Capacity Magazine December / January 2020

XX1 ISSUE XX MONTH 2014 2020 VOL 20VOL ISSUE DECEMBER/JANUARY

Business intelligence for the global carrier industry

Capacity

capacitymedia.com

Capacity

VOL 20 ISSUE 1 DECEMBER/JANUARY 2020

Big Interview Bevan Slattery talks to Capacity about the launch of the OAC subsea cable Feature Capacity highlights 20 leading security and antifraud solutions in the market

Business intelligence for the global carrier industry

A New Year A New

Capacity

Wave capacitymedia.com

Capacity

| 01

CONTENTS Capacity magazine, December/January 2020

VOL 20 ISSUE 1 DECEMBER/JANUARY 2020

Big Interview Bevan Slattery talks to Capacity about the launch of the OAC subsea cable Feature Capacity highlights 20 leading security and antifraud solutions in the market

NEWS & ANALYSIS

FEATURES

04 ASIA & ASIA-PACIFIC

after page 40

12 NORTH AMERICA

20 GLOBAL CARRIER AWARDS: WINNERS REVEALED

14 LATIN AMERICA

28 DIGITAL’S NEW ERA

43

17 EUROPE

36 INVESTORS BET ON US METRO FIBRE MARKET

45

45 POWER BENEATH THE SURFACE

48

Business intelligence for the global carrier industry

Cover image: Adobe Stock

A New Year A New

Wave

23 MIDDLE EAST 26 AFRICA

59 WHAT WILL NEXT-GEN SUBMARINE CABLE ARCHITECTURE LOOK LIKE IN 2020?

43 SUBSEA NEWS

STRATEGIES capacitymedia.com

ON THE COVER pages 41-60

Capacity shines a spotlight on the booming subsea cable industry and next-generation networks

11 Q&A Song Toh, VP of global network services products, Tata Communications

63 THE GLF CBN: WHERE AUTOMATION MEETS SETTLEMENT

19 SPONSORED Q&A Tony O’Sullivan, COO, RETN

64 BATTLING FRAUD INTO THE FUTURE

Eric Cevis, president, Verizon Partner Solutions, on how the company is laying the foundations for future technologies

Power beneath the surface Big Interview: Gil Santaliz, CEO, NJFX

52

Big Interview: Erling Aronsveen, CEO, Celtic Norse

59

What will next-gen submarine cable architecture look like in 2020?

SECUIRTY

PEOPLE & DIARY

after page 60

76 MARKET TRENDS: Global Interconnection Index

63

SPECIAL REPORT

The GLF CBN: Where automation meets

78 APPOINTMENTS The industry's latest movers

48 THE BIG INTERVIEW Gil Santaliz, CEO, NJFX

79 A DAY IN THE LIFE Chris Sturgeon, CEO, Red Penguin

52 THE BIG INTERVIEW Erling Aronsveen, CEO, Celtic Norse

80 A TRIBUTE In honour of Brynn Fowler

settlement

64

Battling fraud into the future

69

20 security and anti-fraud solutions

SPONSORS

and nd

Anti-Fraud A Anti nti-F nt Frau raud Solutions Solutions

THE BIG INTERVIEW pages 34-35

FEATURE pages 69-73

THE BIG INTERVIEW pages 48-49

Bevan Slattery, CEO, SUB. CO, discusses the investment opportunity with subsea assets amid the OAC cable launch

ƥ is a top priority for carriers.

Capacity lists 20 security and anti-fraud tools to help

Gil Santaliz, CEO, NJFX, talks to Capacity about the company's history and what new opportunities are on the horizon

capacitymedia.com

Subsea news

69 20 SECURITY AND ANTIFRAUD SOLUTIONS

38 THE BIG INTERVIEW Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX International

20 SSecurity ecurity

SPECIAL REPORT

Capacity

30 THE BIG INTERVIEW Eric Cevis, president, Verizon Partner Solutions 34 THE BIG INTERVIEW Bevan Slattery, CEO, SUB.CO

THE BIG INTERVIEW pages 30-31

SUBSEA

19 RETN 22 STC 32 TELEKOM MAYLASIA 50 OMANTEL 54 AQUA COMMS 74 DEUTSCHE TELEKOM GLOBAL CARRIER

66 NTT

DIGITAL INFRA AFRICA CONNECTING THE CONTINENT

1 - 3 APRIL 2020 CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

Capacity Media and BroadGroup launch Digital Infra Africa | 1 – 3 April 2020 | Cape Town, South Africa International connectivity to and from Africa as well as building reliable networks between its 54 countries, is fast becoming the number one priority for the global telecoms infrastructure industry.

Why Cape Town?

Cape Town was voted as the location of choice by the Digital Infra Africa Advisory Board. This is due to South Africa’s strong colocation market growth, with recent announcements from Microsoft, Google, Huawei, Liquid Telecom and AWS over the last 12 months.

In response to this growing demand, Capacity Media and BroadGroup are launching Digital Infra Africa. This is the industry event for advancing projects and investments in the In addition, it is a known hub for subsea, fibre, data centre and African infrastructure space. It will draw out consolidation cloud activity, as well as having a strong presence of content Capacity and diversification trends, whilst also facilitating regional and providers. Other benefits include accessibility for regional international partnerships for the fibre, data centre, cloud, and international players, providing the ideal backdrop for content, satellite, tower and mobile industries. multiple functions hosted by industry players.

Held in Cape Town on 1 – 3 April 2020, this industrydesigned event is your opportunity to network with the entire infrastructure value chain in order to maximise revenue opportunities and meet annual objectives. In addition, it is also your chance to forge new and innovative partnerships, to create a more connected Africa.

How will the event look?

The event will feature Capacity Africa, Datacloud Pan Africa, and Subsea Africa all under one roof, with the addition of inclusion and leadership forums. By combining these powerful brands into one event, it will guarantee RoI with three days of thought-leadership, meetings, trading and networking.

THE ADVISORY BOARD

Artur Mendes CCO ANGOLA CABLES

Marisa Trisolino CEO CMC NETWORKS

Mike Conradi Partner DLA PIPER

Aaron Russell Lead, Network Investments FACEBOOK

Ranjith Cherickel CEO ICOLO.IO

Funke Opeke CEO MAINONE

Amine Kandil CEO N+ONE DATACENTERS

Mike Van Den Bergh Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer PCCW GLOBAL

Byron Clatterbuck CEO SEACOM

Chris Wood CEO WIOCC

WWW.CAPACITYMEDIA.COM/EVENTS/DIGITAL-INFRA-AFRICA

editor’s letter | 03

A New Year, A New Wave

A

s we enter 2020, it’s amazing to think how much has been accomplished over the past 12 months and how far the industry has come. This December/January issue contains special reports on subsea (pages 41-60) and security (pages 61-75). Most will agree that both areas have witnessed much innovation and renewed strategic focus of late, with further waves of upgrades and launches coming into play in the New Year.

In this issue, Capacity looks into the biggest data centre transaction in history – Digital Realty’s record-breaking $8.4 billion deal for Interxion (pages 28-29) – and takes a deeper look at how investors are betting on the US metro market on pages 36-37. Capacity looks into innovations in the subsea cable market, which is being driven by the bandwidth-hungry content sector (pages 45-46).

We hear from Eric Cevis, president of Verizon Partner Solutions, on how the company is laying the foundations for future technologies (pages 30-31). Bevan Slattery discusses his latest venture in SUB.CO and the recent launch of the OAC cable (pages 34-35). We hear from Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX International, about the operator’s launch into Malaysia and which other South East Asian markets it will move into (pages 38-39). NJFX CEO Gil Santaliz provides Capacity with an update on how the carrier-neutral player is continuing to evolve (pages 48-49).

The Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF) shares the latest details on its Communications Blockchain Network (CBN) project, which will revolutionise the commercial settlement infrastructure for the ICT service provider industry, ahead of a whitepaper being published (page 63).

Tackling fraud has become part of a carrier’s normal conversation and is becoming an everincreasing concern. We take a look at this constantly shifting landscape (pages 64-65) and provide a listing of 20 leading security and anti-fraud solutions on pages 69-73.

Capacity The winners of the 15th Global Carrier Awards are acknowledged on pages 20-21 and on a final but sombre note; the industry has recently lost a huge and irreplaceable person, so Capacity pays tribute to Brynn Fowler on page 80.

I hope you will or have enjoyed the Christmas and New Year’s festivities wherever you are.

Here’s to a new year and a new wave of innovation in 2020, which includes the launch of the Digital Infra Africa event in April (see the opposite page for more information)!

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

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Subscription enquiries Customer services customerservices@euromoneyplc. com tel +44 20 7779 8610 fax +44 20 7779 8602 Printer Stephens and George, UK Next issue February/March 2020 Published on 18 February 2020 Directors Leslie Van De Walle (Chairman), Andrew Rashbass (CEO), Tristan Hillgarth, Imogen Joss, Jan Babiak, Lorna Tilbian, Colin Day, Wendy Pallot, Tristan Hillgarth and Tim Pennington

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. © 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.

04 | asia and asia-pacific

GCX TO BECOME INDEPENDENT COMPANY AFTER CHAPTER 11

G

lobal Cloud Xchange (GCX) has announced that it will become a standalone company after its Chapter 11 proceedings and following the completion of the initial phase of its previously announced sale process.

GCX terminated its sale process and laid down its intent to emerge from bankruptcy as an independent entity through a ‘plan of reorganisation’.

Under the terms of the proposed plan, which was first announced on 15 September 2019 with support from more than 75% of the company’s lenders, GCX will also reduce debt by $150million and access new working capital.

“While we had a responsibility to evaluate all potential opportunities, we at GCX are thrilled to move forward as an independent company supported by a group of existing lenders that believe in our team and the opportunities ahead of us,” said Bill Barney, chairman and CEO of GCX. “We are confident this ownership structure – and the additional financial

strength it provides – will allow us to continue to honour our commitments to employees, customers and suppliers, build upon our strategic plan and emerge as an even stronger company.”

The news comes after Barney stepped down in September from his job as CEO of troubled Indian operator Reliance Communications (RCom), so that he has focus on his other task, as head of RCom subsidiary GCX. A statement from both companies said at the time that Barney will “focus full time at the helm of GCX during its corporate restructuring process”.

The decision to move forward as a standalone company was backed by the strong ownership of its senior secured noteholders and a hearing to gain the Court’s confirmation for the standalone plan is scheduled for 4 December 2019.

The company expects to emerge from its Chapter 11 restructuring shortly thereafter.

GCX is being advised in its restructuring

by Lazard, Paul Hastings LLP and FTI Capacity Consulting, Inc.

Bill Barney, chairman and CEO of GCX

CHINA DEPLOYS ONE OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST 5G NETWORKS China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom have launched 5G services for its consumers.

The three state-backed operators had originally planned to launch the services in 2020 but accelerated the rollout making it the world’s largest 5G market following the granted licences awarded to the three carriers for commercial 5G service in June.

Although it should be noted that South Korea, the US and the UK were first to roll out their 5G networks earlier this year.

The new 5G services are now available across 50 Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, with prices as low as $18 (128 yuan). To date more than 10 million users have registered for 5G plans ahead of the launch.

According to Chen Zhaoxiong, viceminister of industry and information technology, more than 86,000 5G base stations have already entered service in China with a further 130,000 5G base stations set to go live by the end of the

year to support this new network.

In addition, Wang Zhiqin, deputy director of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said: “China will embark on large-scale 5G network construction next year. This will further the use of the cutting-edge technology in more traditional sectors and lay a sound digital infrastructure for manufacturing upgrades.” China is set to become the world’s largest 5G market by 2025.

NEWS IN BRIEF Amazon, Alibaba, Google and Microsoft accounted for 72% of the global market for IaaS and PaaS in Q3 of 2019.

Google Cloud has launched its new Network Intelligence Center, a network monitoring, verification and optimisation platform.

Microsoft and Nokia have entered into a strategic partnership to accelerate transformation and innovation across industries with

cloud, AI and IoT. Synchronoss Technologies is working on a JV to help deliver an advanced mobile messaging experience across AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon networks.

Clear has conducted multiple blockchain trials with Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, Telefónica and Vodafone, which could deliver instantaneous and frictionless commercial roaming processes

between hundreds of mobile operators around the globe.

AT&T and Vodafone Business are set to open up access to their respective NB-IoT networks to make it easier for customers to create massive IoT deployments that work across the US and parts of Europe.

The FCC, on behalf of SpaceX, has submitted documents to the ITU for spectrum for an additional 30,000 Starlink satellites.

december/january 2020

asia and asia-pacific | 05

MACQUARIE TELECOM, MICROSOFT INK VMWARE SD-WAN DEAL Macquarie Telecom has sealed an agreement to deliver VMware softwaredefined wide-area networking (SD-WAN)

by VeloCloud services through the Microsoft Azure marketplace.

The arrangement sees Macquarie become one of the first managed service providers (MSP) in the world to deliver VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud through Microsoft’s new Azure Lighthouse capability. The agreement is designed to give partners enhanced automation

and visibility across customers’ Azure environments.

“SD-WAN has had a hugely positive impact on Australian organisations’ networks, creating demand for this technology to be applied to the cloud,” said Michael Davies, head of revenue at Macquarie.

“This takes the ‘plumbing’ out of IT teams’ roles and enables them to work where they’re needed – driving innovation to stay competitive.”

The new agreement will enable organisations with Azure public cloud environments to gain the benefits of SD-WAN via an enhanced Azure-enabled managed services capability, including full visibility and control over up to 3,600 apps, the ability to prioritise or deprioritise apps in real time to optimise bandwidth and infrastructure, carrier neutrality and link remediation, which optimises networks to provide high speed and low latency.

SOFTBANK INKS $30BN MERGER WITH YAHOO JAPAN AND LINE CORP SoftBank Corp has announced plans to merge Yahoo Japan with Line Corp, a messaging app provider, to create a $30 billion tech company.

The news comes as SoftBank hopes to better compete with competitors like Rakuten and the major US tech players like Google and Amazon.

Speaking exclusively to Capacity, Paolo Pescatore, tech, media & telco analyst at PP Foresight, said that the new was “significant for both the local Asian and global markets. It now stands a better chance of success against the leading Asian

and American web providers”.

Through the merger, SoftBank will gain access to Line Corp’s 164 million users and their data in Japan and South East Asia, also allowing it to expand into new areas business outside of its core wireless activities. In return, Line gains access to additional funding from SoftBank as well as its technical expertise.

This deal is “all about scale and complements each other’s assets,” Capacity continued Pescatore.

“In this new world, companies need to compete in a smarter way against rivals and tap into new

revenue opportunities. It will provide a wealth of data and stronger position to negotiate with partners such as advertisers.”

A memorandum of understanding was signed by the parties - SoftBank Corp, Yahoo Japan (now Z Holdings Corp), Line Corp and Naver Corp, which owns Line - on 18 November 2019, with definitive agreements scheduled to be finalised in December 2019.

The share agreement is due to be signed in January 2020 and a completion date has been set for October 2020.

DE-CIX ENTERS SOUTH EAST ASIA WITH MALAYSIA LAUNCH DE-CIX has expanded its global interconnection model to its most eastern point to date by launching operations in Malaysia.

DE-CIX, which recently won the Best Internet Exchange Award at the 2019 Global Carrier Awards, and local internet exchange provider Johor Bahru Internet Exchange (JBIX) have partnered to co-run two internet exchanges in the greater Kuala Lumpur and the Johor Bahru regions of Malaysia.

DE-CIX has also formed a joint venture with Starwing Technologies, creating a new Joint Venture (JV) vehicle: DECIX Malaysia. This company will be headquartered in Kuala Lumpur and will collectively take over the JBIX, which is an open and carrier class IX run by a team of certified network experts and has been operational since 2018. As of today, JBIX serves close to 50 regional networks.

“After successfully establishing leading IXs in Europe, North America, India, and the Middle East, DE-CIX is now taking its almost 25 years of experience to South East Asia,” said Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DECIX International.

“DE-CIX has a proven record of capacitymedia.com

accomplishment in successfully creating interconnection hubs worldwide, in regions where customers are in need of easy-to-access interconnection services.

While Singapore has been a major content hub for the region for the last decade, the key content and cloud-computing players have started to extend their footprint throughout ASEAN – including in Malaysia.”

In addition to offering the advantage of local IXs in these markets, DE-CIX will also introduce a shared interconnection fabric where participants of both exchanges will be able to interconnect.

DE-CIX will also make its Apollon interconnection solutions available to all locations, allowing the provisioning of different interconnection services like peering and cloud exchange.

“Since its launch one year ago, JBIX has received tremendous support from local, regional and global networks.

Their support has not only helped JBIX to become one of the fastest growing IXs in the region, it has also underlined the strategic advantages JBIX has to offer to its participants. Our partnership with DE-CIX will help to accelerate

the development of connectivity hubs in the country, which is an exercise that synergizes with the Malaysian Government’s initiative in promoting 5G, IoT and digital businesses,” Weng Yew Wong, managing director of JBIX. Go to pages 38-39 for our Big Interview with Ivo Ivanov detailing more information on DE-CIX’s Asian expansion plans.

Capacity

asia and asia-pacific | 07

ORANGE ENTERS STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP WITH JAPAN’S RAKUTEN

Emmanuel Rochas, chief executive officer, International Carriers at Orange

International Carriers, the wholesale division of Orange, has signed a strategic

EPSILON SUPPORTS GOOGLE CLOUD PARTNER INTERCONNECT Epsilon now supports Google Cloud’s Partner Interconnect, a service from Google that allows customers to connect to Google Cloud Platform globally.

Partner Interconnect forms part of the Google Cloud Interconnect family.

Another product in the family, Dedicated Interconnect, provides higher-speed and lower-cost connectivity than Virtual Private Network (VPN), and has become the top solution to connect on-premise data centres to Google Cloud.

“Cloud Connect is a key solution in our cloud enablement and interconnection strategy. We are continuously evolving it to offer our customers and partners simple and secure connectivity to the public clouds,” said Jerzy Szlosarek, CEO at Epsilon. “We are enabling access to Google Cloud Platform from across a global footprint while delivering highquality cloud connectivity solutions at scale. Customers and partners gain an innovative SDN platform that supports them with programmable and automated connectivity for their cloud strategy.”

With Partner Interconnect, customers can now choose Epsilon to provide connectivity from their facility to the nearest Google edge point of presence.

In addition, they will also be able to select from a variety of sub-rate interface speeds varying from 50Mbps to 10Gbps.

Epsilon’s Cloud Connect solution is offered through its software-defined networking (SDN) platform, Infiny by Epsilon.

The platform allows customers to establish dedicated connections to Google Cloud Platform delivered via Epsilon’s MEFcertified ethernet service. capacitymedia.com

partnership agreement with Rakuten to provider Rakuten Mobile with Long Term Evolution (LTE) roaming services.

The new range of LTE roaming services with enable Rakuten Mobile, the new mobile operator service provided

by Rakuten Mobile Inc, to provide its subscribers with international connectivity.

“Through this partnership, Orange is delighted to be part of Rakuten’s pioneering approach. Orange and Rakuten are at the forefront of innovation and this partnership is the beginning of a long and fruitful cooperation,” said Emmanuel Rochas, CEO of International Carriers at Orange.

Rakuten Mobile launched as Japan’s

newest mobile network operator in October 2019 with the world’s first end-to-end, fully virtualised cloud-native mobile network.

This partnership with Orange allows Rakuten Mobile to provide its subscribers with international data roaming services around the world. The agreement also extends beyond international connectivity to include support from Orange professional services, enabling Rakuten Mobile to meet the needs of customers.

Orange provided Rakuten with a complete roaming solution that enables Rakuten to directly connect with carriers in others countries via IPX network connection.

VOCUS TRANSFORMS NETWORK WITH CIENA’S BLUE PLANET Vocus Group has chosen intelligent automation software solutions from Blue Planet to accelerate its network transformation and deliver cloud-like experience for its users.

With the advanced software, Vocus is Capacity able to build an adaptive network that is agile and reliable, that will also help reduce unnecessary costs.

“Our customers increasingly want a very simple and seamless experience when working with us, similar to how they interact with everyday consumer digital offerings,” said Kevin Russell, chief executive officer of Vocus Group.

“With automation from Blue Planet, we are able to execute on our customer-first

strategy by building a network that is fast, dependable and enables them to have greater control.”

Vocus said that it is building a new network that “isn’t constrained by legacy and manually intensive silos” followed by a number of acquisitions it has made over recent years.

It was Blue Planet’s open and standardsbased design that influenced Vocus’ decision and streamlines its ability to differentiate and avoid vendor lock-in.

“With Blue Planet, Vocus can quickly adapt to user demands and compete in a marketplace where speed is paramount,” added Rick Hamilton, senior vice president of Blue Planet, a division of Ciena.

COLT SUPPORTS THE CLOUD PATHFINDER FOR GOOGLE CLOUD APP Colt Technology Services now supports the Cloud Pathfinder for Google Cloud app, that enables enterprises to find the best connectivity route to Google Cloud from any on net building or data centre.

Launched back in June, Cloudscene’s Cloud Pathfinder tool enables organisations to instantly find service providers that can connect them to Google Cloud’s nodes across the globe, from an address search.

“Facilitating organisations’ migration and utilisation of the cloud has been a significant priority for Colt over the past few years”, said Bo Duim, Colt’s global director for business development. “However, we know that the cloud networking environment can be complex, so by partnering with the likes of Google and Cloudscene it makes it simpler for enterprises to see who can assist them on their digital transformation

journey.” “Cloud Pathfinder for Google Cloud enables Google’s customers to get connected, faster,” said Belle Lajoie, CEO of Cloudscene. “In doing so, we’re supporting enterprises around the world on their cloud adoption journey. Leading network operators, like Colt, have made it possible for customers.”

Belle Lajoie, CEO of Cloudscene

Capacity

Capacity

Capacity

Q&A: SONG TOH | 11

SD-WAN POWER WITH TATA COMMUNICATIONS SONG TOH, VP OF GLOBAL NETWORK SERVICES PRODUCTS AT TATA COMMUNICATIONS, TALKS TO CAPACITY ǧ

Ǥ Q. How is Tata Communications supporting its customers in their deployment of SD-WAN?

SAP to support enterprises’ network transformation. Recently, we have added a fully-managed Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN service to our IZO™ cloud platform, connecting enterprises seamlessly and securely over the Internet to cloud-based applications.

We have migrated dozens of Q. Why is SD-WAN so critical for enterprises and their global enterprises from a legacy growing demands?

