Capacity Magazine October / November 2019 by Capacity Media

VOL XX ISSUE XX MONTH 2014 2019 VOL 19 ISSUE 6 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER

Cover sponsor: OTEGLOBE

Business intelligence for the global carrier industry

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VOL 19 ISSUE 6 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

Feature The Climate Question: what are the telecoms and data centre industries doing to help? Big interview Veon CEO Ursula Burns tells Capacity how she is leading a radical new strategy for the company

Business intelligence for the global carrier industry

The Climate Question: Renewable

Energy

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| 01

CONTENTS Capacity magazine, October/November 2019

NEWS & ANALYSIS 04 EUROPE

Cover image: Adrian Teal, CartoonStock

10 EURASIA 11 ASIA & ASIA-PACIFIC 16 MIDDLE EAST 20 AFRICA 24 LATIN AMERICA 26 NORTH AMERICA 55 SDN/NFV NEWS

ON THE COVER Capacity examines what the telecoms and datacentre industries are doing to reduce their footprint on the environment (pages 35-36)

STRATEGIES 10 SPONSORED Q&A George Nikoloudis, COO, OTEGLOBE

60 Q&A Nadya Melic, head of international products and technology , Telstra 66 SPONSORED Q&A Hendrik Röllinger, head of business consulting wholesale solutions, Axino 71 SPONSORED Q&A Andrew McGrath, head of connectivity, Vodafone Carrier Services 74 SPONSORED STATEMENT Huawei

FEATURES

30 THE BIG INTERVIEW Ursula Burns, chairman and CEO, Veon

72 BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

34 SPONSORED STATEMENT Cengiz Oztelcan, CEO, GBI

80 OPPORTUNITIES FOR APPLYING BLOCKCHAIN IN ROAMING

THE BIG INTERVIEW pages 30-31

40 THE BIG INTERVIEW Kurtis Lindqvist, CEO, LINX

Ursula Burns, Chairman and CEO, Veon, on the companies reinvigorated strategy

43 SPONSORED STATEMENT Huawei

capacitymedia.com

56 Q&A Nan Chen, president, MEF 57 Q&A Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF

Software is king

Q&A with Nadya Melic, head of international products and technology, Telstra

Power listing, 20 to watch in SDN/NFV

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION SPECIAL REPORT after page 69

The digital transformers

Big Interview: Frédéric Dufal, VP strategy, customer experience, digital and International Carriers, Orange

82 MARKET TRENDS: GLF Report

86 APPOINTMENTS The industry's latest movers

Opportunities for applying blockchain in roaming Market trends: GLF Fraud Report

87 A DAY IN THE LIFE Caroline De Vos, COO, SatADSL

SPONSORS

50 THE BIG INTERVIEW Oliver Cantor, associate director of product strategy, Verizon

Kurtis Lindqvist, CEO, LINX, talks Ƥ into Saudi Arabia

News highlights

transformation,

48 EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW ǡ ƥ ǡ Equinix

THE BIG INTERVIEW pages 40-41

PEOPLE & DIARY

44 THE BIG INTERVIEW Oliver Camplin-Warner, head of Telstra International

52 SPONSORED Q&A Sergio, Grassi, chief marketing & ƥ ǡ

SPECIAL REPORT after page 53

76 THE BIG INTERVIEW Frédéric Dufal, VP strategy, customer experience, digital and transformation, International Carriers, Orange

29 SPONSORED Q&A 35 MARKET STRATEGY: THE Capacity George Sloan, vice president, AT&T CLIMATE QUESTION

38 THE BIG INTERVIEW Aki Uljas, business development director, Cinia; Eeva Liljanto, director of international sales, Cinia

SDN/NFV

THE BIG INTERVIEW pages 76-77 Frédéric Dufal, VP strategy, customer experience, digital and transformation, International Carriers, Orange

