ISSUE 55
COVER STORY
16 · MONE Y
Line of defence MONEY interviews Harald Roesch, chief executive officer at Melita, on the service provider’s constant investment, its cloud-to-premises network experience and the layers of defence it is offering businesses to help mitigate cyber attack risks.
Is Melita ready for 5G and how does the company cope with a rapidly changing technological world? We’ve invested a significant amount in our mobile network during 2018. As a result Melita is currently the only operator in Malta which has a 5G-ready mobile network. Although today there are only a handful of 5G-enabled phones available on the market, the number of models will grow through the rest of 2019 and beyond. As the availability of 5G smartphones increases, we are in an excellent position to give our customers the very best experience possible on a mobile network. We’re equally well-placed in terms of broadband access via a fixed internet connection; Melita is the only network to offer 1,000 Mbps speeds nationwide across Malta and Gozo. This puts Malta in a unique position in Europe — none of our European neighbours has access to such powerful networks throughout the whole country. Melita’s investment in its mobile and fixed networks puts us significantly ahead of the European Commission’s goals for 5G and gigabit connectivity. Connectivity isn’t just about connecting people but also about machine-to-machine connections in what is termed as the Internet of Things (IoT). This segment is growing at such a rate that by next year it is predicted there will be more than 20 billion connected devices worldwide touching every sector, from manufacturing and healthcare, to finance and retail. Melita is also well-placed to help our customers with the fourth industrial revolution, since our 5G-ready mobile network is also NB-IoT and LTE-M-enabled.
Can you safely say that Melita has the lion’s share of the Maltese mobile market? Melita is the market leader in TV and internet. In mobile, Melita was the third operator to enter a market that was well developed with two strong brands already in place. Despite this challenge, we are seeing more and more individuals and businesses opting for Melita mobile. In the business segment this is a result of increased focus in this space but also because more satisfied business customers are promoting us as a provider of choice for business clients. Today we have 130,000 mobile subscribers, with the latest Malta Communications Authority figures1 revealing that we have 21% market share in mobile. Many terms could be jargon for some. Can you elaborate, in layman's terms, on your new B2B services, Cloud Connect and DDoS Mitigation? In layman’s terms a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a form of cyberattack which may render a server, website or internet service unusable. For many businesses today, such a disruption can be highly costly, with impacts including downtime, customer frustration and both immediate and longer-term revenue loss. It’s a sad reality that DDoS attacks are becoming more common and more complex, making them an increasing risk-factor for all businesses. To help in managing this risk, Melita is offering enterprise-grade DDoS mitigation solutions through CenturyLink – one of the largest global connectivity networks. CenturyLink provides layers of defence through enhanced
network routing, rate limiting and filtering that can be paired with advanced networkbased detection and mitigation-scrubbing centre solutions. Perhaps some of those terms could be classed as jargon – put more simply, attack traffic is filtered out and good traffic is sent back to the customer via a dedicated Melita internet connection. Our enterprise customers that utilise this service are better equipped to stay connected to the internet, with their websites and critical applications up and running. Turning to Cloud Connect, this is a service for our enterprise clients seeking a private connection from their offices in Malta to the cloud services provider of their choice. Through our nationwide fibre optic network, Melita provides private connections to leading cloud providers including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM. This results in a consistent and agile cloud-to-premises network experience. In addition to speed and reliability, the network also has an abundance of capacity, meaning there are no constraints on scalability or bandwidth-heavy workloads in the cloud. Melita is offering Cloud Connect in partnership with Telia Carrier; with more than 65,000km of fibre assets across 280 Points of Presence (PoPs) in more than 115 cities and 35 countries worldwide, Telia Carrier’s service, combined with Melita’s resilient international network, is uniquely placed to support Maltese businesses looking to shift critical processes to the cloud using
1
https://www.mca.org.mt/articles/key-market-indicators-
electronic-communications-and-post-q1-2014-q4-2018