WAN architecture and MPLS to hybrid WAN with softwareA hybrid software-defined network is the best option for defined wide area network any enterprise that wants to harness the scalability and cost(SD-WAN), and we currently effectiveness of the cloud and the public Internet to grow and manage over 3,000 customer become more agile. We’re seeing more and more businesses SD-WAN sites worldwide. So, implementing Office 365, moving their data centre applications for us, SD-WAN is not just to a public cloud, and adopting Unified Communications apps. about the initial license sale orCapacity They then realise the need to directly connect branch sites to router deployments, but the the Internet to boost application performance while lowering customer’s entire network transformation journey. This approach costs. All of this means that enterprise networks are becoming sets us apart - our customers have a partner who cannot only far more complex than they were a decade ago, with infinitely migrate them from a legacy WAN to a secure hybrid SD-WAN more application topologies to consider: some on premises, with minimal business disruption, but as a managed service some in the cloud, some transitioning between, and many of provider also continue to support the SD-WAN implementation. these are mission-critical. SD-WAN gives businesses greater One of our network transformation customers is Carlsberg. We visibility over their entire network infrastructure, and control deployed a hybrid software-defined network for the global brewer over each application and branch. Enterprises that want to to support the digital transformation of its operations in 130 expand internationally are able to use the cloud to add multiple sites across Western Europe. We deployed the network in just new users to SaaS subscriptions in just a few minutes. When five months – a year less than the industry standard – and did this cloud infrastructure is combined with a hybrid SD-WAN this during the FIFA World Cup, which is one the busiest times enabled network, businesses are able to manage traffic and of the year for the brewer. As the growing use of cloud-based deploy applications globally in real-time too. What would have applications has led to 70% of Carlsberg’s network traffic being previously taken a global business with thousands of employee on the Internet, the hybrid software-defined network has given days or weeks, can now be done in an instant. SD-WAN is a key the brewer ten times more bandwidth, reduced costs by 25%, and component of an agile, flexible IT infrastructure in today’s digital halved the occurrence of network incidents. age.

Q. Can you explain your IZO SDWAN offering and how it differs from other products on the market?

Q. What is the roadmap for the company in the SD-WAN space as we venture into 2020?

Some players in the SD-WAN space provide the solution as-a-service, or as a pure overlay, on top of low-cost internet, however the issue with this approach is that it gives enterprises no end-to-end performance guarantees. To ensure the reliability of the entire network, the SD-WAN needs to be underpinned by a combination of a private network and internet underlay with predictable performance and SLAs. The combination of our IZO SDWAN overlay and IZO Hybrid WAN underlay does just that.

IZO is a comprehensive enterprise WAN and cloud enablement platform that combines the public internet uniquely engineered for predictable routing, together with enterprise multi-cloud connectivity and SD-WAN routing. It is a global platform built on Tata Communications’ global Tier-1 IP network and our partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure & Office 365, Google Cloud, Alibaba, Salesforce, IBM, Oracle, and

The SD-WAN market is highly competitive, so we will continue to invest in IZO SDWAN and forge the right partnerships such as our collaboration with Cisco to help our businesses transition successfully from legacy WANs to hybridsoftware defined networks. We will reinforce our bring-yourown-network (BYON) and managed SDWAN overlay services to meet the needs of customers who might choose to work with their existing service providers on the underlay. As enterprise workloads continue to move to the cloud, our managed WAN service will be increasingly cloud-centric and focus on management and customer self-service. Site-to-site connectivity remains important for the time being, but it’s unlikely to be where traffic growth will come from in the future. All in all, we’re confident that our strategy and global capabilities will enable us to drive our growth in this rapidly evolving market.

capacitymedia.com

12 | north america

TELIA CARRIER LAUNCHES NEW ASHBURN TO ATLANTA ROUTE

Staffan Göjeryd, CEO of Telia Carrier

T

elia Carrier has added a new diverse and latency-optimised DWDM route in the US, between its existing infrastructure in Ashburn, Virginia, and

Atlanta, Georgia, via Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The news comes as part of the company’s wider expansion plans for its North American network, which includes new metro networks in Northern Virginia and Atlanta, providing flexible connections to data centres in both cities.

The company has seen much demand for additional diversity and capacity between Northern Virginia and Atlanta. In response to this, Telia Carrier has expanded its fibre backbone to connect Ashburn on a new diverse western route via Charlottesville, Roanoke, Knoxville and Chattanooga, with routing options to either Nashville or Atlanta. The resiliency offered with the new route is unique in this region and provides

three North/South options available to Telia Carrier customers along the East Coast.

“We consistently hear from our customers that they need more diversity on routes between major North American cities”, said Staffan Göjeryd, CEO of Telia Carrier.

“This protects against service interruption, which is essential for a first-rate customer experience in today’s competitive markets.

This new expansion in the South East offers flexibility on several levels and lays the groundwork for future route investments in North America”.

In other news, Telia Carrier has also deployed a new network point of presence (PoP) delivering multi-terabit capacity at the NJFX cable landing station (CLS) colocation campus.

DIGITAL COLONY ACQUIRES BEANFIELD TECHNOLOGIES Digital Colony Partners has acquired Beanfield Technologies, a bandwidth infrastructure provider in Canada serving the enterprise, carrier and multi-dwelling units markets.

“Beanfield’s network connects to virtually all of Toronto’s major commercial buildings, apartment complexes and data centres, and the company serves some of the largest and highest value customers in the Canadian market,” said Steven Sonnenstein, a managing director at Digital Colony.

“The company’s executive team, led by founder and CEO Dan Armstrong, has

done a fantastic job creating a leading, Tier 1-market bandwidth provider that Capacity is primed to capitalise on an evolving Canadian telecommunications market. As the region’s MNOs look for new and shared infrastructure solutions, we are excited to support Beanfield and help the company continue to grow.”

Beanfield’s portfolio includes 366km of pervasive and dense metro fibre infrastructure in Toronto and Montreal and over 76,000 strand kilometres of fibre infrastructure. The company also has 541 on-net locations, including 367 commercial

locations, 161 MDUs and 13 data centres.

“As our customers require more bandwidth and faster speeds, our goal is to not only meet their increasing needs, but also find new ways to support them with access to additional resources and Digital Colony’s vast experience in indoor and outdoor small cells,” added Armstrong.

“We are extremely happy to partner with Digital Colony. Their support, guidance and sector expertise will be key assets as we enter new markets and verticals, and broaden our carrier, commercial and largescale residential customer base.”

ESTRUXTURE ADDS VEERUM TO ITS CALGARY DATA CENTRE eStruxture Data Centers has added SaaS provider VEERUM to its Calgary-1 (CAL1) facility.

“As one of the largest carrier and cloudneutral data centre solutions providers in Calgary, eStruxture offers us the direct, low latency access we need to the hyperscale providers of our choice,” said David Lod, CEO of VEERUM. “SOC-II and PCI-compliant, they also give us peace-of-mind from a data security and business continuity perspective.”

VEERUM allows customers to create virtual 3D models of their projects through its cloud-based asset visualisation platform.

This enables companies to analyse project progress, verify quality standards and make data-driven decisions to mitigate issues as they arise. Now, as it expands its client base, VEERUM has chosen eStruxture

to establish a colocation and connectivity strategy in the city of Calgary.

“VEERUM is an exciting new partner for the eStruxture team because of their valuable work supporting capital project delivery at a global scale,” added Jaime Leverton, senior vice president and chief commercial officer at eStruxture.

“With the latest in power delivery equipment, energy-efficient cooling and multiple security zones, our CAL-1 data centre is highly scalable, with significant room to support the future growth of our customers. Thanks to our partnerships with IX Reach, Megaport, and AWS, as well as our pan-Canadian network of data centres, businesses in Calgary can boost georedundancy and directly access a vibrant ecosystem of network, application and cloud service providers.

For SaaS companies like VEERUM, this is of critical value as they look for solutions that can support them as they grow into new markets.”

Jaime Leverton, senior vice president and chief commercial officer at eStruxture

december/january 2020

north america | 13

H5 DATA CENTERS, HURRICANE ELECTRIC PARTNER FOR CLEVELAND EXPANSION H5 Data Centers has confirmed the expansion of Hurricane Electric to its downtown data centre in Cleveland.

As a result of the new point-of-presence (PoP) customers of H5 now have access to Hurricane Electric’s extensive IPv4 and IPv6 network through 100GE, 10GE and GigE ports.

“Hurricane Electric is excited to expand the options for high-speed and cost-effective

global connectivity to the Cleveland metro,” said Mike Leber, president of Hurricane Electric. “The combination of the rich data centre ecosystem at H5 Cleveland and our global footprint offers additional choices for customers of H5 Data Centers and reflects our commitment to providing connectivity to users around the globe.”

Additionally, customers can exchange IP traffic with Hurricane’s global network.

ALIGNED ENERGY BREAKS GROUND ON SECOND SALT LAKE METRO DATA CENTRE Aligned Energy has announced the expansion of its Salt Lake Metro data centre campus with its second facility in West Jordan, Utah. Adding to Aligned’s existing 34MW, 300,000 sq ft West Jordan data centre, the adjacent new 240,000 sq ft facility will boost power capacity by 48MW. At full build, Aligned SLC campus will offer 780,000 sq ft of space and

130MW of capacity. “Aligned continues to achieve aggressive speed-to-market targets, most recently in Ashburn, and now in Salt Lake County with our latest greenfield deployment,” said Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned Energy.

“Expected to complete in Q1 2020, our second West Jordan facility will provide adaptable infrastructure in the region.”

T-MOBILE US TO LAUNCH 5G NETWORK IN DECEMBER T-Mobile US has announced plans to switch on its nationwide 5G network on 6 December 2019.

The news comes part of the company’s renewed plans, since the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint was officially greenlit by The Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

“We’re building a 5G network that will allow us to deliver future New T-Mobile moves that are going to be so massive we couldn’t wait to share the first few. we have definitively put a stake in the ground around the kind of company the supercharged Un-carrier will be and the ways we can put this radically better 5G network to work doing good for this country — good for consumers, good for competition and good for innovation,” said John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile.

It’s likely that the new 5G network will be offered in the 600MHz range, given that the company purchased 1,525 regional 600MHz licences for $7.9 billion.

Capacity

METRO CONNECT USA 10 - 12 Febru ary 2 02 0, Miami

WHERE THE FUTURE OF THE U.S. METRO MARKET IS SHAPED

10 - 12 February Exhibition & Meetings 11 - 12 February Conference ccapacitymedia.com capa ca apa paci cittyym meed diia. a.co com

www.capacitymedia.com/events/metro-connect-usa

14 | latam

TELEFÓNICA PICKS COMTECH FOR LATAM MOBILE BACKHAUL BOOST

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elefónica has selected Comtech Telecommunications’ Heights Networking Platform to upgrade its Vivo Brazil and Telefónica Argentina mobile infrastructure networks in support of 2G, 3G and LTE backhaul.

Both Brazil and Argentina are experiencing high growth in terms of mobile traffic and subscribers as customers transition from 2G to 3G and LTE to experience mobile internet.

Telefónica expects this multi-year upgrade programme will help their business to address this. Comtech’s Heights Networking Platform enables Telefónica to reach its customers with voice and high-

speed data services while meeting the high key performance indicators required by the regulators.

Regulators in both countries realise the value of connecting the unconnected to bridge the digital divide and have established challenging performance requirements for mobile network operators (MNOs) to reach new markets with high quality solutions.

“The decision to select Comtech EF Data was mainly based on the combination of its H-DNA technology, the security and management tools of the Heights Networking Platform, and the proven track record of Comtech EF Data’s products and

services,” said Gustavo Arditti, director of the satellite business unit for Telefonica International Wholesale Services.

Richard Swardh, senior vice president, mobile network operators for Comtech EF Data, added: “The successful Telefónica projects demonstrate a great example of the power of our Heights Networking Platform and its best-in-class performance enabling superior quality of experience for the end user along with the lowest total cost of ownership.”

Earlier in 2019, Claro Argentina selected Comtech Telecommunications’ Heights Networking Platform to connect rural communities throughout Argentina with

FLEXENTIAL, SEABORN PARTNER TO BOOST LATIN AMERICAN OPTIONS Flexential has teamed up with Seaborn Networks to expand its FlexAnywhere offering via the Seabras-1 Latin American subsea cable.

The provider of data centre colocation and hybrid IT solutions will provide customers with direct access to Seaborn Networks’ trans-Oceanic, 72Tbps platform connection to Latin America.

“With the Latin American subsea cable, we are delivering on our promise of expansion by offering the fastest and most reliable wholesale route from the US to Brazil,” said Chris Downie, chief executive officer at Flexential.

“Just like our New Cross Pacific cables to Asia and the Hawaiki submarine cable to Australia and New Zealand, the Seabras-1 to South America is built for performance that is second to none. This enables us to provide our customers with more connections to the world through the latest generation of high-capacity, ultra-low latency service delivered in a fraction of the time of legacy suppliers.”

Via this new partnership with Seaborn,

Capacity

Chris Downie, chief executive officer at Flexential

FlexAnywhere now offers a route on Seabras-1, a non-stop path between the commercial centres of the New York/New Jersey, US, and São Paulo, Brazil, giving Flexential customers one of the lowest latency routes available in the market.

Latency-sensitive applications rely heavily on the shortest and most stable network paths, and Seaborn has designed its solution to deliver on both fronts. The amount of data travelling from the US to

Brazil is growing at a 30% CAGR due to broadband adoption, bandwidth-heavy application adoption, and a broader business shift of Brazilian businesses to the cloud.

At the same time, many legacy USBrazil network systems are nearing endof-life and need to be replaced. Seaborn’s latest generation trans-Oceanic network platform is a simple solution for network buyers looking to quickly phase out current end-of-life systems.

“Our vision is defined by flexibility: we pioneered a pay as you grow business model and the most responsive service delivery capability based on customer’s requested due date that enables all purchasers of US to Brazil network services,” added Larry Schwartz, chief executive officer of Seaborn Networks.

“Flexential’s dedication to giving its customers the flexibility they need to grow and evolve makes them an ideal partner for us, and we look forward to continuing to push boundaries to give our shared customers the very best.”

GOOGLE TO BUILD NEW DATA CENTRE IN URUGUAY Google is set to build its second Latin American data centre in Uruguay.

According to reports, the new facility is situated on a 20-hectare parcel of land and will be based at Uruguay’s Science Park in the city of Canelones.

The news follows negotiations that took place when Carolina Cosse, Uruguay’s former industry minister, visited Google’s headquarters in the US two years ago.

The decision to launch this new facility in Uruguay was made back in 2017 after the installation of the Tannat cable, linking Uruguay to Brazil and Argentina.

The 2,000km system was a joint project between Google and Antel Uruguay.

In addition, the project has been bolstered by the presence of Google’s 10,000km Currie cable system, which links Chile to the US along the entire west

coast. The system recently went live.

The new facility will become Google’s 14th global site joining existing assets in the US (South Carolina, Iowa, Oregon, Nevada, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee), South America (Chile), Europe (Ireland, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland and Belgium), and Asia (Taiwan and Singapore). december/january 2020

CARIBBEAN 2020 11 & 12 February, San Juan

10 February

Pre-event: Welcome drinks reception

UNITING THE CARIBBEAN TELECOM LEADERS

www.capacitymedia.com/events/capacity-caribbean Capacity

LATAM 2020 10 & 11 March, São Paulo

9 March

Pre-event: LATAM Peering Forum & Welcome Drinks Reception

DRIVING FUTURE CONNECTIVITY IN LATIN AMERICA

www.capacitymedia.com/events/capacity-latam

Capacity

europe | 17

CHINA TELECOM EUROPE AND LAMDA HELLIX LAUNCH POP

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amda Hellix and China Telecom Europe (CTE) have launched a new point-of-presence (PoP) at the Lamda Hellix Athens data centre campus.

“Over the past few years we have seen more and more Chinese enterprises looking for a trustworthy gateway to the digital spectrum in Europe,” said Charlie Cao, managing director of China Telecom Europe. “Our new PoP in the Lamda Hellix data centre marks the start of a new era for our commercial operations.

We are investing in the Digital Silk Road

while steadily creating a large bandwidth, multi-route, high-quality, low-latency, controllable communications network across Europe and Asia.”

The new PoP is CTE’s first in Greece and, once live, it will give local businesses physical and digital networks required to establish a commercial presence in the Chinese market.

The partnership between the two companies forms part of CTE’s Digital Silk Road initiative, which aims to break down barriers between regions.

BICS LAUNCHES FIVE EUROPEAN POP S AND NEW FIBRE ROUTE BICS has expanded its European network footprint by deploying five new points of presence (PoPs), enhancing two more PoPs, and launching a new fibre route.

The global communications enabler has launched the new fibre route between Torino, Italy, and Lausanne, Switzerland, while the new PoPs in Warsaw, Stockholm, Prague, Helsinki and Copenhagen will enable low-latency IP services in northeastern Europe.

The network expansion delivers reduced latency for voice, data and IP services.

“Latency is becoming a key differentiator for our customers, and as such a critical

element in our network expansion plans,” said Johan Wouters, senior vice president of capacity solutions at BICS. “More than just an expansion of BICS’ footprint, the new fibre route between Torino and Lausanne and the strategically Capacity placed new PoPs ensure we can optimise key routes, so that we can offer the best quality of service with the lowest possible latency.”

The new fibre route is exclusive to BICS and its launch supports the company’s strategy to connect submarine cable systems coming from Asia and Africa onto the European continent - therefore strengthening its position in the market.

TIM AND GOOGLE CLOUD FORM STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP TIM has announced a term sheet setting out the terms of a strategic partnership with Google Cloud.

Once finalised, the partnership will enable TIM to become a key player in the cloud and edge computing space. It will also allow TIM to expand its portfolio of products and services offered in the Italian market through a unique offer of public, private and hybrid cloud.

“Thanks to the partnership with Google, a world leader in innovation, TIM confirms its focal role in promoting the technological progress in Italy,” said Luigi Gubitosi, CEO of TIM. “In the next years, Cloud and Edge Computing will represent two of the key markets that will mostly benefit of the new products and services enabled by 5G technology.”

To support this and its general business growth, TIM has said that it will invest in its innovation and talent. This includes capacitymedia.com

building wholly owned Tier IV data centres, as well as hiring or training more than 800 cloud engineers over the next few years.

According to TIM, the Italian cloud computing market is expected to grow, driven by public, hybrid and edge computing services demand, and will be further fostered by the integration of new products and services supported by the 5G technology.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud

Charlie Cao, managing director of China Telecom Europe

VOXILITY LAUNCHES INTO SPANISH MARKET WITH IAAS HUB As part of its European expansion plans, Voxility has launched operations in Spain and deployed a point of presence (PoP) in Madrid with Interxion.

The expansion enables the international infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider to deliver IaaS and enhanced distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation services to local and regional networks.

Voxility’s network is directly connected to more than 1,450 BGP peers.

“Our launch in Spain is part of our continuing growth strategy across the most interconnected internet hubs worldwide and we are now happy to facilitate access to new network capabilities and optimised performance for local Spanish networks.

Madrid has emerged as an axis for the Iberian Peninsula, but also North Africa and South America,” said Marian Petrescu, general manager at Voxility.

Voxility’s presence in Madrid provides a strategic hub for customers in Spain and is part of the company’s expansion strategy that is focused on bringing high performance and low-latency services closer to local markets.

“We are excited to welcome Voxility to our Madrid Data Centre campus and support its growth in Spain. Voxility joins a diverse IP ecosystem of more than 90 carriers, internet service providers and content delivery networks. Our campus operates on a 100% renewable energy and is a gateway to both North Africa and Latin America,” added Robert Assink, managing director at Interxion Spain.

“Together, we are supporting the growth of flexible and fluid IT infrastructure locally in Madrid and across Spain contributing to make Madrid the digital hub of Southern Europe.”

18 | europe

AWS TO OPEN DATA CENTRES IN SPAIN Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it will open a new cloud infrastructure region in Spain.

The new AWS Europe (Spain) region will consist of three availability zones at launch, making it AWS’s seventh region in Europe, joining existing ones in Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, as well as the upcoming Milan region launching in early 2020.

“Cloud computing is already powering innovation within businesses, educational institutions, public administrations, and government agencies across Spain, and with this AWS infrastructure region, we look forward to helping accelerate this transformation,” said Peter DeSantis, vice president of global infrastructure and customer support, Amazon Web Services.

“Opening an AWS region in Spain will drive more technology jobs and businesses, boosting the local economy, while enabling organizations across all industries to lower costs, increase security, and improve agility.

We’re excited to have AWS contribute to

Peter DeSantis, VP of global infrastructure, customer support, AWS

the future growth of Spain.”

Due for completion by late 2022 or early 2023, the Spain region joins AWS’s other 69 availability zones across 22 infrastructure regions worldwide. The company has announced plans for 13 more availability zones and four more regions in Indonesia, Italy, South Africa and Spain.

Capacity

Let’s talk about worldwide connectivity.

FRANCE-IX CHOSES NOKIA FOR BACKBONE UPGRADE France-IX has selected Nokia for the renewal of its interconnection backbone.

The Nokia 7750-SR-s IP router will enable France-IX to provide its peering community members with an advanced IXP platform that delivers optimum connection capacity for both current and future needs.

“Among the most innovative IXPs, France-IX is keen to scale 100G capacity and deliver 400G interconnection on a stable, programmable platform that leverages automation and reduces time to market for new services,” said Rafael De Fermin, SVP of Europe and MEA for Nokia’s IP and optical business.

The new platform will deliver a higher port density to accommodate predicted growth as well as the evolution of FranceIX’s service offerings will also be supported by the Nokia IP routers, which are 400GEready.

Deployment is due to begin in Paris and Marseille this year, with completion set for 2020.

SPONSORED Q&A: TONY O’SULLIVAN | 19

ONE BELT. ONE ROAD. ONE NETWORK. THE WAY FROM EUROPE TO ASIA. Q&A WITH TONY O’SULLIVAN, COO AT RETN Q. For those who don’t know, how long has RETN been operating in Europe and what are its plans to expand into the Eurasian market?

Q. RETN’s TRANSKZ recently won the award for Project of the Year – Terrestrial, at the 2019 Global Carrier Awards. Can you tell us a bit about the project?

TRANSKZ has been a centrepiece of the RETN strategy for years. It was apparent back in 2012 that there would be a requirement for vastly increased bandwidth between Asia and Europe. Other operators recognised this and increased investment in new subsea systems, while we, as a terrestrial fiber company, had different thoughts.

RETN was We aimed to connect Hong Kong to Europe terrestrially via established in China and Kazakhstan to establish a network ready for high 2002 as the B bandwidth, high availability and low latency services. In 2016 we end to a network completed phase 1 to start providing protected 10G L1 capacities providing IP and L2 services on TRANSKZ. Transit services Capacity Phase 2 was completed in mid-2019, allowing 100G and 10G to the Russian L1 services as well as L2. The services are not only protected by market. It quickly default, we have also established 3 paths across Kazakhstan back became clear into Europe for multiple layers of redundancy and choice. that customers in countries along the entire network have an appetite for the services we Q. As data demands continue to grow, how is TRANSKZ provide and the way we provide them, leading to real expansion contributing to global wholesale traffic and particularly the into markets all over Europe. 7 years ago we made the first One Belt One Road initiative? move towards Central Asia, establishing the beginnings of our TRANSKZ project in Kazakhstan. Recent expansions in adjacent About 6 months after we started digging fiber to the Kazakhstan markets showed the project has been more successful than we border the Chinese government announced their plans for “One ever planned. We will continue investing in these regions, our Belt One Road”. approach of regional partnerships to support the growth in local This of course provided a massive boost in terms of publicity, it economies with global connectivity has proven very popular. was very reassuring that our strategy was correct.

