at Colt Technology Services, explains that was certainly Colt’s standpoint when it started on software-enabling its network at the beginning of the decade.

“We’re now onto out third generation of it with our IQ network,” he says.

“We’re able to give zero touch power to the customer with the SDN investments we’ve been making for years. We’re also looking at AI-related initiatives as well, with network health and customer experience use cases. It’s another form of automation. We’re looking to get more out of an RPA model.”

So does AI-driven zero touch create a future where carriers employ robots for almost everything, disintermediating the entire human element?

“If you look way down the line, you can see the need for fewer people,” admits Sabir. “But I don’t see the human element entirely going away. You’ll always need people to install equipment and dig fibre. And even if customers can Capacity self-serve, a human side to it is sometimes important. If a computer says ‘no’, you might want to talk to a person about why. It means humans move up the value chain to focus around more valuable activities. Automation handles the grunt work. Machines can handle this because they are more predictable and consistent.”

With true zero touch operation probably still some time away, the pressure is on carriers to make ‘lighter touch’ network operations function, says Tom Footit, senior director of product management at Accedian, vendor of virtualised software tools for networkwide visibility.

“Challenges include being able to have continuous, ubiquitous and accurate information on how the network is operating, being able to analyse, in real time, the performance issues and determine a course of action, by leveraging AI and machine learning algorithms and being able in real time to make changes to the network based on the results of this analysis,” he says.

Troubleshooting is an important zero touch use case, agrees Carlijn Adema, head of marketing and comms at Nokia’s Global Services business unit which has worked on deploying ML and AI to solve network problems in a zero touch way.

“We’ve been doing a lot with robotics and RPA,” she says. “When we move to automation, we can work five times faster and 100% correctly. That includes

everything from alarm monitoring to restoration and everything in between.”

She says Nokia has moved on from simple rules-based RPA to AI that can learn from its mistakes.

“That’s a big difference,” she believes.

“We’ve worked with a carrier in Brazil who wants to work on eliminating network issues before subscribers are impacted. ML detects anomalies, find the root cause and prioritise which actions to take. We can inject AI into the carrier network, based on what their concerns are. We’re also building a new digital architecture so that we’re ready for managing 5G. We’ll need to be more agile to manage the complexity of IoT.” Fridstrom of Telia Carrier believes that zero touch networks are an ultimate inevitability in the coming years, but the industry might as well face the fact that no one is really there right now.

“Two years ago people were questioning if it was worth the investment, now it is clearly really, really worth it,” he concludes.

The invisible network – an enterprise dream It may be that from an enterprise perspective the best kind of network is not simply zero touch, but completely invisible - something they don’t need to think about at all. That’s certainly the view of Kevin Deierling, VP of marketing with network vendor Mellanox “For many legacy vendors it’s all about the network – selling network infrastructure and their services to maintain it,” he believes. “But most customers think business, not network.

So at Mellanox we work with partners like Nutanix, Cumulus and Apstra to make the network something customers simply don’t need to think about so they can focus on running business applications.”

Nutanix, he says, makes compute, virtualisation, and storage invisible, but has left the network management up to the customer to configure and maintain: “By working with Nutanix and integrating our spectrum switch software with their hyperconverged infrastructure, we make the network invisible too. With advanced automation technologies like zero touch RoCE, Nutanix Acropolis, Cumulus EVPN and Apstra intent-based networking, we let customers forget about their network and think instead about running their business.”

Capacity

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64 | market trends: network automation

NETWORK AUTOMATION

N

etwork automation tools will used by 45% of organisations by 2021, an increase from approximately 10% today, according to figures from Gartner.

In its 2018 Market Guide for Network Automation report, Gartner found that the network automation market is evolving from operationally-focussed network configuration and change management tools, to policy-based tools and orchestration tools, and — in rare, forward-leaning use cases — more strategic and business-aligned, intent-based networking systems.

Gartner defines network automation into the following four sub-segments, these however will only deliver value when the company adopting the technology is suitably mature both culturally and from a process perspective.

