FEATURE
NEAR FUTURE OF THE DATA INDUSTRY BY PATRICIO ALBERTO REY SOMMER
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uring the last few years, we have been witnessing tremendous traffic growth in the backbone networks that connect us. Data Centers are being built everywhere and different technologies as AI are making headlines every day. Chat GPT maybe been the first tangible product that gives the general public a glimpse on what is to come. Assisting to GSMA MWC at Barcelona, I could see firsthand how mobile technology is also pushing. We do not have many WIFI 6E devices and we are talking about WIFI 7 and we have not ended deploying 5G and we are also talking of the benefits of 6G. What do we need to sustain all these fast-growing trends? My first thoughts are connectivity and energy. And now comes the big question, who will provide it? My experience as infrastructure developer is that driving and independent subsea cable project has become a very difficult endeavor. In the real world, if you do not secure a contract with a content provider is very hard to drive a feasible initiative. And the trend is that more and more
OTT’s are developing their own infrastructure for their use. Due to their nature, these companies have ready access to high amounts of capital that allows them to develop these projects without the burden of getting into a project finance or issuing debt to budget the deployment, accelerating the entire process tremendously. Besides all that, cable vendors provide them high discounts due to the upfront payments that the content companies can provide. The risks involved are also very low, this is mainly explained by the intended use of the capacity, all of it is need internally to support their core business. The risk of over sizing the infrastructure has proven also almost inexistent due to the high growth of the data requirements, being the opposite a very common scenario. From a traditional infrastructure development standpoint, it seems very counter intuitive to have an industry investing heavily in low yield assets as subsea fiber optic cables, instead of investing all its own resources in their core businesses, as most of other industries do. Maybe MARCH 2023 | ISSUE 129 43