Our model is simple: identify what you do well, what your real TRANSKZ is the backbone that can serve connectivity for benefits are to customers, and replicate them, providing a uniform the Northern part of “One Belt One Road”, already it is being customer experience across all markets. used by the economies of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan for access to the global digital economy and in planning for future digital transformations.

Q. What assets does RETN have in the Asia-Pacific region and Aside from the effects of providing access to global wholesale what is the significance of this to its customers? services for these economies, TRANSKZ has vastly democratised access to terrestrial bandwidth as a competitive alternative to It was only with the completion of the first iteration of subsea for those who care about service quality.

TRANSKZ in late 2016 that we started building out seriously in the Asia-Pacific region. We were waiting for the right time until we could provide a real RETN product locally. Since then Q. As 2019 draws to a close and we move into 2020, what are we have established teams in Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore RETN’s strategic priorities for the year ahead? and Taiwan with an extensive subsea and terrestrial network connecting them all, as well as Tokyo and Seoul.

2020 will see further network developments around our core The network has allowed customers in Asia-Pacific access to the assets in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, new products to RETN European network and TRANSKZ, but I would argue, support further expansion into the enterprise sector. more importantly, exposed them to a different way of working.

But most importantly from the customer’s perspective, continued It’s very heartening to have very satisfied and complimentary investments in our internal operations to ensure that our products customers because we turned up their services in a matter of days, and services continue to be delivered seamlessly to all customers as rather than months. For RETN this is normal, but for Asiawe grow. Watch this space… .

Pacific this is game changing. capacitymedia.com

20 |

GLOBAL CARRIER AWARDS: WINNERS REVEALED THE 15TH ANNUAL GLOBAL CARRIER AWARDS TOOK PLACE IN LONDON ON OCTOBER 30, BRINGING TOGETHER OVER 420 MEMBERS OF THE WIDER WHOLESALE COMMUNITY TO CELEBRATE THE INDUSTRY’S BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENTS OVER THE LAST 12 MONTHS.

Capacity

december/january 2020

global carrier awards 2019 | 21

BEST PROJECT Best European Project Sparkle Best Middle Eastern Project Omantel Best Asian Project PCCW Global Best Americas Project GlobeNet Project Of The Year – TERRESTRIAL RETN Project Of The Year – SUBSEA EllaLink BEST DATA CENTRE & INTERNET EXCHANGE Best Internet Exchange Innovation datamena Best Data Centre Innovation Iron Mountain Data Centers Best Internet Exchange DE-CIX

Best CEO Of The Year Ufinet BEST TECHNOLOGY DEPLOYMENT

Best Strategic Subsea Route TELIN Best Subsea Innovation China Unicom Global

Best SDN/NFV Deployment AT&T / Colt Technology Services

Best Unified Communications Innovation Epsilon / Dialogic Corporation

Best OSS/BSS Deployment Neutrona Networks

Best Voice Service Innovation EMERGING MARKET Airtel Business

Best 5G deployment China Unicom Global INNOVATION

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Best Anti-Fraud Innovation Orange International Carriers Best Blockchain Innovation TOMIA Best Cloud Innovation Colt Technology Services Best Data Service Innovation EMERGING MARKET Reliance Jio

Best Voice Service Innovation MATURE MARKET Voxbone Wholesale Innovation Disruptor Of The Year GOLD DATA BEST REGIONAL WHOLESALE CARRIER Best Eastern European/CIS Wholesale Carrier OTEGLOBE Best Pan-European Wholesale Carrier Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier Best African Wholesale Carrier Liquid Telecom

Best Data Service Innovation MATURE MARKET EdgeConneX

Best Middle Eastern Wholesale Carrier Saudi Telecom Company

Best Enterprise Partnership Global Cloud Xchange (GCX)

Best Asian Wholesale Carrier China Unicom Global

Best Marketing Campaign Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier

Best IoT Initiative Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier

Best Caribbean Wholesale Carrier C&W Networks

Best Social Media Campaign Sparkle

Best IPX Service Etisalat

Best Latin American Wholesale Carrier Telefónica

Best Marketing Team iBASIS

Best Network Technology Innovation PCCW Global

Best North American Wholesale Carrier NTT

Best Wholesale Sales Team Turk Telekom International

Best OTT Partnership Neutrona Networks

BEST GLOBAL WHOLESALE CARRIER

Best Security Solution Airtel Business

Best Global Wholesale Carrier – VOICE Airtel Business

Best SMS Innovation iBASIS

Best Global Wholesale Carrier – DATA Orange International Carriers

Best Data Centre Equinix BEST MARKETING/SALES TEAM

SPECIAL RECOGNITION Best CSR Initiative PCCW Global capacitymedia.com

22 | SPONSORED STATEMENT

STC WINS BEST MIDDLE EASTERN CARRIER STC TAKES HOME THE TROPHY FOR BEST MIDDLE EASTERN WHOLESALE CARRIER AT THE PRESTIGIOUS GLOBAL CARRIER AWARDS AT CAPACITY EUROPE 2019

Capacity

STC, represented by Wholesale Business Unit, won the “Best Middle Eastern Wholesale Carrier” 2019 Global Carrier Award.

The winners were announced on October 30, 2019, in London at the “Capacity Europe 2019” conference, attended by 2500+, 650+ global ICT companies and 90+ countries.

The ceremony for the 15th annual Global Carrier Awards was attended by four hundred top executives of the wider wholesale community celebrating the industry’s biggest achievements over the last 12 months.

The Capacity Europe award is affirmation of STC's leading

role regionally and recognition as a key global player.

STC is at the forefront of a digital transformation wave, where Wholesale provides products nationally, regionally and globally through its extensive national and international infrastructure, interconnecting customers to next generation services and content.

STC’s strategic position in the region linking all neighboring countries with one another and with the rest of the world is efficiently and reliably enabled through its data centers, terrestrial and global optical fiber networks, which are considered the largest and most modern in the region. december/january 2020

middle east | 23

BATELCO AND DU LAUNCH REGIONAL NETWORK PROVIDER, ARC

B

atelco and du have launched Arc, a new joint venture that aims to simplify intra-regional connectivity in the Middle East by providing interconnected data centre solutions.

Arc will deliver these interconnected solutions to carriers, cloud and content providers as well as enterprise companies.

“The challenge for network-centric businesses in the Middle East is to rapidly connect, optimise and control their services while having presence as close as possible to users,” said Mahesh Jaishankar, CEO designate at Arc. “So far, it has been costly, complex and time-consuming to roll out applications and services across markets in the Middle East. Arc directly addresses these challenges and provides a seamless platform for cross border connectivity, similar to what we have seen in other regions around the globe.” Through the development of a single platform for agile network ecosystems, Arc minimises the complexities of regional hub connectivity and delivers quick access to data networks and data centre infrastructures across the region.

“Today’s ICT market is all about agility and experience. It’s about seamlessly connecting hubs and growing your ecosystem across the region,” added Ananda Bose, board member of Arc and chief wholesale & corporate officer at EITC. “We’re proud to be investing in Arc and supporting an innovative business that will ultimately benefit the region and the entire value chain, from carriers through to end users.” In its first phase of business, Arc is

Al-Daylami, Jaishankar, and Bose (L-R): New JV to deliver interconnected solutions and accelerate innovation Capacityacross the Middle East

offering connectivity solutions to over 30 points of presence (PoPs) across the Middle East, Asia and Europe, integrated with data centres in the UAE and Bahrain, as well as bridging cross connectivity with major cable hubs in the region.

“For digital transformation and cloud adoption to grow in the Middle East, it needs to be simpler to connect and host solutions at the edge of the network,” added Adel Al-Daylami, board member of

Arc and chief global officer of Batelco Global.

“We are excited to invest in Arc and accelerate innovation across the Middle East. Arc supports a range of customers with an all-in-one solution that includes global points of presence, world-class data centres, multiple subsea cable systems and all major hubs across the region. Arc is a powerful yet a simple solution that has been long overdue in the Middle East.”

GBI ENTERS CLOUD CONNECTIVITY DEAL WITH MICROSOFT Gulf Bridge International (GBI) and Microsoft have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to enable cloud adoption for key businesses in the region.

The strategic partnership will enable organisations to gain faster access to the Microsoft Azure Cloud, delivering high performance, security and compliance to better transform their business operations.

GBI is an existing ExpressRoute connectivity partner, giving its customers access to low latency and private cloud connectivity. In addition, GBI’s Cloud Connectivity solutions are built on SD-WAN allowing enterprises to control, manage, and monitor their network.

“We are continually exploring new ways to optimise digital experiences for enterprises, and our partnership with Microsoft represents one of the many milestones taken on GBI’s transformation journey,” said Abdulla Al Rwaili, executive director and managing director at GBI. “The partnership will enable organisations of all kinds to make the move to the cloud with confidence and provide a foundation for digital transformation. capacitymedia.com

We look forward to enabling more organisations to benefit from the flexibility and agility of the cloud.”

Microsoft’s Azure ExpressRoute allows companies to create private connections between the Azure Cloud and infrastructure onpremise or in a colocation facility. As these connections do not go over the public Internet, it offers increased reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies, and higher security.

“Our partnership with GBI is another step forward in enhancing connectivity across the country and access to the cloud,” added Lana Khalaf, country manager of Microsoft Qatar. “As Microsoft ExpressRoute partner for Azure, GBI will provide fast and secure connectivity to customers with access to Microsoft cloud and accelerate their digital transformation journeys.”

Batelco and GBI renewed their long-standing partnership during a meeting at Capacity Europe 2019. During the meet, the two companies boosted their collaboration by committing to deliver accelerated connectivity between Bahrain and Europe for the customers of both companies.

2018 Best African Wholesale Carrier

2019 Best African Wholesale Carrier

Capacity

2015 Best African Wholesale Carrier

2014 Best African Wholesale Carrier

Named Best African Wholesale Carrier for a record eight consecutive years at the Global Carrier Awards.

2016 Best African Wholesale Carrier

2017 Best African Wholesale Carrier

Capacity

2013 Best African Wholesale Carrier

www.liquidtelecom.com

2012 Best African Wholesale Carrier

Building Africa’s digital future

26 | africa

LIQUID TELECOM LAUNCHES FASTEST EAST TO WEST AFRICA FIBRE LINK

Nic Rudnick, Group CEO of Liquid Telecom

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an-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom has launched the fastest direct land-based fibre link connecting East to West Africa via the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

This coast-to-coast digital corridor follows the completion of Liquid Telecom’s new high-capacity fibre link running 2,600km across the DRC and the company’s ‘One Africa’ broadband network, which is vastly improving transcontinental communication.

Liquid Telecom’s latest fibre expansion connects the company’s network on the Atlantic coast at Muanda in the DRC, via Liquid Telecom’s international subsea cable partners. It then runs directly East to Kinshasa and through the DRC onto Lubumbashi in the South, connecting with other cities in between, including Kikwit, Kananga and Kolwezi. The link then crosses the DRC border into Zambia, integrating there with Liquid Telecom’s existing and rapidly expanding pan-African terrestrial fibre network.

“Liquid Telecom has connected East to West Africa with the most direct digital corridor across the southern hemisphere.

We have set a new benchmark and achieved a historic milestone in our vision to create a more connected Africa,” said Nic Rudnick, Group CEO of Liquid Telecom.

“By linking the DRC to Liquid Telecom’s rapidly expanding pan-African fibre network and the rest of the world, this transformative infrastructure is creating a foundation for digital growth. Fast, reliable

Capacity

broadband connectivity will advance society, fuel innovation and help champion pan-Africa trade.”

Liquid Telecom’s East to West fibre link promises significantly reduced latency between major continents via Africa. It also meets the growing demand from global enterprises for fast, reliable, high-capacity and cost-effective communication across the southern hemisphere.

This new extension connects the DRC to neighbouring Tanzania and Zambia with onward connectivity to Liquid Telecom’s ‘One Africa’ broadband network fast approaching 70,000km. It is central to the company’s vision to create a single fibre network spanning the entire African continent - North - South and East - West.

Rudnick added: “By connecting East to West Africa via DRC with a direct landbased fibre link, more African cities, more communities and more businesses will have access to reliable and faster internet connections than ever, and many for the first time.”

CHINA TELECOM DEPLOYS POP WITH AFRICA DATA CENTRES Africa Data Centres has extended its partnership with China Telecom Global through the deployment of a point of presence (PoP) at one of its South African facilities.

Africa Data Centres has facilities located at Africa’s major regional business and trade hubs, including Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Kenya. It will be expanding its footprint to West Africa and North Africa, as well as other areas it believes are emerging as the epicentre for Africa’s

digital economy,” “China Telecom’s investment in Africa Data Centres’ points of presence means our customers can look forward to reliable, low-latency, worldwide connectivity, which will enable them to deploy their applications and workloads quickly and efficiently,” said Stephane Duproz, CEO of Africa Data Centres.

“China Telecom’s presence is more than just an addition to the growing list of carriers at our carrier-neutral Johannesburg

data centre, it heralds the start of a long and fruitful relationship aimed at growing colocation services across the continent.”

Changhai Liu, MD of China Telecom (Africa and Middle East), added: “Through its broader partnership with Africa Data Centres, the firm revealed that China Telecom will also be able to offer data centre colocation services to its customers in several countries in Africa.

Africa is without a doubt one of the fastest-growing markets in the world.”

SEACOM, RAXIO PARTNER TO LAUNCH UGANDAN CARRIER-NEUTRAL FACILITY Pan-African service provider SEACOM has teamed up with Raxio Data Centre to launch a carrier-neutral, enterprise-grade data centre in Uganda.

The news comes after SEACOM launched its enterprise connectivity and cloud solutions in Uganda earlier this year.

Raxio Uganda’s facility will become the cornerstone of digitisation in the country, “enabling customers to seamlessly crossconnect within the data centre”.

“This partnership with Raxio Uganda will be key as we drive to expand our business in this important market,” said Tonny Tugee,

MD of East Africa at SEACOM, who was appointed in March 2019.

“Raxio Uganda’s new enterprise-grade facilities will ensure the delivery of a full range of services, in a stable, ‘always-on’ environment, to our customers in Uganda.

We’re also excited about the potential to extend our relationship outside of Uganda, further augmenting the geographic reach and network infrastructure we can offer our customers.”

The new Raxio data centre will operate according to Tier III standards accommodating up to 400 racks and

delivering 1.5MW of power at full capacity.

It is due to launch in Q1 2020.

Tonny Tugee, MD of East Africa at SEACOM

december/january 2020

africa | 27

HELIOS TOWERS IPO HITS $1.45BN ON LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE Africa-focused telecom tower infrastructure company Helios Towers closed its initial public offering (IPO) on $1.45 billon.

The George Soros-backed company raised $364 million on its first day and the IPO, which was issued on the premium listing segment of the London Stock Exchange, represented one of the largest Africa-focused IPOs of 2019.

The company operates 6,800 towers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Republic of Congo, Ghana, Tanzania and South Africa, the latter of which it launched operations in 2019.

Helios, which serves carriers such as Airtel Africa, MTN Group and Vodacom, had shelved IPO plans in 2018 amid political risk concerns in DRC and Tanzania but has announced its intention to go public in September 2019.

IHS Towers and Eaton Towers also backtracked on plans to IPO last year with Nigeria elections and lowered valuations as the reasons cited for not doing so.

Since then, IHS Towers raised $1.3 billion via the debt market and Eaton Towers sold its business to American Tower Corporation for $1.85 billion.

Kash Pandya, CEO of Helios, said the float “signifies our commitment to spreading mobile infrastructure across Sub-Saharan Africa”. The CEO has reportedly said that the company may use some of the funds for its expansion plans, which includes adding three new African countries to the five where it operates.

The amount raised in the Helios IPO certainly signals strong appetite from the global investor community on the infrastructure of Africa’s growing mobile revolution.

Shareholders including Bharti Airtel and Millicom International Cellular sold down their stakes in the IPO. Helios Towers set its IPO size at £250 million and gave the company a market capitalisation of approximately £1.15 billion.

The law firm Akin Gump advised Helios Investment Partners on the IPO.

Capacity

DARK FIBRE AFRICA EXPANDS CONNECTIVITY WITH INTRACOM TELECOM Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) has selected WiBAS point-to-multipoint (PtMP) technology by Intracom Telecom to enhance its microwave connectivity capability.

The South African open-access fibre infrastructure provider’s decision to select WiBAS PtMP technology resulted from the need to offer high-quality wireless last mile access connectivity to its wholesale customers who, in turn, provide connectivity to consumers.

“This technology will enable us to provide our customers with quick wireless connectivity solutions while they are waiting for fibre deployment or in areas where dense fibre deployment would not be feasible,” said Andreas Uys, chief technical officer at DFA. “High-quality wireless capability ensures that we do not have to compromise on the service levels to which our wholesale customers have become accustomed.”

The WiBAS PtMP system is going to be used to extend DFA network connectivity

28 |

Digital’s New Era OVER THE LAST 24 MONTHS, DIGITAL REALTY HAS BROKEN THE RECORD FOR THE LARGEST DATA CENTRE M&A DEAL TWICE. THE COMPANY HAS, IN THE PAST TEN YEARS, INVESTED NEARLY $23BN IN SUCH TRANSACTIONS THROUGHOUT ITS WORLD DOMINANCE QUEST, DOUBLE THAN CLOSEST RIVAL EQUINIX. IS IT ENOUGH? JOÃO MARQUES LIMA SEARCHES FOR THE ANSWER Digital Realty’s first billion-dollar acquisition took place in 2012 when the company invested $1.1 billion in buying British colocation provider Sentrum. The deal saw the American REIT purchase three buildings amounting to approximately 761,000 sqft in the London region.

Since then, Digital Realty has heavily expanded its capital expenditure (CAPEX) in several other large merger and acquisition (M&A) deals including Telx in 2015 for $1.98 billion, eight Equinix facilities in 2016 for $874 million, DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) in 2017 for $7.4 billion, Ascenty in 2018 for $1.8bn, and more recently, Interxion for $8.4 billion.

With the DFT and Interxion transactions - currently the two highest cash amounts paid for a given business in the data centre world, Digital Realty has shown that it is in the game to win big and build one of the world’s most valuable Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) which is currently valued at $25.24 billion, a figure that is nearly half of the one rival Equinix boasts, which has an valuation of $48.41 billion.

“When you think about Digital, think of this as a series of long term contracts that are stacked on top of each other with typically 3% annual escalators, where the underlying collateral or security is critical infrastructure for cloud source providers and enterprise companies and government, to a lesser extent,” Digital Realty’s CEO Bill Stein has previously told Data Economy.

“What you’re really buying is this

stream of recurring cash flow, as an investor.”

The transaction with Interxion shows the ‘gold rush’ moment the European Capacity data centre landscape is witnessing, especially propelled by American operators and large investment funds.

The EMEA region is projected to reach $17.21 billion in data centre market value by 2024, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 11.1%, according to Structure Research.

The double-digit grow proves a strong demand for colocation services, be it retail or wholesale.

As part of the merger of the two transatlantic giants, Interxion’s CEO David Ruberg, says: “Stakeholders will have the opportunity to continue to reap the benefits of the value that we have created via the communities of interest approach in our carrier and cloud-

What comes out the other end is a company we will feel pretty comfortable competing against” Charles Meyers, CEO, Equinix

neutral European data centre portfolio.”

Mixed feelings When the acquisition of Interxion was announced in late October 2019, the market expressed mixed feelings, with some arguing that the deal was “inexpensive” for Digital Realty but would help the company build its footprint in Europe and others – especially investors – who voiced some dissatisfaction with the deal for its inexpensiveness.

One of those voices is Berenberg Bank’s analyst Nate Crossett who says that “DLR is getting Interxion inexpensively”.

With the price tag at $93.48 per share, Crossett and other analyst houses have argued the share price should have fetched around $100, with some pointing at $113 as the anticipated selling tag for the business. This would have made the transaction reach $10.15 billion, an extra $1.75 billion, which could have left shareholders more at ease with the mega-merger.

However, the market has also not dismissed the competitor impact that such transaction could have across Europe, where Interxion operates 53 carrier and cloud-neutral facilities in 11 European countries and 13 metro areas including Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris, London, and Stockholm.

“The prospect of combining these two powerhouses is really exciting for the European data centre market,” says Andrew Jay, executive director of data centre solutions at CBRE. “Interxion is the last pan European retail december/january 2020

feature: digital realty/interxion | 29

platform and so I expect it was hardfought over by Digital Realty.

“In a global context, Interxion should be complimentary to Digital Realty’s 2015 acquisition of Telx and the more recent Telecity divestment assets purchase, both of which bolstered their connectivity offering.”

Jay adds that the combined group will be

company’s Q3 results call transcript held in October.

“Interxion has always been a vigorous competitor of ours in Europe, and I’m sure they will remain as such. As for Digital Realty, it’s my experience that the overlap between our business and theirs is actually fairly small. That will probably not be the case with our xScale

How the world’s Top 2 data centre operators compare Digital Realty + Interxion

Equinix

CEO: William Stein

CEO: Charles Meyers

267 facilities

204 facilities

36.2m sqf

23m sqf

2.15m sqf U/C

N/A sqf U/C

44 metros

56 metros

20 countries

26 countries

5 continents

5 continents

$982m combined Q3 revenues*

$1.4bn Q3 revenues

$31.75bn combined market cap*

$48.22bn market cap

Capacity *Financial values are simple sums of separate entities’ current figures and should not be used for market trading or guidance.

vying for the top position in the FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris) markets with over 300MW’s of IT capacity which is around a fifth of the market.

“They’ll be able to expand the Interxion “communities of interest” across a much wider footprint which should benefit their customers and accelerate the combined group’s growth. These unique communities are gold dust having taken 20 years to develop.”

By leveraging Interxion’s diverse footprint, they’ll be well placed to satisfy the hyperscale requirements which are expanding out from the traditional FLAP markets.

“If they get the integration right they’ll create the best of both, retail and wholesale, worlds,” Jay adds.

Equinix reacts Whenever a big transaction takes place, market watchers are not the only ones voicing their opinion. Rivals do so as well, and Equinix’s CEO Charles Meyers quickly reacted to Digital Realty’s take on Interxion.

“It’s not too difficult to see why each of those parties might be interested in this combination,” Meyers said in the capacitymedia.com

joint venture, where we’re likely to be more consistently head to head. But in our core retail business, we only see them sort of selectively as a competitor.”

Meyers continued to tell those on the line during the call that Digital Realty’s entire retail business outside of Europe, “in other words, what we would be appending from a retail perspective on to the Interxion business”, is about one-tenth the size of Equinix overall.