The four stages of Network Automation Maturity In addition, network teams lag behind other domain groups in embracing automation as a way to meet increasing

Highest Maturity

business demand and as a result are looking for ways to address this as quickly as possible. At a management level,

infrastructure and operations leaders struggle to reconcile the risks that configuration changes create with the

Intent-Based Networking Systems (IBNS) - the mathematical validation that business intent and network configurations are in sync

Policy-Based Automation (PBA) - abstraction away from a device-configuarion-centric view and replacing it with a centralized policy control workflow, particularly in scenarios concerning SDN, SD-WAN and Ethernet Fabric technologies

Capacity Orchestration - programmatic control of network elements interfacing with either device CLI environments and/or open standards and APIs, often incorporating principles based on a DevOps philosophy

Lowest Maturity

Network Configuration and Change Management (NCCM) - the set-up and configuration, patching, rollout and rollback, resource use, and change history of the physical network infrastructure, often in comparison with a “gold standard” for the device in question Source: Gartner, Inc.

Where do you plan to make the most strategic networking investments in 2018 demand for greater agility.

Driven by the need for optimisation, lowering cost and simplification/agility, network optimisation/tools is the area where participants said they were planning to make their strategic investments back in 2018.

NetOps 2.0 refers to a guiding set of principles, tools and practices which includes the idea that networks must be agile, not fragile; automation by default, manual by exception; tools should be used proactively, not reactively; and risk should be managed bot avoided. When participants were asked how long it will take them to adopt NetOps 2.0, 40% expect to embrace this approach within as little as three years.

Cloud-Managed LANs

2

Ethernet Switching Fabrics

12

Intent-Based Networking Systems

5

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49

Service Provider On-Demand Services

3

SD-WAN and/or vCPE

16

SDN and/or Network Overlays

11

NFV

2 0

10

20

30

40

50

Percentage of Respondents Total Results: 129

Source: Gartner, Inc.

april/may 2019

| 65

How long will it take for you to get to NetOps 2.0 From a security perspective, operations teams and vendors are pushing a consolidated SecOps/network operations

strategy; however, these options need further assessment to determine whether the requirements are sufficiently aligned.

tĞ͛ůů ŶĞǀĞƌ ŐĞƚ ƚŚĞƌĞ

7

More than 5 years

7

3-5 years

37

1-3 years

40

Within the next year

7 0

10

20

30

40

50

Percentage of Respondents Total Results: 67

Source: Gartner, Inc.

What is your approach to network automation?

A final group of emergent tools being applied against network automation use cases, particularly for forward-leaning end users (such as large financial, e-commerce and SaaS-based enterprises), is focussed on cross-domain

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configuration. Although not networkoriented, these tools support DevOps approaches and micro-services architectures. Gartner estimates that these broader continuous configuration automation tools now address

approximately 15% to 20% of network automation use cases, and this percentage is set to grow.

Linux tools (Chef/Puppet/Ansible)

34

Other Linux tools

3 8

GUI with programmable fabric Ě ŚŽĐ ĂƵƚŽŵĂƟŽŶ ǀŝĂ >/ͬƐĐƌŝƉƟŶŐ

12

SolarWinds

17 1

Micro Focus (NA) EŽ ĂƵƚŽŵĂƟŽŶ

11 6

Homegrown tools /͛ŵ Ă ǀĞŶĚŽƌ ĂŶĚ ĚŽŶ͛ƚ ǁĂŶƚ ƚŽ ƐŬĞǁ ƚŚĞ ƌĞƵůƚƐ

8 0

10

20

30

40

Percentage of Respondents Total Results: 205

capacitymedia.com

Source: Gartner, Inc.

66 | appointments

Liuba Istrati Telekom Romania Wholesale Liuba Istrati has been appointed as head of international voice sales at Telekom Romania Wholesale.

Istrati started her role on 1 March 2019 and replaces Cristina Mihai, who decided to pursue new opportunities outside the group after 10 fruitful years at the company.

“Liuba is a highly motivated and enthusiastic person with extensive experience and knowledge of the global telco industry. She has over 12 years’ experience in the demanding Russia, CIS and European markets,” said Dumitru Vlad, wholesale director at Telekom Romania Wholesale. “Liuba will manage the Telekom Romania voice and SMS business and is tasked with continuing to grow business, developing new markets and partnerships.”

Dennis Keko Kahindi Liquid Telecom Uganda

Sumeet Walia Tata Communications Tata Communications has appointed Sumeet Walia as its new chief sales and marketing officer.