“The combination represents the bringing together of two very different businesses. A strong European retailer and a strong global wholesaler. There is probably merit in the deal and an industrial logic to it. It’s a bit of a stretch to say that the combination really meaningfully closes a gap in terms of trying to replicate the scope, scale and value of Platform Equinix.

“The challenges in combining those businesses, just mechanically, let alone operationally, financially and culturally, will certainly be non-trivial. Even if and when that’s done successfully, what comes out the other end is a company we will feel pretty comfortable competing against, certainly in Europe, which we’ve been doing, obviously, for years, and in particular on a global basis.”

When it comes to Equinix’s own acquisition strategy, Meyers said the company is going to be disciplined, and that he is “not going to chase valuations if we think they don’t make sense for the business”.

Is it enough?

The answer to the question ‘is it enough?’ is undoubtedly a no.

Not because of the deal in itself, but simply because of the enormous market demand still out there for more colocation services and cloud access.

The European data centre ecosphere is also in constant change, with dozens of facilities having moved hands over the past months, rejigging monopolies and colocation powerhouses across the continent.

This is a trend set to continue, with several market rumours suggesting at least three large-sized deals of more than $2 billion currently on the table that could once more change the game.

Today, it is common to hear that “everyone is on sale” and that seems to be the case in Europe, where there is a scarcity of businesses for acquisition despite the large investment pools investors have at their disposal.

As Equinix’s CEO Meyers, says, the Digital Realty and Interxion merger doesn’t close the gap in the market, which still has enough to offer not only to the world’s two largest data centre operators but all the other players.

Top 10 data centre M&A investors in the last decade Digital Realty - $22.75bn Equinix - $11.36bn Apollo - $4.3bn Elegant Jubilee - $3.44bn GI Partners - $2.85bn Asian Institutional and Private Investors Consortium - $2.77bn CenturyLink - $2.5bn GTT - $2.3bn Shagang Group - $2.2bn IBM - $2bn As of October 29, 2019 Source: Data Economy, 2010-2019

30 |

Verizon: Laying the foundation Verizon’s Eric Cevis speaks to Capacity’s Natalie Bannerman about the sea of change currently effecting the industry and how Verizon is working to bring it all to fruition Capacity

C

apacity Europe saw the launch of the first ever Women in Telco and Tech Breakfast Briefing. With 70 men and woman engaging in roundtable discussions on the topic of diversity and inclusion ahead of one the biggest events on the wholesale carrier calendar, it was Eric Cevis, president of Verizon Partner Solutions taking to the stage to open the session that showed the significance these discussions we’re now starting to have. In an impassioned speech, Cevis explained why Verizon and by extension, the ITW Global Leaders Forum (GLF), is doing its part for diveristy & inclusion (D&I) and why it is key to business evolution.

“Our belief is that our customers are changing, those that have buying power are changing and the people that are making the buying decisions are changing,” he explains. “If you want to leverage those changes you’ve got to address that in your go-to-market ecosystem. To me, making sure that you’re not cutting off any areas or groups allows you to increase your routes of

distribution and opportunities so that you monetise, thus good for business not just the right thing to do.”

One aspect of that good for business discussion is how to retain agility in an industry that continues to grow and seems to only want to further scale. During Cevis’ keynote panel, the carrier innovation exchange, he shared that this is something he tries to maintain within his own team.

“The way that we retain it, is by investing in individuals with training and development so that you’re remaining constant on the evolution and making sure that our people skills are there to handle that transition,” he says.

“To me, this feeds back into our diversity and inclusion discussion, it makes people feel like they belong because they’re not left behind as automation plays forward. When you’re actually investing in them, you’re ensuring there’s still opportunities for them going forward as well.”

Business transformation has quickly become a key area of development among telcos, particularly around investing in the network for future demands of tomorrow.

For Verizon this ultimately means delivering the best customer experience.

“Business transformation for the customer experience is the focus,” he says.

“We look at business transformation thinking not what we should be doing a year from now, but ten years from now with the idea that the investment we make today is building for the future, tomorrow.”

Part of this journey in Cevis’ view is to take care of the customer experience as well as the ease of use and transformation, it’s part of the education customers need to embrace change altogether.

“My belief is that if you care for both the customer experience, transformational ease and at the same time set them up for the evolutional journey of the technology, it’s easier for them to embrace those changes. “ One of those changes also involves the evolution that many service providers are experiencing and that’s transitioning from a carrier to a technology company.

“People are accepting that they’ve got to be more flexible and they’ve got to be more agile. The things that got us to where we are, are not the things to take us to where december/january 2020

the big interview: eric cevis | 31

1986

Staff supervisor, government systems, Bell Atlantic

2003

VP business wholesale marketing, Verizon Retail Markets Group

2003

VP business channel development, Verizon Retail Markets Group

2006

VP business, Verizon Communications

2014

President, Verizon Partner Solutions

it becomes a question of how you leverage those while at the same time remembering that it will continue to evolve, because we have no clue about the capacity that will now be available. We’re about to cross this Fourth Industrial Revolution wall. Between 2G, 3G and 4G it was a step by step, but now we’re talking about a leap-frog in capability.”

But Cevis isn’t worried because Verizon has an Ace up its sleeve in the form of innovation labs, that enable the company to tap into and invest in the most cutting-edge ideas in preparation for evolution.

“We don’t have all the ideas ourselves,” he explains. “So, we’re investing in entrepreneurs, millennials and people who are coming up with things I would never have even thought about. I like that we no longer have to organically do everything ourselves. We’ve gotten into this new in-organic space where you can partner now, and you don’t have to be the win all to everything that is happening.”

The things that got us to where we are, Capacity are not the things to take us to where we need to be” Eric Cevis, president, Verizon Partner Solutions

we need to be,” he says. That change is taking place; the evolution is taking place, the demands for bandwidth are continuing to increase, and so we have to make sure we are taking care of that moving forward.”

Traditional revenue streams have been in decline due to price compressions, driven in turn by the fact that the marketplace has more alternative suppliers, so prices are going down so that the market can compete. This is coming from cable companies, MNOs, fibre companies etc.

The key differentiator now becomes the quality and reliability of your service.

“If I only care for the current state of business that we’re doing, we’ll only be able to grow our business so far – if anything, I’m going to decline my business, as well as continuing to understand the demands of the consumer. Thinking this way will bring us back to sustainable growth.”

As of one of the first in North America to go live with 5G, I was curious as to where Cevis sat in the discussion on the impact of this next-gen technology and whether or not further use cases needed to be defined.

“Some uses have been defined already so capacitymedia.com

One area that Verizon is particular keen on partnering on is content. With the likes of AT&T spending a whopping $85 billion on its acquisition of Time Warner, Cevis says Verizon is taking a different approach.

“What we believe at Verizon is that we don’t have to own Time Warner, the content or make that $85 billion type investment, that we believe you’ll have to continually make, because content has to stay fresh. Our belief is to allow content players to build that out themselves and partner with them.”

Although simple in principle, how Verizon plans on effectively monetising its network is a debate that many in the space continue to have with the OTTs and content players, but Cevis says; “Allow those partners on the network but you rev-share or do partnership agreements with them because you’re giving them a quality and reliability on your network to get the user experience to be one of the best.

Therefore, people are willing to pay a little differently because of that experience.”

Never one to be left out of the conversation when it comes to the next big trend, I asked what was next for Verizon in

its work about edge computing and what opportunities, if any, there were.

“We use the term intelligent edge network,” says Cevis. “At the moment we’re leveraging the dense fibre partnership we’ve done with Corning, taking those assets and including it on our software-defined network (SDN). In doing more virtualisation of the network it allows us to push cloud compute to the edge.”

In Cevis’ own words, simply put, the edge or intelligent edge network, allows you to put the compute power into the cloud itself, take latency out and support things like robotic surgery or autonomous cars.

“We think those are real and future things that we will monetise in the business moving forward,” he adds.

As someone who is considered to be a thought-leader in the space, Cevis, and by extension Verizon, participates on a number of boards and standards bodies, one of them includes MEF. Speaking to him about this work and Verizon’s participation, he says it’s all about the bigger picture. ”If you’re really going to scale in this environment you can’t do all these one-off siloed, proprietary strategies,” he says.

“You’ve got to go to more of an opensourced approach and really start embracing this kind of lifecycle orchestration standards body and the API standards. The more that we all do that in the carrier community, the more we’ll have an impact on a global basis for the society we support.”

Ultimately, Verizon, like all other carriers, wants to have its say in the direction this industry is moving in. “We’ve partnered with standards bodies like MEF and have people sitting on those boards because we want to have a voice in the conversation.”

Looking beyond this, he says that enterprises are actually wanting greater interoperability between carriers as it takes the work out of moving between providers.

“You see that enterprises are asking for that collaboration. No real provider gives all their business to one company so that you don’t have one source of failure.

What we’re finding is that by at least having a standards approach we take some of that pain away.”

A great example of this cross-carrier collaboration is the Global Leaders Forun (GLF), an organisation just as pivotal to the conversation as MEF and its counterparts.

“I think about the GLF in the same way I think about MEF and the TM Forum, and in the same way I think about our work around diversity and inclusion. We do these things because it is our social responsibility to bring best practices together.”

As the GLF takes on D&I as an area of development in its work, Cevis and Verizon will be front and centre as the discussion wages on.

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34 |

Slattery on The Next Subsea Wave Fresh off the back of SUB.CO’s announcement about the new Oman and Australia cable (OAC) being built, Jason McGee-Abe speaks to Bevan Capacity Slattery about the benefits of the new route and how subsea is becoming increasingly attractive for investment players.

I

spotted Slattery at one of the recent receptions at our Capacity Europe in London. The serial entrepreneur is a busy man so I immediately took my chance to go over and speak with him.

We first met at a Superloop party held during Capacity Asia 2016 in Hong Kong.

Superloop had announced that its Hong Kong dark fibre network was live and Slattery revealed that work was progressing well on the TKO Express, the first domestic subsea cable linking Hong Kong’s major finance and technology centres, Chai Wan and Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate. TKO’s installation completed two months later and has since become an integral part of its network.

Back to London and with Slattery’s most recent venture, SUB.CO, fresh in mind and the announcement that it is building a new international subsea cable system that will directly connect Muscat in Oman to Perth, Australia, I suggest a big interview with the serial entrepreneur for this issue. His diary is jam-packed at Capacity Europe so we agree to finalise a

call in the weeks after the event. After three weeks, I finally get my chance to speak in detail with him. He’s driving home in Brisbane after a day’s work in Cloudscene’s offices and I’m up in early at home in London.

OAC: Express Connectivity I immediately ask him about the Oman Australia Cable (OAC) cable and enquire how long the project has been in the pipeline for. “It’s been cooking for about 15 months,” he says.

“It’s an interesting route and provides great connectivity at a time when we’re seeing a surge of bandwidth in the cloud and major cloud providers are reaching further and further out.”

These providers are in more dense metro markets like Singapore, the US and in Europe, but are expanding into more underserved markets like Africa and the Middle East, so the OAC cable comes as welcome news.

Cloud consumption is a key driving force in the industry today and we’re seeing cloud providers expand

geographically due to customer demand.

“Diverse, secure routes providing scalable bandwidth and international connectivity along a low latency route are needed. This is why we’ve built the OAC. It’s surprisingly the first express route that travels across the Indian Ocean from Australia to EMEA,” he tells me. “We are taking some project risk with this but you always will when you’re first to market with something.”

OAC is the first direct express cable route from Australia to EMEA, so it’ll help support the low latency demands.

Designed as a three fibre pair system, OAC has the option to upgrade to four fibre pairs based on demand and will span approximately 9,700km.

“For me, the Oman Australia Cable is the final piece of an important puzzle to improve Australia’s resiliency and recognises the growing importance of Oman in becoming the new “cloud hub” in EMEA,” he adds.

Oman has emerged as a key hub for EMEA and gateway between Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Muscat december/january 2020

the big interview: bevan slattery | 35

1997

Co-founder and director, iSeek Ltd

2001

Co-founder and CEO, PIPE Networks

2010

Founder and deputy chairman, NEXTDC

2012

Co-founder and CEO, SubPartners

2013

Non-executive director, Asia Pacific Data Centre Trust (APDC)

2013

Chairman and co-founder, Biopixel

2013

Founder and executive chairman, Megaport

2013

Founder and executive chairman, Superloop

2013

Founder, Cloudscene

2019

Founder, SUB.CO

Slattery believes the third wave of investment will be in the subsea space and that we’ll definitely see investment companies go beyond traditional choices and back submarine assets.

They are a very similar class of asset in the sense that the infrastructure has a long life. Quite simply, long-term customers and long-term assets is an attractive investment,” he adds. “With trillions of dollars of investment flowing in looking for long-term assets, subsea cables are certainly attractive.”

Slattery is approaching this particular subsea project in a different manner though and certainly from a long-term investment aspect.

It is certainly a far cry from the consortium-based model that he was involved in with the INDIGO cable and a big differentiating factor is time to market.

“One of the things that I learnt from the INDIGO cable project was how consortiums can be challenging and slow you down when you’re sharing assets and risk, but in particular when trying to get consensus from all members for a decision,” he says.

In comparison, manufacturing of the OAC is already set to commence in late Capacity 2019, with the installation forecasted to

enabling over 530 data centres.” A core focus of Megaport’s roadmap over the next 12 months is helping service providers and enterprises with their global SD-WAN deployments, he tells me.

“Being able to spin up virtual SD-WAN infrastructure to do your aggregation right next to a cloud on-ramp, internet exchange or whatever it may be is very powerful and important to a lot of enterprises and service providers. The beauty is we’re enabling this and helping customers take advantage of this.”

Superloop’s focus over the next 18-24 months is about being fully connected to the cloud and “making sure we’re fully embracing SD-WAN and helping enterprise interconnect on an MPLS or a low-latency IP network across Asia and the world”. He adds: “We’ve built the network and the backbone, are building up the access, so now it’s time for us to turn the heat up and start leveraging the amazing network that we’ve built.”

Superloop has just completed a recapitalisation of the company and budget sheet, he explains. I ask him about the takeover approach from May by QIC Private Capital for AU$494 million and he says “we stepped away from those QIC talks around June”.

The Great Barrier Reef

With trillions of dollars of investment flowing in looking for long-term assets, subsea cables are certainly attractive”

also has 15 subsea cables terminating there today and will host a new Equinix facility.

Additional branching units have been designed to extend the OAC system into Salalah, Oman, and Djibouti.

“A private equity firm in Australia is backing us and has taken a long-term view on key routes that we think are underserved and will also give good returns,” Slattery adds.

Bevan Slattery, founder, SUB.CO

Subsea - the new investment wave

complete by the end of 2021.

“We’ll be ready for service in early 2022,” he says.

I immediately ask for more details about the private equity firm and ask whether he can disclose its identity. “Not just yet,” he responds immediately but he does reveal that there is much more appetite to back subsea projects.

“We’ve seen infrastructure investment firms, funds, and private equity firms such as EQT, Digital Colony, Macquarie, and Fidelity – get deep into fibre networks. They all historically went into telecommunications infrastructure and we’ve seen them go into the data centre space now,” he explains. capacitymedia.com

Megaport & Superloop Slattery’s other companies have also been positioning and preparing themselves in the face of the explosive growth in cloud connectivity and interconnection between cloud regions. The volume of traffic is vast and latency is increasingly becoming a huge part of the conversation next to security.

“Megaport currently has over 600 customers and are in well over 70 markets in over 20 countries,” he says. “Cloud interconnection is exploding and we’re

Aside from his busy portfolio of companies, I ask Slattery what he does in his spare time.

He first responds that he has recently been spending time with his daughter who has recently graduated but highlights a particular project close to his hear as he informs me about his passion for the Great Barrier Reef, which he grew up on.

Slattery has a business called Biopixel, which documents natural history and all things about the Great Barrier Reef. The company has created the biggest HD 4K and 8K video library.

“The reason I’m doing that is to help the reef survive and grow,” he says. “To do so, we need to be able to tell a story and the way you tell a story these days is visually.

Storytellers like Discovery or BBC can access our content and create their stories.”

He adds that 35% of the David Attenborough documentary on the Great Barrier Reef a few years ago came from the Biopixel soft library.

Slattery has set himself a target of building 1 million sq m of tolerant reef over the next decade. If this project is anything like the other initiatives and companies he has put his mind too, the Great Barrier Reef is in safe hands.

As we go to press, the Slattery Family Trust is also about to launch the Great Barrier Reef census so do take a look if you’d like to find out more.

36|

Investors bet on US metro fibre market AS METRO FIBRE AND SMALL CELLS SOLIDIFY THEIR PLACE IN THE LIMELIGHT, THE NATURAL PROGRESSION IS TO HIGHLIGHT ITS GLAMOROUS SIDE, WHICH IS WHERE INVESTORS SHOULD PUMP THEIR CASH INTO. ABIGAIL OPIAH REPORTS The demand for metro fibre is developing at rapid rates thanks to the copious need for fast broadband connection. In 2019, imagining a world without fast connection would be as impossible as imagining a world without mobile phones The need for limitless broadband in the US and across the globe has been welcomed by a flood of new construction and acquisitions in the sector, as key players in the industry boast about their expanded footprints. Hunter Newby, American entrepreneur, investor, conservationist and the owner of Newby Ventures meticulously describes the US metro market’s state as healthy, established, and growing from an investment viewpoint.

“More investments are required everywhere, and in certain places, it is more near term than others relative to the return on investment capital. Metro fibre has reached a level of general acceptance in the industry,” he adds.

“Everybody now realises the need for fibre which helps to attract more capital.

There has been some very successful and high-profile transactions that have taken place in the sector, which is a testament to both the stability and credibility of the market.

“There are, however, still places where there is a big lack of metro fibre, but as the investments continue to happen, the core of the metro continues to bubble out so that each step to reach the next

Capacityis not a major town or neighbourhood stretch,” he continues.

However, it is not the same narrative for all parts of the US as Hunter explains that a lot of places still have to wait because they are just not close enough to the metro fibre core. It does not take a rocket scientist to observe that where there is a lack, there is an opportunity.

“Investment appetite is routed in dark fibre. Dark fibre is what large entities that are moving a lot of data need and require,” continues Hunter. “Many of them have invested their own capital in dark fibre as a result and even build their own submarine cables now, which would have been unheard of just ten years ago.”

A quick search on Google evokes a plethora of subsea cable investments from the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Off the top of the list is Google’s 10,500km Curie cable designed

Everybody now realises the need for fibre which helps to attract more capital” Hunter Newby, owner, Newby Ventures

with four 18Tbps fibre-optic pairs, which delivers 72Tbps of needed bandwidth to South America from the US And it doesn’t just end there as the nature of the subsea cable customer is changing.

The new customer Traditionally the prime (and for most of history, the only) customer had been the major telecommunications companies and, of course, the military. Now the prime customers are becoming the mega data centres, primarily owned and operated by the social media/cloud computing providers - Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

These companies are not only customers, but they are so deeply involved that they are equity owners and active participants in entire subsea cables. No longer is it desirable to bring a subsea cable to a landing station and from there interconnect with the major telecommunications providers.

Now the need is to take a significant portion (or the entire cable) directly to a private data centre.

“If they are going to build their own submarine cables they are certainly going to build metro,” adds Newby.

“There is a hierarchy of demand for dark fibre too, which has a lot to do with distance and the challenges of constructing fibre routes over great distances, and the cost that comes with that. I believe that every entity that december/january 2020

feature: US metro | 37

could potentially use dark fibre would like to have it but they cannot necessarily afford it on an individual bases in a country like the US.” The US metro fibre market is on a steady rise because of digital transformation. Those in the industry may deem this as a buzz word chucked in at tech conferences and other industry events, but digital transformation is the master key unlocking an abundance of opportunity.

Marc Dyman, chief revenue officer, FibreLight, paints a similar picture regarding the metro market to that of Newby.

“There is a lot of building and constructing happening in nontraditional areas as enterprises continue to embark on digital transformation.

These entities are applications that use to exist in-house at their location but they are now living somewhere else. The reliance on metro fibre is becoming more important than it was in the past,” he adds.

“In regards to the metro fibre, there is a lot happening with data centre interconnection, which is exploding in the metro fibre networks. On the wireless side, inside those metro networks, there is an increased bandwidth move. We have clients that are asking, in the metro networks, for dark fibre.

“The challenge is continuing to have the CAPEX to address and participate in all the projects that are available, so the trick is to pick the ones that will yield the greatest margin and profitability. The flip side is that there are so many projects that are going on in those different areas, and we are seeing an influx of demand in the markets that we are in.”

FibreLight, a company that designs, builds, and deploys custom fibre networks and responsive customer experiences, is focusing on the transition off of using IP networks to get to the cloud versus a layer two Ethernet network, which is big in the enterprise segment according to Dyman.

“Originally when they got into the cloud game, it was about bringing your own bandwidth and having an IP connection, but now as you move more missioncritical applications into the cloud or a hybrid data centre location, it requires a different type of connectivity, which is a big future opportunity.

“The wireless guys are leveraging small cells to make more of their spectrum and to create a better user experience. Where we see growth is from the guys who are mounting small cells on buildings. We can look at other revenue streams and capacitymedia.com

make that business case look a lot better.”

Future gains Last year, CTIA commissioned consulting firm Accenture to do a study which found that by 2019, there would be 200,000 small cells deployed.

There is a lot happening with data centre interconnection, which is exploding in the metro fibre networks” Marc Dyman, chief revenue officer, FiberLight

The study assessed the impacts of regulatory reviews required for the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act (NHPA/NEPA) on 5G small cell roll-outs by US wireless carriers. 5G alone is expected to require hundreds of thousands of small cells, therefore NHPA/NEPA review costs are expected to significantly impact 5G deployment based on predictions. Accenture estimates the industry could spend an incremental $2.43bn related to NHPA/ NEPA reviews through 2026.

To the untrained eye, these are just predictions, but to those in the know, it is a wealth of knowledge for those who have the power and capital to invest.

“In regards to investors’ appetite, FibreLight would direct investors to networks that hit on key components like investing in fibre networks where you can build a network that has high density of fibre, and can touch wireless applications as well as interconnect data centres and those markets,” he concludes.

Capacity

Biggest Metro Fibre M&A in 2019 Zayo Group signed a definitive merger agreement to be acquired

by Digital Colony Partners and EQT Partners in a cash transaction valued at $14.3bn.

Shareholders will receive $35.00 in cash per share of Zayo’s common stock, including the assumption of $5.9bn of Zayo’s net debt obligations.

Marc Ganzi, managing partner of Digital Colony, said: “We believe the company has a unique opportunity to meet the growing demand for data associated with the connectivity and backhaul requirements of a range of customers. We are excited to work alongside the management team and EQT to grow the business and expand its presence in the global market.”

The deal will transition Zayo from a public company to a private company while the Zayo team continue to lead the company forward, base in Boulder, Colorado.

“The general US metro fibre market is supported by great demands from 5G roll outs amongst other things and we are building tons of small cells, towers and metro dark fibre in the US as a result,” added Jack Waters, president, Zayo Networks and chief operating officer, Zayo Group.

“We have a transaction on the path to close in the first half of 2020, which is a part of our company’s strategy to get that done for shareholders. The acquisition is a public to private transaction.”

The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2020 subject to customary conditions, which include regulatory clearance and Zayo shareholder approvals.

“Digital Colony and EQT share our vision that Zayo’s Fibre Fuels Global Innovation, “said Dan Caruso, Zayo’s Chairman and CEO. “I am confident this partnership with EQT and Digital Colony will empower Zayo to accelerate its growth and strengthen its industry leadership.”

*The transaction is expected to close in H1 2020.

38 |

DE-CIX launches into South East Asia DE-CIX has now expanded its global interconnection model to its most eastern pointCapacity to date.

Jason McGee-Abe speaks to Ivo Ivanov, DE-CIX’s international CEO

I

vanov joined DE-CIX back in January 2007 and ever since then has been deeply involved in the establishment of DE-CIX sites in Istanbul, Palermo, Madrid, Marseille, New York, Dallas, Dubai (UAE-IX), as well as Mumbai (Mumbai IX ), and several DE-CIX consultancy projects in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

DE-CIX’s internationalisation strategy has been continually enhanced and, as I write this, the company has just announced its plans to launch operations in Malaysia after partnering with local internet exchange provider Johor Bahru Internet Exchange (JBIX). The deal will see the companies co-run two internet exchanges in the greater Kuala Lumpur and the Johor Bahru regions of Malaysia.

This is big news for DE-CIX as it marks the internet exchange operator’s first venture into South East Asia and Ivanov tells Capacity that it is just the first of many markets. “It’s just the start of the chain,” the CEO of DE-CIX International tells me.

“DE-CIX will also look to enter other markets around Malaysia over the next 12-24 months.”

DE-CIX Malaysia “After successfully establishing leading IXs in Europe, North America, India, and the Middle East, DE-CIX is now taking its almost 25 years of experience to South East Asia,” says Ivanov. “Malaysia is one of the most vibrant markets in the world.”

Forming a joint venture with Starwing Technologies, the company has created a new carrier and data centre-neutral JV vehicle, DE-CIX Malaysia, which will be headquartered in Kuala Lumpur and will collectively take over the JBIX. JBIX is an open and carrier-class IX that has been operational since 2018. As of today, it serves close to 50 regional networks and Ivanov divulges that since the DE-CIX announcement a number of financial enterprises have expressed interest in using interconnection services at JBIX. Malaysia is just the first step as DE-CIX has identified more opportunities in South East Asia “to enable more and more

markets around Singapore”. The plan is to develop these local markets and the connections with Singapore, whilst maintaining a very robust and distributed platform that will be constantly developed over the years. DE-CIX has created interconnection hubs worldwide in regions where customers are in need of easy-to-access interconnection services.

“Whilst Singapore has been a major content hub for the region over the last decade, the key content and cloudcomputing players have started to extend their footprint throughout ASEAN – including in Malaysia,” he states.

Asia Expansion Plans Singapore and Hong Kong are and will remain two of the key hubs in the ASEAN market, Ivanov says. He does stress that this heavy concentration will inevitably become redistributed within the region, in particular with surrounding markets.

“We believe that around 80% of relevant telecommunications concentration in Singapore will reduce over the years,” Ivanov tells me. “It will december/january 2020

the big interview: ivo ivanov | 39

2007

Chief strategy and corporate development officer, DE-CIX

2015

CEO, DE-CIX International

2017

COO & Board Member, DE-CIX Group

interconnection infrastructure. “There is huge demand for interconnection and further services,” he says. Services such as FlexPOP, which is set to revolutionise how carriers can expand their on-net presence with a “first-of-its kind infrastructure-as-aservice (IaaS)”, will be made available across its assets in South East Asia.

The company has spoken to many of its global anchor customers about its plans.

“Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and financial services firms and network operators share this vision with us and they want to support us in connecting to our platforms, which will appear in this part of the world,” says Ivanov. I enquire about Asian-based companies, such as Alibaba and Tencent, and Ivanov responds: “They are already part of the DE-CIX family and are connected to various DE-CIX platforms worldwide.

They will follow us in these new markets,

DE-CIX will also look to enter other markets around Capacity Malaysia over the next 12-24 months”

Ivo Ivanov, CEO, DE-CIX International

never lose its key hub status but new emerging markets will gradually create their own hubs.”

Alongside Malaysia, DE-CIX has identified the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand as other South East Asian markets that have great potential to become their own hubs. “It won’t happen tomorrow but, within the next couple of years, these countries will evolve quickly, based on population, business and economic growth,” he says.

Over the next few years, more and more operators will look to create further points of presence (PoPs) in cities such as Kuala Lumpar, Johor Bahru, Jakarta, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi, he says.

“There are millions of users around these two markets, which operators, especially the international global ones, want to have access to. The demand for low latency and the huge traffic volumes driven by video, payments, gaming and other applications like on-demand and live streaming of sports is vast.”

DE-CIX is helping to drive the demand for very low latency and high resiliency for capacitymedia.com

especially as they deploy heavily across South East Asia. We will certainly welcome them to all DE-CIX exchanges across South East Asia.”

If you want to create your own crystal ball for South East Asia in terms of growth, demands and requirements on the market, one only needs to look at the history and recorded growth of South Korea, Japan and China. The potential for DE-CIX in South East Asia is vast as is the markets its identified. A huge area of opportunity highlighted on my call with the former business and law school graduate is with enterprises.

Enterprise Federation DE-CIX has been growing its geographical presence at two levels: one is from a wide-scale global point of view and the other is within each of these locations, at the local level. The company is essentially bringing connected networks closer to the edge – right into regional data centres and as close as possible to end-users and enterprises.

Today, DE-CIX’s global infrastructure supports more than 1,700 networks but

Ivanov highlights further opportunities that are in place for enterprises. DE-CIX has already been working hard on creating interconnection services for enterprises directly or indirectly with the cloud exchange in Europe and the US. Ivanov explains how DE-CIX is set to strive helping enterprises to start using interconnection services. He hints that the company has already started looking at the potential of creating more specific industry and vertical interconnection groups designed for larger enterprises. I ask Ivanov for an example and he starts talking about the car manufacturing industry.

“Let’s take an automotive company, which has a connected car strategy. It wants to enable the cars with excellent in-network services in terms of data delivery into the car but also data usage created from thousands of sensors out of the car,” he explains. Manufacturers will want to control the data flow in and out of the car and DE-CIX is bound to see demand here for interconnection services.

All manufacturers need to create new digital assets to stay relevant. This is valid for other sectors too, such as healthcare and finance services. Digital strategies and new assets will give them the chance to differentiate themselves amongst the competition and to grow their relevance as a digital company. Creating assets is just one part but how to monetise these assets is a big topic. “The manufacturer wants to control the data in and out of the car as they want to monetise these assets,” Ivanov continues. “It’s a billion-dollar business.

How can they do it though? They must have control and increase the quality. The network operator of a car company has to be involved in this and has to control this.

That means DE-CIX will offer these type of organisations with interconnection federations, which may be like closed user groups, run and owned in accordance with the terms of compliance, data privacy or security. A car manufacturer can then invite all those network operators that want to interconnect with the car or receive and use data out of the car created by the thousands of sensors.”

DE-CIX is looking to create and offer pre-designed interconnection federations for different sectors. A huge benefit of such a framework is that an enterprise is essentially establishing its own private interconnection platform, helping to establish thousands of relationships and scrapping the need to close thousands of different bilateral agreements.

DE-CIX is playing a significant role in the world today. Its Asian expansion, coupled with the development of new services, partnerships and enterprise federations, is repositioning the internet exchange operator in a new digital age.

Capacity

special report

SUBSEA December/January 2020

CONTENTS 43 Subsea news Capacity rounds up some of the biggest stories in the world of subsea

45 Power beneath the surface Capacity

Capacity considers the impact of bandwidth-hungry content on subsea

48 Big Interview: Gil Santaliz, CEO, NJFX

52 Big Interview: Erling Aronsveen, CEO, Celtic Norse

59 What will next-gen submarine cable architecture look like in 2020?

Infinera’s Geoff Bennett takes a look at the subsea cable architecture of the future

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news: subsea | 43

SUBSEA NEWS HIGHLIGHTS ANGOLA CABLES, NOKIA TRIAL AFRICAUS FIBRE LINK Angola Cables and Nokia are building a direct optical connection between Sangano, Angola, and Boca Raton, Miami, US. “By optically interconnecting the deployed MONET and South Atlantic Cable System (SACS), Angola Cables is able to further reduce latency between content providers in North America and the rapidly growing data consumption markets in Africa,” said Ângelo Gama, CTO of Angola Cables.

In its final acceptance trial, latency was reduced by 30% compared to existing routes.

GOOGLE’S CURIE CABLE NEARING TRANSMISSION Google’s 10,500km Curie cable system, which connects Chile and the US, has been successfully installed and tested.

Curie marks Google’s third subsea cable after the Dunant and Equiano cables.

“By owning and operating our own subsea cables we can add a layer of security beyond what’s available over the public internet and can plan effectively for the future capacity needs of our customers and users around the world,” said Google.

Curie will deliver 72Tbps of needed bandwidth to South America and is due to start transmitting data in Q2 2020.

Image:

ELLALINK, TELXIUS SEAL CONNECTIVITY PACT The EllaLink Group and Telxius have entered into a collaboration agreement for international subsea capacity and terrestrial connectivity in Latin America.

The agreement includes cable landing facilities in Fortaleza, Brazil, and the infrastructure owned by EllaLink and Telxius will enable European traffic to reach all the major cities in Brazil and capacitymedia.com

across Latin America.

“The Telxius facility in Fortaleza provides the ideal landing solution for a next-generation subsea system like EllaLink, while strengthening Telxius’ trans-Atlantic route diversity,” said Diego Matas, COO of EllaLink.

SEABORN, ANOVA PARTNER ON USBRAZIL TRADE ROUTE Seaborn Networks has teamed up with Anova Financial Networks, an international carrier and market data provider, to create a new route between the US and Brazil.

Capacity The new ultra-low latency (ULL) fibre connection will link the financial centres of São Paulo, Brazil and Chicago, US, offering multiple ULL tiers for potential customers.

The system will leverage Seaborn’s Seabras-1 cable that connects São Paulo, Brazil, and New York/New Jersey, US, as well as Anova’s microwave network connection between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to all five sites in the New Jersey Equity Triangle.

HC2 SELLS ITS STAKE IN HUAWEI MARINE NETWORKS HC2 Holdings (HC2) has announced that its marine services division, Global Marine Group (GMG), has agreed to sell its 49% stake in joint venture Huawei Marine Networks to Hengtong Optic-Electric Co for approximately $140 million.

Under the terms of the agreement, GMG will sell 30% of Huawei Marine Networks to Hengtong at closing, while retaining 19% under a two-year put option agreement at the larger of the same equity value ($285m) or fair market value.

In addition, Hengtong is also acquiring Huawei’s full 51% stake and will own 81% of the joint venture once both sales have been completed, which will become 100% once GMG’s put

option has been finalised.

The sale is due to complete in the first quarter of 2020, subject to the usual closing conditions.

NTT LAUNCHES $119M SUBSEA UNIT IN SINGAPORE NTT has launched a new subsea cable unit in Singapore to maximise on the growing demand for connectivity in Southeast Asia.

NTT confirmed in October 2019 that it was entering a strategic JV, Orient Link, to strengthen NTT Group’s submarine cable business.

NTT holds a 42% stake in Orient Link, with Japan’s ICT and Postal Services (JICT) and WEN Capital (WEN) holding 38% and 20% respectively.

A total of $119 million was raised in capital and JICT plans to inject up to $78 million into Orient Link.

ORANGE TO BUILD WEST AFRICAN BACKBONE Orange has announced plans to build a new international backbone network in West Africa.

This multi-regional West African network will connect to the rest of the world through additional subsea cables, as well as a terrestrial network, and will link up all the main capital cities in the region such as Dakar, Bamako, Abidjan, Accra and Lagos.

“Through this project, Orange is clearly demonstrating its leadership and expertise in the design, deployment and operation of international network infrastructure,” said Jérôme Barré, CEO of Orange wholesale and international networks.

The news also follows the company’s recent investment in the MainOne subsea cable connecting Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire to Europe, the West African backbone network is the next stage in the development of Orange’s international connectivity in Africa.

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Power beneath the surface

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CONTENT SECTOR. GUY MATTHEWS CONSIDERS THEIR IMPACT

Capacity

T

he nature of our increasingly information-driven society means that we rely more heavily than ever on the world’s undersea cable network infrastructure. From financial trading platforms to social media hubs, we are all dependent on the bandwidth that these networks give us, and more insistent than ever that they offer us maximum uptime and minimal latency. The quest for innovation to meet these needs is ongoing.

The last 12 months have seen the emergence of a number of technologies which look certain to play an important part in the subsea market of next year and beyond. Not least of these is Space Division Multiplexing (SDM).

Optical communication technology has, over the decades, tended to advance by finding new ways to increase the data-carrying capacity of individual fibre pairs. This has seen scientists seek to optimise multiplexing in four dimensions: time, wavelength, polarization and phase in order to squeeze as much data as possible over a fibre pair. SDM moves the focus to the dimension of space – in other words looking at not just more data per pair but also employing more fibre pairs per cable to carry that data. This is happening in tandem with other enhancements such as power-optimised repeater designs. capacitymedia.com

“In the past, the goal was to maximise the amount of bandwidth per fibre pair – more wavelengths, a higher bit rate per wavelength,� explains Alan Mauldin, research director with analyst firm Telegeography. “This has shifted in the last year to an emphasis on more fibre pairs in a single cable. We’re seeing new cables being planned with so-called SDM.�

Mauldin cites Dunant, a collaboration between operator Orange and content player Google, which promises to be the first SDM-based cable when it comes into service in 2020, connecting Virginia Beach in the US with France’s Atlantic coast. With its 12 fibre pairs, it will offer 250Tbs per second of performance, enough to transmit the entire contents of the Library of Congress three times a second. “The big content providers are heavy drivers of SDM,� observes Mauldin. “This will continue, as there’s no indication that the likes of Google and Facebook will stop investing in new cables any time soon. Cables with 12 fibre pairs are on the way, and 16 fibre pair ones will follow.�

It’s no secret that the balance of power in the subsea sector has, for a number of years, been shifting from traditional telecoms operators to the content sector – players such as Google, Amazon,

Microsoft, Facebook and Netflix.

Geoff Bennett, director, solutions and technology with vendor Infinera says that along with this shift has come a change in perception on how a cable system should be built. “What Facebook, for example, is trying to achieve is a uniform user experience around the world,� he says. “That requires the free movement of your information and your Facebook friends’ information.

This in turn means replication of Facebook information around different data centres, and that’s what drives Facebook’s bandwidth needs and the kind of cable they want to fund.�

What Facebook is trying to achieve is a uniform user experience�

Alan Mauldin, research director, TeleGeography

Image: Adobe Stock

| 45

46 | feature: subsea

The SDM model works better for the content giants, he says, than trying to squeeze more and more traffic through a single pair. It also explains the sheer number of cables that the content sector appears to be prepared to invest in.

Bennett makes the point that when you compare what Facebook is spending on cables versus the advertising revenue they are generating, the former is a tiny fraction of the latter. Google, he says, are similar, also having an advertising-driven revenue model.

“Facebook and Google know what every additional millisecond of user latency costs,” he explains. “These players know what they are doing – to two decimal place of accuracy – such is their access to cutting edge analytics. That’s why they need cables that feature higher order modulation in the fibre, putting the pressure on vendors like Infinera to come up with transponders to match. A cable like Marea [which runs between Virginia Beach and Bilbao in Spain and is backed

by Microsoft and Facebook] shows what can be achieved with the highest quality of transponder. Marea has small gaps between amplifiers, making it more expensive to own and operate, but the return is the highest possible transAtlantic bandwidth.”

Telegeography’s Mauldin says there are other content sector requirements in play that dictate not just how cables are built but where: “We’re seeing new cables planned from the Nordics down to Ireland and the UK,” he says. “The idea is to connect to data centres with favourable

We’ve had to look at ways of getting closer to capacity limits” Brian Lavallée, senior director of Portfolio, Ciena

cooling costs and green power. Where the big content providers want to put their facilities affects how cables are routed.”

Nordic data centres are booming, as is the network infrastructure to support them, and it’s not just at the behest of content providers argues Mattias Fridstrom, chief evangelist at Telia Carrier: “The added diversity that results from this trend is highly welcome for carriers too,” he says. “It’s a good thing probably that fewer cables are landing in the UK. You want as much diversity as you can get as a cable customer. As a pan-European provider, it suits us to invest in cables landing in places like western France and Bilbao. That way we can get trafficCapacity to the US without going via London. We support the idea of more trans-Atlantic cables, and of a greater spread of them. New cables around Africa are also good news. Things are really flying there, and new connections and infrastructure is needed.”

In terms of new technology, Fridstrom says Telia is always happy when a new

system comes in because it will tend to be better than an older system. He is particularly excited about ZR and ZR+, new standards for transmitting 400 gigabit Ethernet and higher over data centre interconnection links up to 100km using dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and higher order modulation such as 16 QAM. Data centre trends are shaping cable development in other ways, says Brian Lavallée, vendor Ciena’s senior director of portfolio marketing and an expert in submarine networking solutions.

“Traditionally you would have had the cable itself underwater, and the terminals within the landing stations,” he points out. “Now these terminals are typically pushed right into the data centres. With the majority of new traffic being turned up being from Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other content players, we’ve had to look at ways of getting closer and closer to capacity limits.”

Early in 2019, Ciena was the first vendor to show off 800 gigabit per second transport networking with the launch of WaveLogic 5, the successor to its Wavelogic Ai programmable solution. It features innovations such as ML-driven predictive maintenance.

Patterns of demand may shift and commercial models might change, but such is our reliance on the Internet for our business and leisure needs that overall demand for cable capacity can only go up.

Reassuring then that key breakthroughs are still being made and new horizons reached.

New lease of life – some major cable launches planned for the next two years This year has seen a flurry of private cable announcements from Google.

First was Curie, which has just been completed and offers a new link between Chile and the US. It is the first US to Latam cable wholly owned by a non-telecom company.

When Google’s Dunant cable comes online in 2020 with its 12 fibre pairs, it will provide co-backer Orange with performance of more than 30 terabits per second per fibre pair and will represent the first new subsea cable between the US and France in 15 years.

Google’s Equiano cable, the third of its big ticket plans announced in the last 12 months, also boasting 12 fibre pairs, will start in Portugal and run along the West Coast of Africa as far as South Africa.

Planned for launch in 2021, it promises

around 20 times the capacity of the last cable built on this route, claims Google.

Equiano will be the first subsea cable to incorporate optical switching at the level of the fibre pair level, making it easier to add and reallocate capacity.

The Jupiter Cable System is due to launch in early 2020, linking Japan with Los Angeles and the Philippines. The consortium backing it includes Amazon, Facebook, NTT Communications, PCCW Global, PLDT and SoftBank.

Less certain is the future of the Pacific Light Cable Network, one of a large number of new trans-Pacific builds currently awaiting completion.

Controversy around Huawei and a trade and tariff war between the US and China, as well as unrest in Hong Kong, mean that the US government approval that PLCN needs is far from assured.

The 8,000 mile-long system, backed by Google, Facebook and Chinese telco Dr. Peng Telecom & Media Group Co, is supposed to connect Hong Kong and Los Angeles.

The Bay to Bay Express Cable System (BtoBE), backed by Facebook, Amazon and China Mobile International, will connect Singapore and Hong Kong with the United States when it comes on line, probably in 2021. The Japan-GuamAustralia South Cable System and Southern Cross Next will between them enhance connectivity between Australasia and the US. In the Atlantic, EllaLink is a planned submarine cable linking Brazil and Portugal with en route landings at Cape Verde, the Canary Islands and Madeira.

december/january 2020

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48 |

NJFX: The Marseille of the US NJFX has truly established itself as a leading subsea player on the world’s stage, but where did it all start? Capacity’s Jason McGee-Abe caught up with Gil Santaliz, CEO of Capacity NJFX, to find out more about the company’s meteoric journey

A

s I make my way up to interview Santaliz, I think about how far New Jersey Fiber Exchange (NJFX) has come in becoming a household name in such a short space of time.

Before walking into the NJFX meeting room at Capacity Europe I immediately notice the adjacent room. It’s hosting Interxion and two things spring to my mind. Firstly, about the news that broke the night before that Digital Realty was acquiring Interxion for $8.4 billion, the biggest data centre deal in history (read more on pages 28-29), and the interesting conversations that must be happening inside. Secondly, the influence that the Interxion business model that originated in Marseille has had on NJFX’s evolution.

Where did it all begin?

The concept saw a joint venture formed and launched in 2015 with a group of investors, which included Tata Communications.

“Originally, we were going to be a sidekick to Tata in that we were building a Tier III

data centre next to their cable landing station (CLS),” says Santaliz. “We put the capital up for the land, construction, and then interconnected the facility with the cable landing station (CLS).” NJFX built a 1.4-acre plot next door to the Tata Communications subsea CLS, where it built a meet-me room (MMR). After a short while there were some management changes at Tata Communications and the relationship changed somewhat. “They are still a shareholder today but not to the same extent,” he adds. “ Prior to founding NJFX, the telecommunications executive sold metro dark fibre provider 4Connections to Optimum Lightpath, a subsidiary of New York cable operator Cablevision (now Altice USA), in 2008 for an undisclosed amount.

In September 2015, NJFX announced it would construct a 64,000 sq ft Tier III data centre facility adjacent to Tata’s CLS, providing direct access to its European and South American subsea cables: TGN Atlantic and Seabras-1. Exactly one year later, NJFX launched the carrier-neutral colocation facility. “It had compute,

carrier-neutrality and business from metro players,” explains the CEO. NJFX offered terrestrial connections to such operators as Altice, Crown Castle Fiber, Epsilon, Windstream, Zayo and ZenFi.

Interxion influence “We had developed our relationship with Interxion at Capacity events and watched what they were doing in Marseille,” he explains. “I met with Dave Ruberg [CEO of Interxion] and even went to the WWII submarine repair facility in Marseille where he said that he was going to turn it into a big international CLS.” Santaliz admits that he thought Ruberg was out of his mind at the statement but has been amazed watching it all become a reality. Interxion has certainly helped to boost the city of Marseille, which now plays host to 14 subsea cables. This visionary idea struck Santaliz and, with the support of his partners, NJFX purchased another 48 acres next door back in Wall, New Jersey. “We got the right to put another data centre in, which was a 150,000 sq ft 15MW facility with a separate CLS.” “Subsea players approached us as a result december/january 2020

the big interview: gil santaliz | 49

2001

CEO & Founder, 4Connections

2008

EVP, business development, Cablevision

2009-2015

Angel Investor, Private Equity; Interim CEO, 24 7; Consultant, Spire Capital

2015

CEO, NJFX

power. We’re hosting subsea cables in a building in the US and there’s no other place in the US that does what we do.”