In the newly appointed role, Walia will lead and align the global sales and marketing functions around the company’s go-to-market strategy to drive business growth in all markets worldwide.

“Sumeet is an accomplished business leader who has the ability to continuously adapt and understand the dynamic business environment in which we operate with a proven track record,” said Vinod Kumar, managing director and CEO, Tata Communications.

“With his understanding of our business, industry and culture, I am confident that Sumeet will successfully lead the market efforts as we drive growth and greater momentum.

Liquid Telecom, the pan-African telecoms group has appointed Dennis Keko Kahindi as the new CEO of its Uganda division.

Kahindi entered the role on 1 March, bringing over 15 years’ experience to the new role. He previously held senior executive roles at Oracle and Microsoft in Rwanda and Uganda.

“Dennis is the ideal person to lead Liquid Telecom Uganda on its next phase of growth,” said Adil El Youssefi, CEO of the East Africa Region at Liquid Telecom.

Prior to his appointment at Liquid, Kahindi was the business lead for Oracle in Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda. Before that, he served as country manager for Microsoft in Uganda and Rwanda.

“His talent, vision and insight will help cement recent customer successes, create new customer relationships.”

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André Telles CenturyLink

Jack Waters Zayo Networks

CenturyLink has appointed André Telles as its new sales director for wholesale strategic accounts for the Latin America region.

In his new role, Telles along with the rest of the CenturyLink team in Latin America will focus on supporting their customers´ business needs regardless of their network’s complexity, size or reach.

“I’m confident our customers will find in André the right talent, focus and expertise to continue growing their business in the LATAM region,” said Gabriel Holgado, vice president of the global account division & wholesale services at CenturyLink, Latin America.

Telles enters the role with more than 18 years’ experience in the telecoms sector working with a number of international companies and being an active part of the wholesale industry evolution.

Zayo Group has appointed Jack Waters as president of Zayo Networks and chief operating officer of Zayo Group Holding.

In this new role, Waters will lead the company’s global networks business, which includes fibre solutions, transport, enterprise, and strategic networks businesses as well as network operations and security.

“Jack’s leadership will continue to be instrumental as we fully leverage our global fibre footprint to provide solutions to the world’s most innovative and impactful companies,” said Dan Caruso, chairman and CEO of Zayo. “He has put a foundation in place, including the regional and strategic fibre network teams.”

Sara Baack Equinix Sara Baack has been promoted to chief product officer at Equinix.

Baack is one of three veteran leaders of the business to move into new roles as the company strives to become a more customer-centric outfit. Karl Strohmeyer and Eric Schwartz were also promoted to chief customer and revenue officer, and chief strategy and development officer respectively.

Baack, who joined Equinix in 2012 as chief marketing officer, will take on the role of chief product officer, leading product marketing, management, development and engineering across core colocation and interconnection offerings, amd the company’s edge services portfolio.

Emmanuel Rochas Orange International Carriers Emmanuel Rochas has taken over the reigns as CEO of Orange International Carriers. In his new role, Rochas, who succeeds Pierre-Louis de Guillebon, is responsible for managing international connectivity and transmission services for wholesale voice, mobile, internet and security.

Rochas previously worked as head of the Group strategy team and has experience in strategy and development, as well as the management of complex business activities in a context of significant transformation.

“I am looking for a collective engagement from the IC teams over the coming year. Engagement on innovation, development of new offers and of finding new ways of doing things for continual improvement in order to satisfy customers, and to develop our market share,” he said.

John McCloskey CyrusOne John McCloskey is the new vice president of hyperscale and cloud sales at CyrusOne. McCloskey brings 30 years of technology sales experience to the role where he will oversee enterprise cloud customers and help lead the development of the next set of hyperscale accounts.

Before joining CyrusOne, McCloskey served as senior vice president of global sales at Akamai Technologies. During his tenure, he led the company’s go-to-market within Akamai’s £1.5 billion web performance and security division. Prior this, he spent 6 years at Microsoft in a number of leadership roles, including global head of cloud and enterprise sales.

Tell us your move

Capacity is keen to hear from readers about new roles and appointments in the industry.

Send details to natalie.bannerman@capacitymedia.com, with a high-resolution picture

april/may 2019

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68 | innovation report: 5G wireless

ARE WE THERE YET? INDUSTRY SEES 5G ON THE HORIZON Íą Čƒ

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hen people have been talking about 5G for so long it’s hard to recognise that the biggest innovation in the industry is almost here.