NJFX’s CLS campus offers access to four subsea cable systems to Europe and South America and seven independent US fibre-based backhaul providers. Customers can access points of presence (PoP) in 15 countries across Central and South America, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Dual CLS partnership News circulated around the industry in October that NJFX now marks the spot of the first-ever dual CLS to terrestrial interconnection after partnering with Telxius and Windstream Wholesale.

The NJFX CLS in Wall, NJ, is now connected to Telxius facilities at the CLS in Virginia Beach, VA, which is connected to the MAREA and BRUSA subsea cables.

Windstream supports the connection with over 500Tbps of transmission capacity, boosting global connectivity options.

“We are proud to be the catalyst of the first-ever CLS to CLS terrestrial route. This is an integral part of the shift the industry is

We are proud to Capacity be the catalyst of the first-ever CLS to CLS terrestrial route”

Gil Santaliz, CEO of NJFX

of our independence and carrier-neutral approach, saying that they would bring cables straight into our building,” the CEO adds. After the first cable was confirmed for the CLS, NJFX approached SubCom and a blossoming partnership is still ongoing.

From that moment, NJFX went from being the sidekick of a joint venture building a Tier III data centre to support Tata Communications to becoming the host of its own subsea CLS and carrier-neutral site.

Today, NJFX owns and operates a 58-acre campus. It has the ability to interconnect to multiple subsea and terrestrial cables from one place. Following Ruberg’s vision, Santaliz and his partners have created the Marseille of the US. “We have two 2 MMRs that are interconnected to each other, so we don’t discriminate,” Santaliz says. The carrierneutral player’s philosophy is to help carriers grow their business and not get in the way it even commits to not even selling internet to its customers. “So we’ve created a truly carrier-neutral product that the market wanted and really needed,” he adds. “We don’t sell anything other than space and capacitymedia.com

seeing in new infrastructure being deployed to replace the old networking models,” proclaims Santaliz. No one ever really thought of using the coast of the United States to get traffic up and down before but NJFX is helping this become a reality, he adds. Another system linked to this is Crosslake Fibre’s 95km unrepeaterered subsea fibre-optic cable to Long Island.

“The total capacity of the subsea cables coming out of these two cable landing stations is greater than all of the capacity of the previously placed North American subsea cables stretching across the Atlantic combined. Windstream and Telxius are bilaterally leveraging each company’s routes to address customer network diversity requirements and capacity needs. The potential for clients is endless.”

NJFX has sealed a number of partnerships over the past year, which has included the European-based carrier class Ethernet exchange NetIX, which connects over 20 IXPs that serve more than 100 members, enter the US market for the first time by launching a new PoP at the NJFX colocation campus. The PoP at NJFX also

provides opportunities for American peers to exchange traffic directly with other peers around the world. NetIX declared that it picked NJFX because of the array of subsea cable systems it has landing at its cable landing station.

Other partnerships formed include Epsilon connecting its SDN backbone to NJFX’s CLS colocation facility, allowing customers to bypass New York entirely and gives users access to on-demand local, regional and global connectivity. Telia Carrier deployed a network PoP, delivering multi-terabit capacity at the NJFX CLS colocation campus. The new network infrastructure provides resilient network options for customers wanting diverse connectivity throughout North America. By leveraging the Havfrue/AEC2 subsea cable system located at NJFX, Telia Carrier customers can reach Denmark directly and transit the Nordis, Baltics, and can access four unique fibre routes going into Russia.

New intercontinental capabilities Another level of NJFX’s evolution involves the establishment of new intercontinental wide area network (WAN) capabilities between North America, South America and Europe, which have been developed in partnership with Bulk Infrastructure and Neutrona Networks.

The highly-anticipated Havfrue transatlantic subsea cable network lands into NJFX’s CLS campus. It runs between New Jersey and Denmark, with branches to Ireland and Norway. The consortium backing the new transatlantic cable includes Aqua Comms, Bulk Infrastructure, Facebook and Google. The system is expected to be ready for service in Q4 2019.

The next wave of technological advancement will be just as compelling with the onset of the enterprise revolution, which takes the WAN model and extends it into other continents through NJFX’s unique CLS campus. Santaliz discloses that NJFX is now open to bespoke facilities on its campus.

“We’re building out the campus and we’re going to announce that we’ll have a new cable station building available that someone can have for their own use,” Santaliz tells me. “If someone wants their own four walls, here’s a building that we can create, which is a 15MW data centre and you can do your own thing.”

With the industry constantly growing, we’re all trying to keep up with the explosion of data usage. NJFX has firmly established itself as an innovative on/off ramp to global networks and is in a unique position as one of the most critical meet-me points for access to international connectivity. It has started a revolution in the subsea industry with its carrier-neutral Tier 3 by the subsea model and bespoke agile approach. It’s clear to see why business is booming in New Jersey.

50 | SPONSORED STATEMENT

CREATING A GLOBAL HUB OMANTEL HAS GROWN FROM A REGIONAL WHOLESALE PROVIDER TO A GLOBAL PLAYER subsea cable system between Oman, Somalia and Ethiopia.

G2A provides direct access to east Africa and supports the development of the digital economies of these fast-growing economies. This has come after our investments in the Asia Africa Europe (AAE-1) cable system that spans the globe.

AAE-1 uniquely connects Asia, Africa and Europe via Oman and offers new and diverse terrestrial networks that avoid some common bottlenecks. It covers countries that comprise almost 50% of the world’s population, spanning approximately 25,000 km with a design capacity of up to 40Tbps built on the latest 100Gbps technology. AAE-1 provides point-to-point connectivity between customer endpoints and serves high capacity requirements in response to customers’ growing data, internet, cloud and video traffic demands.

Omantel is the only provider on the AAE-1 cable system to have two landings, one in Oman and the other in France. To further serve the needs of our customers, we launched Omantel France and offer a Europe-wide network footprint. This made Omantel the first and only GCC telecom operator to have a Capacity subsea cable landing in Europe.

Cloud, content and real-time communications are driving the need for telecom hubs that can support global transformation while connecting and optimising applications and services with optimised latency networking, says Sohail Qadir, vice president of wholesale at Omantel.

Oman is located at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, at the nexus between Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. It has been a centre for international trade for centuries, and recently it has emerged as a leading global hub for telecom.

Omantel has capitalised on Oman’s unique geographic location, enabling Omantel to offer an optimised network latency between Frankfurt and Singapore, as well as many key destinations across the globe. This is a competitive advantage that benefits our customers but it is not the only reason Omantel has been positioned as a leading global telecom enterprise.

While planning and implementing our award-winning Global Wholesale Integration Project, we have taken the geographic advantage of Oman and combined it with strategic investments to offer customers a comprehensive set of solutions that support digital transformation. It is not just about our location. We have taken deliberate steps to develop infrastructure, solutions and processes that benefit local businesses and customers in Oman and around the world.

Going Global What is a global hub? For us, it is simply a place that combines diverse connectivity options to multiple destinations with data centre infrastructure and a safe, open and friendly business environment that encourages and facilitates growth.

Omantel has been investing in subsea cable infrastructure for more than two decades. Today, we have investments in more than 20 subsea cable systems globally and direct connectivity to more than 50 countries and 120 cities.

Our projects included launching the Gulf to Africa (G2A)

Optimising Performance In Oman, we have partnered with Equinix to develop a worldclass data centre infrastructure in Muscat and provide a secure and reliable place to host applications and service providers. The Equinix Muscat 1 data centre offers customers a carrier-neutral facility with direct access to subsea cable infrastructure, which is a unique concept in the region.

The final piece of the jigsaw is ensuring that we can offer optimised performance across our global footprint. To do this, we developed an International Network Operations Centre (INOC).

INOC was developed in response to customer demand and has been specifically tailored to the needs of the cloud and contentcentric market. It monitors our international services via either terrestrial or subsea cable systems to ensure smooth network operations.

It has been purpose-built to resolve all network-related issues rapidly and in compliance with stipulated policies, procedures, and quality standards. INOC aims to ensure up to 100% uptime of the network, and delivers operational service excellence ensuring high levels of customer experience.

Reach Further When delivered as a seamless solution that combines all of these elements, transformation can be accelerated and growth can be achieved in new markets. Our wholesale clients can connect and optimise their applications and services in a trusted hub that offers them direct access to high-growth markets. This enables them to deliver consistent end-user experiences that meet and even exceed the expectations of their customers.

Utilizing Omantel as their global hub, our wholesale clients can serve millions of potential users and capture more opportunities with increased agility.

Our customers have a need for global access and performance.

We are not just connecting our customers. We are enabling them to reach further. december/january 2020

Capacity

52 |

Celtic Norse: The gateway to Norway’s connectivity hub CEO of Celtic Norse, Erling Aronsveen speaks to Natalie Bannerman about the soon to be built 2,000km subsea cable andCapacity why it’s set to be a real game-changer for the region

W

ith all eyes on the Nordics it’s no wonder that new infrastructure projects are cropping up at a rate faster than ever before.

In September, DigiPlex broke ground on the construction of two new data centres near Oslo, Norway. Bulk Infrastructure AS launched its Nordic Gateway, an on-ramp solution into the Havfrue Cable System.

Cinia green-lit its €700 million Arctic Connect cable in collaboration with MegaFon and in 2018, Google announced plans to open a new €600 million green data centre in Fredericia, Denmark, the first for the company in the country.

One of the more hotly anticipated projects is the construction of Celtic Norse, a 2,000km cable linking the city of Øysanden, in Norway, just south of the city of Trondheim and Killala Bay, County Mayo in the Republic of Ireland.

How did the project come about? Well it all goes back to 2015, up in the Norwegian mountains with three representatives from

one of the major over the tops (OTTs) looking at the Akrestømmen site as a potential location for a hosting campus.

“Through that process, which was a steep learning curve, it showed us that we were woefully inadequate and unprepared to answer questions about international connectivity,” explains Erling Aronsveen, CEO of Celtic Norse. “That whole experience of answering their demands for data centre space, got us into developing our own subsea cable.”

Firmly at the helm of this new system Aronsveen says the new cable will create much needed connectivity and lower latency for the region.

“The Celtic Norse sea cable will enable regional Norway to connect its attractive sites and vast renewable power resources to Europe and America with better response times to Eastern Seaboard US than anywhere else in the Nordic region.”

According to the executive, there is plenty of land and power to accommodate hyperscale data centres in Norway, but the international connectivity is not yet optimal enough.

“At present, all fibre in central Norway is routed through Oslo, but that won’t do for data centres,” he explains. “What we’re proposing to our owners and other utility companies in this part of Norway is to build our own cable. In doing so we are making Trondheim a landing point for international connectivity with almost direct connectivity to the US. Plus, with the landing in Ireland we will also reach those data centre markets.”

Additionally, from a backhaul perspective, as a member of the EasyFibre consortium, Celtic Norse is well placed to offer unique benefits to its customers.

“We are part of a terrestrial fibre consortium in the Nordics called EasyFibre.

It is made up of roughly 12 different fibre owners that have pooled all their fibre together into a dark fibre value proposition,” he says. “For the OTTs or anyone who wants to do anything in this region, you don’t have to wade through all the different companies who have fibre. It’s a one-stop shop. As for the Celtic Norse cable we can just draw on our partners and do great stuff for this cable on the terrestrial december/january 2020

the big interview: erling aronsveen | 53

1996 - 2001

Senior Business Project Manager, Atea ASA

2002 - 2005

Senior Project Development Manager, Oppland Provincial Authority

2012 - 2014

Technical Liaison Officer, NATO

2005 - 2018

Senior Telecommunications Advisor, Eidsiva Bredbånd

2018 - present

CEO, Celtic Norse

fibre and providing hydroelectric and wind power to facilities in their producing region. This is why they have ventured into Celtic Norse. They all have long-haul fibre networks at the proposed landing stations and this new system will add to their offerings,” explains Aronsveen.

All three shareholders will fund Celtic Norse AS up until funding is secured and the project is completed, which is due to take place by the end of 2021.

The most recent development in the project came during Capacity Europe this past October. Celtic Norse announced that it is working with Vodafone Iceland and Scotland’s infrastructure body, the Scottish Futures Trust and Host in Scotland, the data centre body that it sponsors, on two branch cables landing in both countries.

The first in Irvine, in the town on the West coast of Scotland, and the second in Grindavík, a fishing town on the Southern Peninsula of Iceland.

This will move Norway, Scotland and Iceland a Capacity thousand kilometres closer to New York than they are now”

Erling Aronsveen, CEO, Celtic Norse

fibre side of things.”

Unlike traditional cables built with anchor tenants, Celtic Norse will leverage “the organisations, the municipalities and those that stand to benefit from this, to invest in this system,” says Aronsveen.

Though no official figures have been given, Aronsveen estimates the total cost for the development of the system to be just below 500 million NOK (approximately $57 million). But the development of the project took a big turn in July 2019, when the company announced that it had been partly acquired by three energy suppliers.

NTE, TrønderEnergi and Nordavind DC Sites AS each acquired a 1/3 of Celtic Norse with each new owner all holding regional grid operations, hydroelectric and wind power production, as well as fibre-optic operations in the region.

Together, they have combined company revenues of close to €400 million per year.

“Celtic Norse is currently owned by three utility, energy producers in Norway. They do not have any special interest in subsea cables or international connectivity. What they do have is an interest in providing capacitymedia.com

“Having branch partners in the geographical regions, adds both credibility to the project in terms of getting financing together and it also adds value to the system once its built,” Aronseen says. “It means you can branch capacity into different places. For example, the capacity sales between Iceland and Norway, though it’s not something we’re into yet, it’s definitely something worth considering.”

Celtic Norse will enter into a joint build agreement with the branching partners and have everything built at the same time as it “generally costs you more when you do it afterwards”, Aronsveen explains.

The news also means that Celtic Norse will be working with Aqua Comms as its operations partner for the venture, leveraging much of the company’s existing assets and capabilities.

“We’ve got a NOC, we’ve got engineers, we’ve got capabilities, we’ve got insurances and, a whole range of things,” said Nigel Bayliff, CEO, Aqua Comms.

Aronsveen adds: “Celtic Norse will not try to build an operation like Aqua Comms, we’re not competing, which is

why we are working with them.”

Interestingly, Bayliff says that in effect Celtic Norse is adding to Aqua Comms’ North Atlantic Loop in the region.

“If you look at the North Atlantic Loop, this adds Norway to the loop. It looks like a cable between two points but in reality, it’s a segment of a whole loop-based architecture,” he says.

“That resilience is even more important once those older systems across the Atlantic start to shut down because the number of options along this route will decrease over the next few years,” continues Aronsveen.

The final details on the specifications of the system have yet to be given although Aronsveen confirms, “We are looking into eight pair systems, notionally 20Tbps per pair. It will serve Norway’s data centre needs of the Norway, together with the new branches for next couple of decades.”

Though route diversity in the fight against aging systems is a key driver for Celtic Norse, the other is latency, saving its customers up to 30% in comparison to existing systems.

“One of the main reasons we decided to go into this venture in the first place was to eliminate the disadvantages,” Aronsveen says. “If you want to go from the middle of Norway to New York today, you will have to get down to the continent and then down to London and then across the Atlantic and that’s more expensive. This will move Norway, Scotland and Iceland a thousand kilometres closer to New York than they are now.”

As far as the progress of the project goes, the company completed a request for information in June 2019 and into a request for price (RFP) on 30 September.

The desktop study (DTS) was completed in October last year (2018). December/ January 2020 is the date set for the decision point investment, design and manufacturing, with installation and ready for service (RFS) by winter 2021.

“Celtic Norse heads into the RFP with the confidence that a vendor will be selected to build the system by the end of December 2019 and the final stages of financing will be complete with the significant advantage of having a contract signed for a turn-key build,” he says.

Unlike most of his peers, Aronsveen seems less concerned about the participation or opinion of the OTTs in the new system. Instead, its all about putting Norway and its forward landing points firmly on the map and at the centre of international connectivity.

“Our goal is not to just chase the OTTs, There’s a broader history to be written about taking a part of a country that is connected to the internet but not an international hub and trying to make it into one.”

54 | SPONSORED STATEMENT

AQUA COMMS: THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SPECIALISTS FOCUS: FIBRE OPTIC CABLES UNDER THE SEA As we enter a new decade, it’s fair to say that the world of telecoms continues to change at a rapid pace. With that change comes the need for new business models that are agile, flexible and resilient. Nowhere more so is this critical than in the TransAtlantic market –

The Busiest Oceanic Data Route in the World.

CeltixConnect-1 (CC-1) a high fibre-count cable across the Irish Sea, interconnecting the core hubs of

New York, Dublin & London.

Capacity Building on its vision of efficient submarine infrastructure

Aqua Comms is structured accordingly not only in its organisational structure but in its FOCUS on what it does – and very specifically what it doesn’t do.

Aqua Comms is the owner and operator of America Europe Connect-1 (AEC-1), its first Trans-Atlantic cable, as well as

In light of the evolution of this part of the market, and in recognition of the critical nature of telecoms infrastructure, Aqua Comms operates as a carriers’ carrier and only that.

Its FOCUS therefore is on providing high-bandwidth, transport-layer subsea services, and only in the Wholesale market – where its goal is to deliver this quickly and manage it efficiently to those that integrate these services into their network platforms.

ownership, Aqua Comms is currently building 3 new cables including America Europe Connect-2 (AEC-2) , its share of the Havfrue cable.

This adds a second and completely diverse Trans-Atlantic cable, running from New Jersey to both Ireland and Denmark/the Nordics – two high-growth datacentre markets:

Organisationally, it is managed and directed by a very experienced management team that sits on top of its organisational pyramid structure, covering the core functions of Sales and Marketing, Engineering and Operations, and Corporate Services – but then outsources the majority of the workforce that sits under these management teams.

This outsourced approach ensures that there is scalability and efficiency of resource whilst retaining full directional control of those resources.

december/january 2020

| 55

This FOCUS makes us unique in the market, which combined with the latest technology in submarine cable design and capabilities gives 3 critical reasons to partner with us:

Future-proof your network Aqua Comms’ existing and new cables are built to use the latest transmission technology today and the planned transmission technology of tomorrow.

Work with us as your network grows from 10G to 100G to 400G and beyond.

Out with the Old, In with the New With new cables comes long life.

Plan your network needs today with Aqua Comms who offer 1 year leases through to 20 year IRUs on 2 new diverse routes. Partner with us for today and for tomorrow.

Services delivered in under a week Aqua Comms operates cables it built that allows us to deliver services typically in under a week.

Take away the worry of service delivery with Aqua Comms.

Capacity

Along with its Trans-Atlantic footprint, Aqua Comms is building 2 other new subsea cables: CeltixConnect-2 (CC2), a second Irish Sea cable, fully diverse from CC-1, and North Sea Connect (NSC), a new route connecting the UK to Denmark and the Nordics.

Combined with the other Aqua Comms’ cables, this will deliver a resilient dual-path network across the Atlantic between North America and Europe, creating the North Atlantic Loop.

Independent Infrastructure Partner In the ever-growing and rapidly evolving digital age, Telecoms infrastructure is more business-critical than ever, and Aqua Comms is set up to deliver on its part as an independent infrastructure partner and as the TransAtlantic Specialists.

For more information visit www.aquacomms.com

capacitymedia.com

Capacity

Capacity

Capacity

opinion: geoff bennett | 59

WHAT WILL NEXT-GEN SUBMARINE CABLE ARCHITECTURE LOOK LIKE IN 2020?

THE DEMAND FOR SUBMARINE CABLE CAPACITY IS SOARING.

ǥ ͎͏ͭ͹ǧ͎͏ͭ;ǥ SUBMARINE FIBRE DESIGN CAPACITY ON MAJOR ROUTES HAS

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hose are serious questions, but let’s start with a transatlantic cable that most people agree represents the state of the art today – the MAREA cable, which is owned jointly by Telxius, Facebook and Microsoft.

MAREA is so highly regarded because it consists of an optical fibre highly optimised for coherent transmission at high modulation order.

16QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) is used on at least one of its fibre pairs – a first for production grade transatlantic transmission. In addition, MAREA’s optical amplifiers operate at very high-power levels and are more closely spaced than normal at around 55km.

By using extremely high performance transponders, such as Infinera’s ICE4, the commercial capacity on a single fibre pair on MAREA is at least 24Tbps. Note that up to 26.2Tbps of capacity was achieved in trials of ICE4, but operators will decide the optical budget safety margin required.

MAREA was deployed with eight fibre pairs and it’s interesting to note that each one of these pairs delivers as much capacity as all the operational transatlantic cables in service at the time. Even so, the demand for subsea capacity is so great that we must plan now to meet the needs of the near future.

that the amps are so closely spaced, there simply isn’t a way to get enough power into the cable to supply more fibre pairs.

When MAREA was designed, the goal was to maximise the capacity per fibre pair – and this was a great success. But for Capacity the next generation of transoceanic cables the focus is shifting to maximise the total cable capacity, not necessarily the capacity per fibre pair. So how do we do this?

The limiting factor is total electrical power. One step would be to lower the power level of the amplifiers and increase the spacing. This would mean that conventional modulations like 16QAM would not be able to close the link.

In the past we would need to dial down the modulation to 8QAM or QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying), but modern coherent technology introduces a capability called probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) that can smoothly optimise the modulation efficiency to the optical budget of the link.

By operating in a lower power regime, a new cable architecture emerges, known as Space Division Multiplexing (SDM). The rationale is that, while there is a small reduction in the capacity per fibre pair with SDM, it’s possible to increase the number of pairs by 50-100 percent and achieve a much higher total cable capacity in future submarine deployments.

Why not simply deploy more fibre pairs in such a cable?

Google’s Dunant cable

The answer is that the amplifier chains on submarine cables must be powered by setting up huge voltages at each end of the cable – positive at one end and negative at the other. Based on the power level used in MAREA’s amps, and the fact

Google recently announced plans to bring the first such cable into service next year – the Dunant cable between the East coast of the USA and a landing point in Western France. The total capacity for Dunant is forecast to be 250Tbps over 12

capacitymedia.com

fibre pairs, compared to a potential 192Tbps for MAREA’s eight fibre pairs.

Steve Grubb, global optical architect for Facebook, has recently described some of the advances needed to achieve a transatlantic cable capacity of 1Pbps using SDM techniques. So, it does appear that the next wave of subsea cables will operate with an SDM architecture. But what about current generations of subsea cables?

For systems like MAREA, with large area, positive dispersion fibres, there may still be some room to increase capacity – perhaps by 25% to 50% with Infinera’s next generation of optical engines.

Before cables like MAREA were deployed there were tens of “dispersion managed� submarine cables in operation – including a very early transatlantic cable that first went into service in 2003.

Recently Infinera’s ICE4 technology was used to double the existing capacity on that cable with the result that the commercial life will be extended yet again.

Similarly, there are hundreds of small cables that are laid without amplifiers to cover short underwater distances across straits, between islands, or laid in festoon routes along coastlines between cities.

The capacity of one such cable, operated by OTEGLOBE, was also doubled recently using ICE4 technology.

The demand for subsea capacity continues to soar, and we must meet that demand. In the longer term, SDM promises a great way to increase cable capacity for future long-distance installations. Meanwhile, advances in high-performance submarine transponder technology continue to boost the capacity of all types of existing cable.

Capacity

special report

SECURITY December/January 2020

CONTENTS 63 The GLF CBN: Where automation meets settlement Capacity examines the work being done by the GLF in its Communications Blockchain Network

Capacity

64 Battling fraud into the future Capacity explores how carriers can can manage fraud in a constantly shifting landscape

69 20 security and antifraud solutions Capacity rounds up 20 of the top solutions in security and anti-fraud

Sponsored by

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DEUTSCHE TELEKOM GLOBAL CARRIER PROTECT YOUR DATA TRAFFIC :,7+â(1&5<37(' /$0%'$ Capacity

You take steps to ensure your data is protected on-site, in the cloud or on remote servers. So why allow data to travel unprotected across networks? Yet that’s just what many businesses do, and why data thieves love intercepting data while it’s in transit.

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Battling fraud into the future

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FRAUD IS GROWING AS A CONCERN THROUGHOUT THE BUSINESSES OF WHOLESALE CARRIERS, BUT THEY NEED TO STAY AWARE TO DEAL WITH A CONSTANTLY SHIFTING LANDSCAPE

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elecoms carriers are increasingly viewing fraud as a company-wide issue, as efforts involving big data and innovative technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and blockchain are examined and ramped up to combat attacks.

This is among the findings in the recently released Fraud Report 2019 by industry body the Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF), its second annual report on international wholesale fraud. Some 80 per cent of carriers consider management of fraudulent traffic as a key strategic priority and over half as an increased concern over the past year, according to its survey of more than 30 international carriers, plus technology providers.

A more proactive, coordinated approach is being seen by many as key to combatting these issues, given developments like the massive-scale threats the world has seen in the past few years from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks as the number of connected devices surges. Ericsson predicts, for example, that cellular internet-of-things (IoT) connections will quadruple from 1 billion last year to 4.1 billion in 2024.

IoT and other new technologies, such as 5G and edge computing, have the potential to significantly widen the number of access points for attacks and lead to the emergence of fresh threats like those based on bots, virtual machines and

distributed device hacks.

But as well as readying networks for future battles, there’s a need to keep an eye on the ebb and flow of other existing threats. International revenue share fraud (IRSF) is cited by carriers as the chief growth area for threat activity – with more than three-quarters of respondents in the GLF’s survey reporting high or very high volumes of such activity – and practices such as robocalling are rising in prevalence.

Gaining awareness Though plenty more can still be done and carriers will continue to face threats amid a constantly changing environment, industry players see it as encouraging that awareness about fraudulent activities has grown outside carriers’ specific fraud teams, and is no longer seen as merely a cost of doing business. This is key, given that society in general has become more knowledgeable and demanding about protection.

Katia Gonzalez, head of fraud prevention at BICS, a GLF member, and chair of the fraud working group at industry body the i3forum, speaks of the change she has seen in the past couple of years, with a greater number of platforms and products being brought out to deal with such activities. “Discussing fraud now in any meeting with a customer or peer is normal,” she adds. “It’s just part of

the agenda.”

Fraud is also increasingly being considered as a matter of course in many more parts of telecoms businesses all the way up to top management level, with some 58 per cent of respondents to the GLF’s survey reporting that fraud management has risen in importance at their organisation over the last 12 months.

“When you have CEOs, CFOs and CTOs involved in talking about how to fight fraud, it makes much more impact and tends to drive the industry more, like is happening now,” says Gonzalez, adding that this also improves synergies between teams.

She believes it is not sustainable to avoid facing up to fraud for the long-term future because it will eventually impact on business relations with customers, which increasingly link fraud prevention to quality. “Dealing with fraud is not an option any more, but a must,” she says.

Gonzalez adds that BICS and other i3forum members are now more careful in choosing business partners, and when telecoms fraud becomes a problem, these relations are discontinued.

Evidence is that the industry is getting faster and more effective at blocking fraud, she says, with carriers such as BICS able to help through its learnings from the huge amount of data that flows over its network. According to the company, its FraudGuard platform enabled operators to december/january 2020

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save more than $320 million in 2018, identifying and proactively blocking more than 170 million fraudulent call attempts.

Gonzalez believes that machine learning combined with big data will grow over time to be a significant help in stamping out fraud in the future, pointing out that it will also be necessary to do this because fraudsters themselves will arm themselves with such tools.

But she emphasises that there will always be a need for a strong team behind this too, for analysing traffic and providing support to customers around the clock if anything should go wrong. “I don’t believe in purely automated platforms,” says Gonzalez. “We have a lot of data to crunch, and we still need people at some point to decide what is and isn’t fraud.”

Cross-industry collaboration Others also reflect on how organisational and cross-industry measures are helping to quash threats. “The wholesale market is now setting up departments and processes to address this issue,” says Jason Lane-Sellers, president of the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA) and director of fraud and identity at LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

“Yes, more needs to be done and greater collaboration across the industry will help, but progress is under way.”

Lane-Sellers explains that one of the key reasons for this is that fraud scenarios frequently involve different parts of the industry, such as the enterprise, consumer and wholesale segments. “As such, the greater the collaboration we can encourage and the more members that join the group, the better fraud knowledge, detection and prevention there will be across the industry,” he says.

He adds that the wholesale providers benefit from their “unique” position in being able to identify fraud attacks in the early stages because of their global view of traffic, but effective anti-fraud approaches need to be harnessed by the whole marketplace and can be facilitated by cross-organisational collaboration via associations such as the CFCA and GLF. One industry-wide move that has helped establish more of a framework for jointly battling fraud in the wholesale market is the code of conduct launched last year by the GLF in partnership with the i3forum. Signatories to this have now grown to more than 30 carriers, with the recent addition of MTN GlobalConnect, OTEGLOBE and Rostelecom.

Establishing this code has been a significant positive step, says Robert Teichmueller, head of fraud management at Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, but he believes there is room for building on these recommendations with firmer and capacitymedia.com

more standardised commitments in future.

He thinks collaborations like that recently announced between GLF members to work together via a Communications Blockchain Network also aid this ability to cooperate across the industry. “I’m positive about the conversations and cooperations we’re having,” he says.

Higher level of security Teichmueller says that at DT Global Carrier, there is a commitment to providing security to all customers without them having to sign up to a paid product – with use of big data and automation helping to monitor and reduce damage, and increasingly fit the needs of individual customers. “We have also built a fully automated blocking system that blocks at a granular level,” he adds.

As a result of this, he says, the company has seen a decline in the biggest-scale attacks and although the volume of attacks is growing, they are at a smaller scale and therefore less damaging.

At NTT, Michael Wheeler, executive vice president of the Global IP Network, talks of the need to remain vigilant amid Capacity the continuous “ebb and flow” of the threat landscape as tools are found to block attackers and attackers discover new fraud methods. “There’s some of that cat-and-mouse game that occurs between attackers and defenders,” he says.

Yet even if it’s not possible to predict

find anomalies within user device and phone number behaviour, as well as build partnerships globally to mitigate international fraud, create anti-fraud communities and work closely with cybersecurity and fraud analysis experts,” says the spokesperson .

Elsa Uguet, anti-fraud and security marketing director at Orange International Carriers, points out that fraud management systems have become increasingly commonplace among wholesale players in a way that was not seen a few years ago. “Protecting the value of the business has become a key objective and having a strategy to fight against fraud is now a must-have,” she says.

One key product that the International Carriers division has focused on for customers is its Hubbing Platinum service, which includes anti-fraud capabilities that have helped reduce the impact of rising IRSF activity by detecting and blocking such traffic.

Given the Orange Group’s global operations on the retail side, says Uguet, “we know exactly the game and the pain when it comes to retail traffic impacted by fraud. At the end of the day, it is the end users that suffer and the retail operators that take the blame.”

In the industry as a whole, she notes that efforts such as blockchain and collective work on “STIR/SHAKEN” standards in the US to help halt the rise of

Discussing fraud now in any meeting with a customer or peer is normal. It’s just part of the agenda” everything that might unfold, the fact that NTT has been tracking these events for a couple of decades and has a group of experienced experts working on this means the company has extensive knowledge of what types of tactics it might employ in certain scenarios, says Wheeler.

A spokesperson at Kaspersky, which offers tools to wholesale providers such as a service that can notify users of the reputation of incoming numbers, says that “data analysis and research are key” in stamping out threats. “This can be used to

Katia Gonzalez, head of fraud prevention, BICS

robocalling look promising, while initiatives such as the GLF and i3forum are key too. But she agrees that everyone needs to come on board when it comes to collaboration to fight effectively against fraud in the future.

“We have to stay focused and be ready for everything,” says Uguet. “For us, the message is clear: do not stop the fight.”

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A 2020 VISION FOR SECURITY

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Ǥ Yet like larger threats, these different types of attack are also being enabled by the proliferation of IoT devices. â&#x20AC;&#x153;There are a lot of devices and a lot of ways in which much smaller-scale attackers can use infrastructure on DDoS-for-hire-type websites,â&#x20AC;? explains Wheeler.

While he says the limited size of this smaller-scale activity means much of it does not have a significant impact on NTTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s global IP backbone right now, he emphasises that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s crucial to keep an eye on how it develops over time because continued growth in such attacks may have the potential to eventually cause significant damage if itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not monitored and held in check.

Another issue is that if even random gamers are able to generate these threats, it may open up networks to the possibility of much Capacity larger attacks by individuals in future. â&#x20AC;&#x153;If a gamer finds a simple way to marshal a billion devices and generate attack traffic, that may cause problems on a larger scale,â&#x20AC;? says Wheeler.

As the end of the decade nears, security remains a key concern for carriers. The second half of the 2010s has been characterised by concerns about the rise of large-scale distributed denial-ofservice (DDoS) attacks amid the proliferation of IoT-connected devices.

But while these larger-scale attacks have continued to happen, Michael Wheeler, executive vice president of the Global IP Network at NTT, says a key change in the network security ecosystem in the last 12 to 18 months has been an acceleration in smaller-scale attacks. Some of this activity has been unexpected, he says, reflecting how carriers need to be vigilant in recognising that the threat environment is constantly changing. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We certainly still see some very large attacks as far as volumes are concerned,â&#x20AC;? says Wheeler. â&#x20AC;&#x153;No oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shocked that volumes are getting bigger; thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just the nature of the internet at this point.

The thing we and others in the industry have seen thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a bit less predictable is the higher frequency of very small or shorterduration attacks.â&#x20AC;?

Such attacks come from various sources, including online gamers, and can last as little as five to 10 minutes. Players can pay for someone to make these attacks via methods such as a credit card or bitcoin, with the aim of simply knocking opponents offline â&#x20AC;&#x201C; thus differing from the traditional financial or sociopolitical motivations of DDoS attacks. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a very individual-driven approach with a more personal motivation,â&#x20AC;? says Wheeler.

Dealing with the â&#x20AC;&#x153;ebb and flowâ&#x20AC;?

One challenge in planning ahead to ensure security, he says, is that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s difficult to predict every new type of threat that may emerge â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as the rise in activity among gamers has illustrated â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and many types of attack tend to â&#x20AC;&#x153;ebb and flow.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a linear progression in perpetuity,â&#x20AC;? says Wheeler. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Some of this is driven around defences that get created and attacks becoming less effective because certain tools are now available that werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t before. So thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s some of that cat-andmouse game that occurs between the attackers and defenders.â&#x20AC;?

Nonetheless, the fact that NTT has been tracking these events for a couple of decades means the company now has extensive knowledge of what types of tactics it might employ in certain scenarios. Wheeler says the idea is that even if 100-per-centfoolproof predictions are impossible, the question can still be addressed: â&#x20AC;&#x153;What do we need to do in advance to put ourselves in the best position we can to address this problem?â&#x20AC;?

A fundamental pillar that props all this up is having the right security team in place, with good prior knowledge of the issues involved so theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not encountering a problem that is completely new to them. NTT again benefits here from its past tracking of events, with its staff having a good idea where to target any future investment in security to maximise the efficiency of attack detection and have a better understanding of threats that might emerge. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s critical to have a group of experts that know what theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re doing and have experience with this because in my opinion you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just grab a couple of really sharp people, put them into the security team and expect that theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re going to be familiar with how all these things work,â&#x20AC;? says Wheeler.

Over time, the team has continued to track a whole variety of data on threats to help it in future, including everything from attack type and duration to how long mitigation took and the december/january 2020

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size of attacks. Customers get round-the-clock access to highly trained engineers at the company’s Network Operations Center and detection is additionally aided by the wide span of NTT’s Global IP Network, which means staff gain a broad view of potential threats.

RIPE and the Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF), of which he is a member.

The GLF’s introduction last year of a platform for carriers to share security experiences is now really bearing fruit, he says, with players in the group also unveiling a blockchain initiative earlier this year that should help further improve security.

Auto-mitigation NTT and other global carriers also learn from situations Yet though human intervention is critical, NTT has also requiring interactions between operators as bad traffic passes developed automated tools in-house for proactive threat from one network to another, adds Wheeler. “Those realdetection and mitigation that provide robust protection on top. time interactions can also be very valuable with regard to Among NTT’s tools, it is now a year since the company understanding what’s going on and how best to counteract it,” he extended its line-up of DDoS Protection Services (DPS) with says. the addition of its DPS Max offering, providing an even higher And this need for keen-eyed vigilance is set to continue for the Capacity level of security than the existing DPS Control, Core and Detect foreseeable future. “With all the IoT-enabled devices out there, services (see box: NTT’s DDoS Protection Services). Wheeler the reality is that the potential for attacks gets bigger and bigger says this has already proved popular among customers, with every day, and that forces us to consider how we address these many newly buying it or migrating to the service from other issues and get better at it,” says Wheeler. products.

“We’re certainly a big proponent of collaborating within the While including the features of NTT’s DPS Core and Detect industry and trying to have our teams interact with other folks… services, DPS Max’s key additional proposition lies in these There’s a long journey ahead, and it’s better to be able to do that automatic mitigation capabilities, which are initiated upon the collaboratively versus independently in a vacuum.” detection of customer-defined attack thresholds. Customers to the service can also request or self-initiate mitigations using a DPS Portal available to them.

In addition, NTT offers “blackholing” services, which can be NTT’s DDoS Protection used to automatically discard all traffic to a certain network or drop traffic from certain geographical locations when a customer Services (DPS) is under a large-scale DDoS attack. Wheeler says that even NTT offers its Global IP Network customers four levels of though this blackholing, which is either full or selective, is a more defence under its DDoS Protection Services (DPS) portfolio, basic approach to mitigation, it allows the customer’s network to since adding its highest-level DPS Max service last year to “catch its breath” while a security team homes in for prevention its existing Control, Core and Detect offerings. on a broader level.

“I wouldn’t say it’s got harder to manage security issues, but it DPS Control offers an entry-level service for customers that do not require full mitigation assistance, with the ability for certainly hasn’t slowed down,” says Wheeler. He adds that threats clients to block a network from certain types of traffic that such as multi-vector and so called “carpet-bombing” attacks can they define. pose more complex problems through combining a variety of attack types or targets, but these haven’t necessarily seen a huge DPS Core is the first level of service for those that want full rise in volumes. support for DDoS mitigation and is supported by NTT’s From a customer perspective, as the complexity of attacks Network Security Team – the same team responsible for grows, he recommends that companies and organisations have a keeping the company’s Global IP Network safe. multi-strategy approach to mitigation – with a combination of DPS Detect adds services such as detection capabilities to selective blackholing, the use of filters to block some applications, help notify customers of potential attacks and clientand some third-party mitigation for more “intelligent” attacks initiated mitigation via the DPS Portal. It also allows most likely the best protection. customers to review their detection and mitigation history, Collaboration key Ultimately, says Wheeler, it will take a variety of tools and approaches to continue dealing with threats into the future, but a collective effort from global carriers working together to address industry-wide threats is also key – citing joint initiatives such as Ǥ

and request configuration changes.

Finally, DPS Max provides the highest level of protection, adding automatic mitigation capabilities on top of these other services – with these mitigations based on customerdefined thresholds.

Together we enable

the connected future Capacity

Technology doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stand still. And nor do we. NTT Communications and the Global IP Network are two of the 28 companies and organizations coming together to form NTT. We are excited about the journey ahead as the Global IP Network continues to innovate and connect ideas, people and technology to change the world for the better.

Together we do great things Visit gin.ntt.net for more details Follow @GinNTTnet for news and updates on NTT and the Global IP Network #globalipnetwork #AS2914

20 Security Capacity

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A Anti-Fraud Solutions

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ccording to the most recent report from the GLF, 80% of carriers cite fraudulent traffic management as a “strategic” or “top priority”. This among other things has highlighted the increasing need among carriers for robust security products and agile solutions.

Carriers across the industry are working to mitigate the risks of cyberattacks and fraudulent activity with a host of offerings and solutions that are either built in or added to. Capacity has rounded a cross-section of these offerings from SMS, to networking and operations centres, all to showcase some of the work being done in this area.

Compiled by Natalie Bannerman

capacitymedia.com

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20 security and anti-fraud solutions | 71

Telefónica TUKU Web

Boku ”Silent” OTP service

Telefónica’s anti-fraud service, TUKU Web, is a core tool developed and patented by Telefónica International Wholesale Services (TIWS) that prevents and detects possible fraud, both in incoming traffic and outgoing traffic streams. It tackles fraud at all stages: prevention, detection and action. It is comprised of two modules: TUKU IN (detection of fraud in incoming traffic streams: Bypass (by-pass OTT and by-pass roaming), hijacking, false answer supervision, manipulated CLI, etc) and TUKU OUT (prevention and detection of anomalous traffic in outgoing traffic streams with automatic blocking linked to alarms: IRSF, detection of Wangiri, etc.

Using mobile operator connections, Boku has introduced a “Silent” OTP service to replace OTP’s delivered via SMS. The service uses the carrier network to determine phone number possession and authenticate the user. As a direct carrier billing company Boku needs to authenticate each user before billing. The company has now separated out this authentication step and made it available as a service for any company to verify possession, silently in the background without having to involve the end-user. By using the network connection between the sim card and the local mobile phone tower, phone number possession is established in microseconds.

Winner of the 2018 Anti-fraud Innovation at the Messaging and Capacity SMS Global Awards is Infobip’s sGate SMS firewall and monetisation

Infobip sGate SMS firewall and monetization services

BICS & cVidya FraudGuard

Telenor Fraud prevention

capacitymedia.com

services. The solution combines next-gen hardware with continuous in-depth business and technical support for mobile operators, helping operators fix the deficiencies in their messaging operations, be it improperly charged incoming SMS traffic (including traffic coming from SIM farms), spam or fraud messages. Through its detection and filtering system, coupled with expert analysis, continued audits and tech support for the operator starting from the pre-installation phase, Infobip enables operators to optimise their network and revenue.

FraudGuard is a state-of-the-art fraud detection platform that uses crowdsourcing knowledge to enrich the service and deliver pro-active feedback in order to fight fraud. It analyses BICS’ global traffic in near real time creating a complete overview of fraud trends and allows customers to pro-actively take action and minimise a possible fraud scenario. FraudGuard customers can, in return, enrich the system with fraud details they have detected on their respective networks. The solution levrages the strengths of both partners, the extensive global reach of BICS and the deep expertise of cVidya to offer a most advanced fraud management solution.

Telenor has developed a monitoring solution based on signalling data, which actively detects abnormal traffic towards potential misused ranges. Consequently, only calls towards genuine users are completed.

This ensures that fraud traffic is discovered and stopped before its customers are affected. The service is free of charge. In the event that a fraud incident has occurred, Telenor will assist its customers in the process for stopping the payment of the fraudulent traffic. Its AI fraud solution has been developed and will be further developed in cooperation with Telenor Research to secure a fraud free voice quality product.

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Airtel Business Airtel’s Intelligent Security Operation center (iSOC)

NTT SOCaaS

Airtel’s Intelligent Security Operation centre (iSOC) is based in Manesar, India. It is one of Asia’s largest network operation centre (NOC) and security operation centre (SOC) facility. The SOC in particular offers a suite of cyber-security monitoring solutions including SIEM, SOAR, UEBA, threat intelligence, network behaviour analysis etc. In addition, it also has a number of services including vulnerability management, privilege identity management, anti-phishing services, endpoint detection & response, penetration testing, identity access management, application testing, governance, risk & compliance, firewall assurance and secure device management.

NTT Security’s Security Operations Center-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) allows customers to rapidly build and maintain an optimal security operations model just as you would if you had your own internal SOC. While customers retain ownership of all hardware, cloud services, software and storage infrastructure, SOCaaS provides all of the SIEM management, incident response, eyes on glass monitoring, tuning, and customisation capabilities. Additionally, SOCaaS can e-bond with your existing tool sets or use ours to maintain ticketing, workflow, and reporting artefacts for compliance and auditing. The service features 24/7 monitoring and alerting of security incidents, to name a few.

Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier together with Ciena, has launched Capacity a new security service that encrypts all data during journey across the

Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier Encrypted Lambda

Singtel Trustwave Fusion platform

Amazon Web Services AWS Security Hub

world. The new offering, Encrypted Lambda service, encrypts data on hardware located at the client’s site and protects it over Layer 1, the physical layer, while it is transmitted. This makes it different from traditional solutions by allowing larger data volumes with higher performance, reduced costs and faster speeds. Customers that will benefit the most from the Encrypted Lambda service are those needing to transport very large amounts of confidential data very quickly.

Trustwave, the cybersecurity division of Singtel, offers the Trustwave Fusion platform. The platform enables powerful cybersecurity capabilities to address a constantly evolving threat landscape while running completely in-country, adhering to Singapore data sovereignty laws and regulations. Once connected, the platform unifies Trustwave technologies, services and security expertise onto a single application accessed and controlled by any device including desktop, tablet or mobile phone. Organisations then have the ability to manage security programmes, which includes asset discovery to threat detection and eradication to how resources are provisioned and scaled.

Earlier this year saw the launch of AWS Security Hub, a service that gives customers a central place to manage security and compliance across an AWS environment. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organises, and prioritises security alerts – called findings – from AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon Macie, and from a large and growing list of AWS Partner Network (APN) solutions. Customers can also run automated, continuous compliance checks based on industry standards and best practices, helping to identify specific accounts and resources that require attention.

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Colt Network Encryption services

CenturyLink Adaptive Network Security

Colt Network Encryption services ensure secure connectivity at any network layer, with an end-to-end encryption service that can tailored to users’ needs. It offers optical encryption as part of wave and private wave services. There is voice encryption, which includes both SIP signalling encryption and audio encryption. As well as Ethernet line encryption, which allows for the ability to address the growing need for effective network security solutions, driven by increasing threats and new regulatory requirements such as GDPR.