It’s not a reality yet – the early examples are really proofs of concept – but it’s coming, as Claudia Nemat, Deutsche Telekom’s board member for technology and innovation, says. “There are a lot of stories and myths about 5G. It’s now a reality.� In German, she added: “Jetzt geht’s endlich los.� That means: “It’s happening at last.�

But remember that 5G will be a standard, just as 3G was nearly a standard and 4G LTE has definitely been a standard – though 2G never was.

Today, there’s a huge world effort to ensure 5G is, finally, a global standard.

Only a few people follow in detail what the standards geeks – I use the term approvingly – are doing. But it’s important. Their work means that the day in 2022 you turn on a 5G terminal in your hotel room in Warsaw or Washington to watch a movie it will work. Even better, it means that the aircraft you flew in will be able to connect to the diagnostics network at either Frederic Chopin or Ronald Reagan airport.

So, in spite of Nemat’s declaration, where are we in reality with the standards?

In June 2018 3GPP, the forum for those standards geeks, issued release 15, indicating we were almost there, defining phase one of what it calls “new radio� or NR. When standards people talk of something being new, as opposed to version 3.26 or whatever, you know it really is new.

Functional freeze But that’s phase one, as 3GPP helpfully indicated. The second phase is release 16, which is not expected until 2020 – in March for “functional freeze�, June for “protocols stable�.

Release 16 will also cover what’s called ultra-reliable low-latency communication, essential for many of the proposed use cases for 5G. And then there’s still, on current schedules, release 17, covering enhanced machine-type communication.

When will that be? “TBC� – to be confirmed – says 3GPP. So where are we in the real world? US operators AT&T and Verizon are both Capacity5G on services for trying out pre-standard fixed wireless access (FWA), and T-Mobile US is planning to go that way. With such controlled uses, they avoid a lot of the problems of operating before the final standards are set: no one will expect to pick up a 5G terminal from a home in upstate New York and move it to somewhere rural like Colorado.

Sunrise is trying much the same sort of thing in Switzerland, using 5G as an alternative to fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) – though Olaf Swantee, CEO of Sunrise, told me that one of his challenges is that the home terminals aren’t yet being made in enough volumes for a big rollout.

But whether you’re in Switzerland or the US, this fixed 5G will give network engineers experience in how the new standard works and how resilient it is.

Remember, wireless is still something of a mysterious art as well as a technology.

Network operators don’t even know what to expect from, say, rain and snow, when they offer 5G services.

Electrical noise And remember also that many of the future uses touted for 5G are inside buildings – including factories and warehouses where there is a high-level of electrical noise.

Experience will be built up over the next couple of years, with closed systems using spectrum from 3.5GHz in Sunrise’s case to new millimetre bands – such as 24 and 28GHz – that US telcos will be

pioneering. This practical knowledge will be hugely important once we see the start of mobile 5G services, where global standards will apply.

One of the undoubted benefits of the move towards 5G is that regulators are opening up more spectrum worldwide, and 5G will be inherently more efficient in using that new spectrum.

According to Chris Pearson, CEO of US lobby group 5G Americas, even higher frequencies than 28GHz will follow.

The regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), will be looking at 37, 38 and 47GHz by the end of 2019, he told me. And in March we reported the FCC saying it wants to create a new category of experimental licences for use of frequencies between 95GHz and 3THz – that’s radio waves with wavelengths from 3mm to only a tenth of a millimetre.

Sharing spectrum There will be new rules for the use of all this new spectrum.

As I reported on this page in October/ November 2018, Americans will have to share spectrum in the 3,500MHz band with the US Navy.

There will be computer-based controls to ensure base stations do not interfere with the Navy, which uses that band for missile-detecting radar.

Emmanuel Lugagne Delpon of Orange Labs, who chairs another industry body, Next Generation Mobile Networks, says the first real uses of 5G will be in the consumer area. “It will provide a lot of benefits, such as bandwidth, speed and fixed wireless access.� In the longer term, he adds, we will see uses like massive internet of things (IoT) services. For that, it will be necessary to have very close partnerships between operators and vertical industries. It’ll happen, but there’s a lot of work ahead. april/may 2019

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