Adaptive Network Security cost-effectively enhances a company’s network security posture with a managed, network-based firewall.

Users can easily add functions such as anti-malware sandboxing, data loss protection, web content filtering, application awareness and control when needed. Delivered in the cloud Adaptive Network Security can quickly adapt to new threats without requiring huge customer investments and new expertise. Additionally, by moving protection physically closer to the origins of threats, we’re able to neutralize threats more efficiently and effectively. The solution also features intrusion detection, anti-virus and 24/7 security operations centre support.

The Secure Identity Suite from Sparkle allows users to securely Capacity authenticate themselves by making a simple call from their mobile

Sparkle Secure Identity Suite

iBasis FraudAlert

PCCW Global Crypteia

capacitymedia.com

phone. Designed to combat fraud, the service protects businesses as well as customers by exploiting native GSM/UMTS network features when authenticating the user and securely transmitting information and instructions to the platform. It is especially effective in the prevention of phishing, botnets, man in the middle and man in the browser, key-logger, etc.It is also user friendly as no software needs to be installed, is completely carrier and hardware neutral while delivering high levels of security.

FraudAlert was developed to combat IRSF and Wangiri scams. It has been designed to complement existing fraud prevention ecosystems by adding a final layer of protection and security. The service analyses a stream of real-time call data using an advanced algorithm. SMS/email alerts are generated and sent to customers at the first sign of suspicious activity. Fraudulent activity can then be automatically blocked based on custom thresholds, also fraudulent calls can be ended to prevent costs from incurring. In addition, the application not only prevents fraud, but also allows customers to profitably monetise previously high-risk destinations that were continually exposed to fraud.

PCCW Global offers a suite of customisable solutions to meet the needs of the individual company. This includes the Crypteia Managed Firewall that features that includes firewall rental, installation, configuration, hardware maintenance and 24/7/365 monitoring.

There’s also the Crypteia Threat Intelligence & Management Service and Security Operations Centres tthat provides a 24/7 threat monitoring and identification system. In addiition, there is the Crypteia Managed Anti-DDoS Service that helps prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against your clients’ networks by re-routing traffic away from critical infrastructure assets.

74 | SPONSORED STATEMENT

DEUTSCHE TELEKOM GLOBAL CARRIER: REDEFINING CYBERSECURITY

ǧ

Data is today often described as the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most valuable and secure connection to cloud service providers (CSPs). Secure currency. Whether that is true or not, data has indeed become Cloud Connect provides a private connection over a dedicated the lifeblood of business organizations, and its volumes are Layer 2 Ethernet connection, with guaranteed SLAs and high expanding exponentially. In fact, a study by Cisco predicts throughput. This service is important for mission-critical that global IP traffic will grow to 20.6 zettabytes in 2021. All applications as it does not use the public internet. Deutsche the data created to feed ever-growing mobility services and Telekom Global Carrier is able to connect clients with 40 Capacity connected devices make it a gold mine for evildoers. So itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy CSPs in Europe and the US, with a continually growing list of to understand why cybercrime will continue to be a lucrative partners. undertaking â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and thus a major concern for years to come.

Backing Up for Safety As a leading telco provider, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier In order to doubly ensure the safety of valuable data assets, recognizes its responsibility to ensure the safety of its networks, another of our new offerings is a Data Center Mirroring products and services. Unfortunately, cyber criminals are clever. solution. It echoes an organizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s complete data resources in They are increasingly sophisticated and skilled at keeping up a physically separate location. Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier with technology advancements. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why we are vigilant manages the transfer of data via point-to-point connection while in our efforts to continually provide enhanced solutions for ensuring full encryption during the transfer process. With Data the protection of our clientsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; assets, as well as our own. This is Center Mirroring, if a data center is attacked or is for any reason especially important in light of expanding technologies such as unavailable, files are still accessible and protected. Today it is 5G, M2M or IoT. increasingly important to have these types of backup systems in 360° Security Strategy place to defend against the mounting threat of data theft and The Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier 360° Security Strategy cyber criminality. delivers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art defense portfolio. In To help connect global sites with a secure network, Deutsche addition to our offerings in the voice, DDoS, SMS and IPTelekom Global Carrier offers an IP-VPN solution, based on VPN areas, over the last months we have launched several new Deutsche Telekomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s MPLS backbone. It supplies high-level market innovations. One of the latest is our Encrypted Lambda security along with a variety of choices for access technology, service, which answers a problem that had been largely ignored bandwidth and topology. In addition, we offer a ground-breaking in the past. Today, however, it has seen an unfortunate increase mobile IP-VPN solution, which is perfect for hard-to-reach or in intensity ÂŹâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; namely, the theft of data while it travels across temporary locations. It can also be used as backup as it offers networks. high access resiliency. This means that important documents can Encrypted Lambda is a Layer 1, hardware-based encryption be accessed from mobile devices without concerns about security solution. This combination is especially advantageous for and fraud. Both IP-VPN solutions are Layer 3 services that conveying large amounts of data that need lightning speed seamlessly integrate into a customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; VPN. throughput at extremely low latency. Conventionally, Tirelessly Fighting Fraud encryption of transmitted data has occurred over Layer 3 Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier works relentlessly to safeguard or 4 and is software based. That adds up to more servers, against an ever-wider variety of risks. As a part of our global more maintenance, more skill and more manpower. Plus, service, we deliver 24/7 monitoring, automated processes and a the necessary software computing during data flow slows dedicated management team to help fight fraud. This state-ofapplications and adds latency. Encrypted Lambda eliminates the-art system detects and blocks fraudulent actions, to prevent those difficulties. them from happening in the first place. Every year, we recognize Lofty Safeguards and stop more than 4.000 deceptive cases. In case damage has Another of Deutsche Telekom Global Carrierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s latest broken through our defense lines, our further services and developments is called Secure Cloud Connect. It offers fast, easy solutions aid in minimizing negative effects. december/january 2020

| 75

Battling DDoS Attacks DDoS Defense is another of the security services from Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier. Here it provides layered backbone, cloud and on-premise protection services. As a first block against attacks, on-premise solutions are important. That’s because it is crucial to stop application layer attacks close to where they reside.

In this area, we provide a range of local, always-on, real-time protection to keep systems and applications safe.

For massive volumetric attacks against networks and bandwidth, the only viable solutions are backbone protection or a cloud solution. We offer IP backbone defense for our business internet access and IP Transit customers. So any volumetric DDoS attacks that are routed via Deutsche Telekom to the customer’s network will be identified and stopped – in most cases before they can do any damage.

The mitigation of large-scale volumetric attacks, however, needs a cloud-based solution. To provide our clients with the best possible defense, we joined together with security experts at Arbor Networks. Now, any suspicious traffic is rerouted to Arbor’s cloud where it undergoes scrubbing at one of their global stations. After being cleaned, the now uncontaminated traffic is sent back to the client through a GRE tunnel.

to identify suspicious content and prevent it from being returned to the customer’s mobile network.

Another of our fraud prevention services is SMS+ Protect. It identifies and blocks unwanted and unpaid SMS messaged based on SS7. Because it works dynamically instead of remaining static, as is the case with usual solutions, it can detect the continually changing behavior of grey route traffic. Especially as applicationto-person messaging (A2P) grows in both volume and value, it is increasingly crucial that providers can ensure the delivery of safe and reliable messages.

Safety in Numbers For all our myriad of solutions, however, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier recognizes the need for greater cooperation within the industry as the only way to truly combat fraud and cyber criminality. Only through the free exchange of security-related information will it be possible to prevent large-scale security disasters. That is why the company plays a leading role in various fraud prevention initiatives such as the i3 Fraud Forum. This is a non-profit organization made up of leading telcos which have banded together to support the fight against fraud.

At Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, we will continue to invest in networks, systems and services to provide the highest Preventing Malicious Intent security standards possible. To accomplish this, we are willing to To guard against the vulnerabilities of Signaling System No. take whatever steps are necessary, including provisioning liberal 7 (SS7) protocols, we have developed a powerful SS7 Firewall resources for research and development, and enhancing and solution. This is a fully managed service that analyses the upgrading our current solutions. In addition, we take advantage signaling security of traffic at the network border. It protects Capacity of partnerships to quickly add new security solutions to our against fraudsters, who primarily seek financial gain by stealing already broad portfolio. In the fight for a more secure cyber information. Ominously, however, they are also able to listen to infrastructure, our clients and partners need a defender: Deutsche calls or even find out where a user is located. SS7 Firewall is able Telekom Global Carrier.

capacitymedia.com

76 | market trends: interconnection index

PRIVATE INTERCONNECTION BANDWIDTH TO HIT 13,300TBPS Equinix’s latest Global Interconnection Index (GXI) predicts private connectivity at the edge will grow by 51% CAGR and exceed a total bandwidth capacity of more than 13,300Tbps, equivalent to 53ZB of data exchanged annually

T

he GXI market study finds interconnection bandwidth – the capacity for direct and private traffic exchange between key business

partners – is an essential component to digital business and validates that to compete in the digital economy, companies must address growing data

volumes and increasing data exchange velocity across a rising number of clouds and business ecosystems.

LJ ϮϬϮϮ͕ ƉƌŽǀŝƐŝŽŶĞĚ /ŶƚĞƌĐŽŶŶĞĐƚŝŽŶ ĂŶĚǁŝĚƚŚ ǁŝůů ďĞ ŵŽƌĞ ƚŚĂŶ ĚŽƵďůĞ ƚŚĞ ƉĞĂŬ ŽĨ 'ůŽďĂů /ŶƚĞƌŶĞƚ dƌĂĨĨŝĐ ĂŶĚ ŽǀĞƌ ϭϯ ƚŝŵĞƐ ƚŚĞ ǀŽůƵŵĞ͘​͘​͘ /ŶƚĞƌĐŽŶŶĞĐƟŽŶ ĂŶĚǁŝĚƚŚ͘​͘​͘ Is expected to grow by

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Last year’s GXI stated that bandwidth provisioned for private connectivity was forecasted to grow by 2021 to more than 8,200Tbps of capacity, which is equal to 33ZB of data exchange per year.

“People, software and machines are creating and consuming data faster and in all the places where we work, play, and

live,” said Rick Villars, research vice president of data centre and cloud at IDC. “The significant increase in data created, aggregated and analysed in these new locations is contributing to a major shift away from deploying IT in traditional corporate data centres. Enterprises need access to robust, modern data centre

facilities near the edge locations where businesses want to deploy dedicated infrastructure and interconnect to the increasing number of clouds, customers and partners that are at the core of digital transformation efforts.”

Interconnection bandwidth growth by region The digital economy continues to drive worldwide interconnection bandwidth growth, with a 51% CAGR. North America leads globally, contributing to 38% of interconnection bandwidth, and is predicted to grow with a 46% CAGR. As the most digitally mature region, the focus is on further digitising industries like Manufacturing.

Europe, predicted to grow at a 51% CAGR, contributes 22% of interconnection bandwidth globally.

Strong data compliance regulations enable growth in Healthcare & Life Sciences, Government & Education, and Business & Professional Services.

Asia-Pacific is anticipated to grow at a

56% CAGR, contributing more than 29% of interconnection bandwidth globally. In Asia-Pacific, Cloud & IT Services leads and is forecast to outpace growth of cloud in all other regions.

Latin America is predicted to grow by a 63% CAGR, reaching 1,430+ Tbps of predicted capacity and contributing 11% of interconnection bandwidth globally.

In this region, the Content & Digital Media industry is expected to outpace other regions in adoption.

From North America’s lead in capacity to Asia-Pacific’s rapidly expanding CAGR, all regions are experiencing a dramatic rise in interconnection bandwidth growth, driven by continued expansion of the

digital economy.

In response to rapidly growing volumes of data, enterprise consumption of interconnection bandwidth will grow at a 64% CAGR globally, outpacing other forms of business data exchange.

This is due to be even higher for EMEA, with consumption growing at a 67% CAGR, leading enterprises to account for 60% of total interconnection bandwidth in 2022.

And, by 2022, London alone will account for over a third (34%) of European traffic, with leading European cities – Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris – together accounting for almost 78% of European traffic.

december/january 2020

| 77

Bandwidth Forecast Across regions, by industry and by vertical, interconnection bandwidth growth forecasts continue to accelerate Region North America Europe ƐŝĂͲWĂĐŝĮĐ >ĂƟŶ ŵĞƌŝĐĂ

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Equinix working on 300-mile subsea cable in the English Channel A faster connection between London and makers believe interconnection is a key Paris will support increased business in facilitator of digital transformation. Four London. The 300-mile connection, in 10 IT decision-makers in EMEA feel described as the data equivalent of the the same and, in the UK, over a third Capacity cite Channel Tunnel, will cut connection times (33%) of IT decision-makers by 14%. interconnection as being key to the According to a separate independent survival of their business. survey commissioned by Equinix of more IT decision-makers in the UK are than 2,450 global senior IT professionals, utilising interconnection to connect to almost half (48%) of global IT decisionother enterprises (20%), network service

providers (23%) and cloud service providers (39%).

The independent survey found that over a third (34%) of IT decision-makers in the UK, believe interconnection can help their business to gain competitive advantage within the marketplace. This assertion was true for almost half (46%) of global IT decision-makers and for 4 out of 10 (39%) IT decision-makers in EMEA.

Interconnection bandwidth by industry type As digital ecosystems continue to evolve, installed capacities are predicted to increase globally for each industry, with regional variances. /ŶƐƚĂůůĞĚ ĂƉĂĐŝƚLJ ;dďƉƐͿ dĞůĞĐŽŵŵƵŶŝĐĂƟŽŶƐ ůŽƵĚ Θ /d ^ĞƌǀŝĐĞƐ ĂŶŬŝŶŐ Θ /ŶƐƵƌĂŶĐĞ DĂŶƵĨĂĐƚƵƌŝŶŐ ^ĞĐƵƌŝƟĞƐ Θ dƌĂĚŝŶŐ ŽŶƚĞŶƚ Θ ŝŐŝƚĂů DĞĚŝĂ ƵƐŝŶĞƐƐ Θ WƌŽĨ͘ ^ĞƌǀŝĐĞƐ ŶĞƌŐLJ Θ hƟůŝƚLJ tŚŽůĞƐĂůĞ Θ ZĞƚĂŝů ,ĞĂůƚŚĐĂƌĞ Θ >ŝĨĞ ^ĐŝĞŶĐĞƐ 'ŽǀĞƌŶŵĞŶƚ Θ ĚƵĐĂƟŽŶ Other North America

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According to the survey, optimising the performance of networks is a key priority for almost half (46%) of IT decisionmakers in the UK. Interconnecting to multiple clouds and IT services across

capacitymedia.com

1,000

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multiple edge locations and cloud regions represents the next largest and fastest use of interconnection bandwidth and is predicted to grow 13x by 2022. The move to multi-cloud strategies is cited by survey

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respondents as a priority for over a third (36%) of IT decision-makers in the UK. Interconnecting to digital business partners makes up the remainder of interconnection bandwidth use cases.

78 | appointments

%LOO %LVKRS Alaska Communications Bill Bishop has been named president and CEO of Alaska Communications..

Bishop had served as Alaska Communicationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; interim CEO since June 2019. He joined the company in 2004 and has served in several leadership roles in consumer and business sales and operations, including vice president of business and wholesale, senior vice president of customer and revenue management and COO.. â&#x20AC;&#x153;In my role as interim CEO, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve developed an even deeper understanding of Alaska Communicationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; opportunities and challenges, our people and customers,â&#x20AC;? Bishop said.

Bishop has more than 25 years of telecoms experience, including AT&T and McCaw Communications, and will also serve on the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s board of directors.

$OOLVRQ Kirkby Telia Company Allison Kirkby has been appointed as president and CEO of Telia Company, as of Q2 of 2020.

Christian Luiga will remain as acting president and CEO until Kirkbyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tenure begins and will then return to his role as executive vice president and CFO of Telia Company.

Kirkby enters the role having previously served as group CEO and president of TDC Group. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m delighted and extremely honoured to be appointed president and CEO of Telia Company,â&#x20AC;? says Kirkby. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Given its unique assets, scale and leadership position, Telia Company has the ability to be a role model for the global telco industry and bring the benefits of digitalisation to all its stakeholders, especially its customers and owners. I am really looking forward to getting to know the Telia team as we take Telia Company forward.â&#x20AC;?

Gary Carr Colt Technology Services Colt Technology Services has appointed Gary Carr as its new chief financial officer.

In his new position, Carr will â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;lead a period of financial transformation for Coltâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, ensuring that all functions across the organisation are working together for the overall benefit of the business.

In addition, upon entering the new position, he will also join Coltâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s executive leadership team reporting to chief executive officer Carl Grivner.

With over 23 yearsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; experience in telecoms, Carr joined Colt back in 2014 as group financial controller before being promoted to deputy chief financial officer.

During his time with the company he had overseen various commercial operations including leading the financial shared service centre in India.

$PXU /DNVKPL Tata Communications Tata Communications has appointed Amur Lakshminarayanan as managing director and group chief executive officer â&#x20AC;&#x201C; designate.

With over 35 years of experience, he most recently served as president and CEO of TCS Japan, global head of telecom, media & information services, HiTech and utilities, and head of TCS UK & Europe.

In his new role, Lakshminarayanan will advise the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interim management committee. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am truly excited to join another Tata company. Tata Communicationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; leadership in India, strong international presence with its talent base, technology capabilities and global network reach puts it in a strong position to help customers with their digital transformations. I look forward to working with our customers and partners to harness the next phase of growth,â&#x20AC;? he said. said Lakshminarayanan.

Capacity

Andrei (OHIDQW TOMIA TOMIA has named Andrei Elefant as its new chief product officer. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am honoured to join an organisation who is leading the way in bringing solutions to the market that addresses current industry demand,â&#x20AC;? said Elefant.

Elefant enters the role with more than 20 yearsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; experience in the sector. Prior to his appointment, he served as CEO of Allot Communications, lead the company offering from network optimisation solutions to security-as-a-Service solutions, all through M&A and integration of security technologies into Allot main product lines. â&#x20AC;&#x153;It is great to have Andrei on board to help TOMIA continue to lead the way,â&#x20AC;? the company said.

9LYHN %DGULQDWK TowerCo Vodafone Group has announced that Vivek Badrinath will become CEO of its new European tower company TowerCo, as of April 2020. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m pleased that Vivek, one of our most experienced senior executives, will be leading our new tower business,â&#x20AC;? said Nick Read, chief executive of Vodafone. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We believe that there is significant scope to generate operational efficiencies and increase tenancy ratios across our tower portfolio, and that we will be able to unlock value for shareholders.â&#x20AC;?

Badrinath currently serves as chief executive of Vodafoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rest of world operations. He previously held roles at Orange, where he was deputy chief executive.

&KDG 5RGULJXH] Stream Data Centers Stream Data Centers has named Chad Rodriguez as its new vice president of network and cloud.

In his new role, Rodriguez will work to help the company diversify its connectivity options to meet the growing bandwidth and local access needs of its customers. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Our goal at Stream is twofold.

First, we want to hone our relationships with Tier 1 providers by providing them with more customised solution sets as they look to establish on ramps as close as possible to their enterprise end users.

Second, we can then blend this result with Streamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s deep-seated real estate expertise to further develop our sites as increasingly important connectivity hubs, bringing robust and redundant services to our customers,â&#x20AC;? said Rodriguez.

Kaan 7HU]LR OX Veon 9HRQ KDV QDPHG .DDQ 7HU]LR OX as its joint chief operating officer along with Sergi Herrero.

Herrero joined Veon on 1 September 2019 from Facebook ZKLOH 7HU]LR OX VWDUWHG RQ November 2019.

7HU]LR OX MRLQV DV D PHPEHU RI Veonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s group executive committee and reports directly to Burns. In this new role, he will focus on executing the transformation of the core connectivity business. $V FR &22V 7HU]LR OX DQG Herrero will jointly drive the growth agenda of accelerating Veonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s core connectivity business while developing new high growth adjacent digital revenues and venture businesses.

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december/january 2020

Capacity

80 | brynn fowler

A TRIBUTE TO BRYNN FOWLER O

n Tuesday, 22 October, the industry lost a huge and irreplaceable person. Some of you may already know this but Brynn Fowler, who was director of OCI networking business governance & planning at Oracle and Board president & co-founder of the Women’s Tech Forum (WTF), sadly lost her battle with stage four cancer.

Brynn was a true guiding force for the community she helped build with the WTF, which has been creating a networking community focused on empowering and supporting women across the cloud, telco and data centre infrastructure industries. The WTF’s mission is to create a safe and open environment for women in our industry to connect and support one another. A strong network of connections and friendships to support reshaping the conversation, help close the gender gap in the tech industry, empowering and inspiring other women as they grow and develop in their careers.

Brynn was also a pivotal driver and leading light across the industry in helping to reshape the conversation about diversity, parity, the gender gap and empowering women within the industry.

This included being a key figure on a number of Capacity panels over the years and the WTF’s support of the establishment of the Global Women in Telco & Tech Summit and Awards.

She lived life to the absolute fullest, always giving everything her all. Whether as one of the most dedicated and hardworking leaders and influencers at work or in our industry, or travelling around the world and embracing new experiences. She was never afraid to share her story and thoughts, whether that was about mentorship, sponsorship, and friendship, or indeed over the last few months via a blog about her battle with cancer in the hopes of helping others that are going through the same thing.

The brightest of lights never fade.

They keep on shining through the wisdom and Capacity energy that remains. You have left a profound mark on this world and your beautiful spirit will illuminate us forever” There have been many kind and beautiful words received and shared as the news of her passing has echoed through our industry. One person summed Brynn up beautifully with four words: courageous, tenacious, passionate and honest. This was certainly true in both business and life.

You have poured out your belief in her shining light and it has been amazing to see just how many people she has left a positive impact on. Brynn had the ability to break through the barriers of today’s world and make her peers and co-workers into her friends and family. She had an amazing heart and, for a little while, we got to be part of it.

The friendships, conversations and advancements that originated from Brynn will continue to grow. Brynn inspired and

impacted so many people, especially in the face of adversity this year. Her achievements in life and work were many, lasting and will never be forgotten.

In recognition of Brynn’s work and spirit, Capacity can announce that this page in the Capacity magazine will now be dedicated to the conversation and work that Brynn was so deeply passionate about: diversity, parity, the gender gap and empowering women within the industry.

Elena Winters, sourcing manager for edge and backbone at Facebook and co-founder of the WTF, has kindly agreed to be the first author of this new series.

Her husband Troy recently wrote a beautiful post entitled My Street Light and one extract read: “One’s spirit and energy lives on through the people they have impacted. Seeing the outpouring of love and appreciation both from her personal and professional community is making me realise the wide impact she has had on many people.”

To ensure that her spirit and energy lives on, Capacity is also dedicating and renaming the Agent of Change Award at the Global Women in Telco & Tech Awards in her name so that this trailblazing light will continue to guide people and illuminate our industry forever more.

Brynn with the WTF board members

december/january 2020

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26 March 2020 Mainz

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