10 OTEGLOBE 29 AT&T 34 GBI 43 & 74 HUAWEI 52 EOLO 66 AXINO 71 VODAFONE CARRIER SERVICES

Capacity

'(876&+( 7(/(.20 */2%$/ &$55,(5 &211(&7,1* 7+( :25/' )25 <28 At Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier, we are reinventing wholesale. To prepare our clients for the challenges of a fast-evolving telecom market. One that will see the rapid growth of future technologies needing cuttingHGJH Ç±/Ç± FRQQHFWLYLW\ 6R ZHÂ·YH H[SDQGHG RXU SRUWIROLR DQG LQLWLDWHG VWUDWHJLHV WR DFFHOHUDWH LQQRYDWLRQ DJLOLW\ DQG WUDQVSDUHQF\ 1RZ WUXH VHDPOHVV JOREDO FRQQHFWLYLW\ YLD RQH VXSSOLHU LV D SURÃ&#x20AC;WDEOH UHDOLW\ :LWK Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier. Get in touch: globalcarrier.telekom.com

editor’s letter | 03

Wholesale Changes!

elcome to the Capacity Europe issue of the magazine. If you’re reading this at the event - welcome to London! If you’re reading this from afar - why aren’t you here? The wholesale carrier community is undergoing a wider digital transformation today and with total bandwidth capacity expected to hit 13,300Tbps by 2022, according to Equinix’s latest Global Interconnection Index (GXI), wholesale changes and innovation are even more critical today for the industry to stay abreast of the thirst for content and capacity. As such, this issue features special reports on SDN/NFV (after page 53) and business transformation (after page 69) to highlight just some of the amazing innovation and technology that is transforming the industry. We hear from MEF’s Nan Chen and Pascal Menezes (pages 56-57) on the advancements being made with SD-WAN standardisation and automating inter-provider service delivery. The proliferation of network virtualisation and automation continue to surge so Capacity also takes a deeper look at the software-defined technologies changing the wholesale game (pages 58-59) and we profile 20 SDN market leaders driving the industry forward (pages 61-65). Big interviews have been conducted with leading executives, such as: Ursula Burns, chairman and CEO of Veon (pages 30-31), Kurtis Lindqvist, CEO of LINX (pages 40-41), and Oliver Camplin-Warner, head of Telstra International (pages 44-45). On the topic of climate change, we look into how telecoms and data centre companies are investing in renewable energy to reduce their footprints (pages 35-36). Security and mitigating fraud continue to be ongoing challenges the industry faces and we feature a sneak peek at the latest benchmark annual report by the Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF) on fraudulent traffic in the international telecoms industry (pages 82-83). On the topic of Awards, good luck to the shortlisted companies for this year’s Global Carrier Capacity Awards and congratulations to the eventual winners!

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

Follow Capacity on Twitter: @capacitymedia Follow Capacity on Facebook: www.facebook.com/capacitymedia Follow Capacity on YouTube: www.youtube.com/capacitytv Follow Capacity on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/capacitymedia

Management CEO Ros Irving ros.irving@capacitymedia.com

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

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

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

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

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

Production Production and marketing coordinator Pablo Gainza pablo.gainza@capacitymedia.com

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

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

Design Freelance designer Barbara Donner Freelance writers Guy Matthews Annie Turner

Subscription enquiries Customer services customerservices@euromoneyplc. com tel +44 20 7779 8610 fax +44 20 7779 8602 Printer Stephens and George, UK Next issue December/January 2020 Published on 22 November 2019 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 | europe

EQUINIX, GIC LAUNCH $1BN EUROPEAN DATA CENTRE JOINT VENTURE

Charles Meyers, president & chief executive officer, Equinix

quinix has launched its hyperscale joint venture, in partnership with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, which will develop and operate xScale data centres in Europe. The facilities will allow these key enablers of digital transformation to

streamline their continued growth, while strengthening Equinix’s leadership position in the cloud ecosystem, as enterprises increasingly embrace hybrid multi-cloud as the IT architecture of choice. “The formation of our JV with GIC Capacity is a strategic milestone for Equinix as we

continue to deepen our relationships with the world’s largest cloud and hyperscale companies and help them meet their core workload deployment needs and gain proximity to the thriving business ecosystems available at Equinix,” said Charles Meyers, president and CEO of Equinix. “Similarly, as today’s businesses are increasingly moving to implement hybrid multi-cloud strategies for their digital infrastructure, Equinix serves as a unique on- and off-ramp to execute that strategy. We look forward to launching similar JVs in other operating regions and believe these efforts will continue to further differentiate Equinix as the trusted centre of a cloud-first world.” The initial six facilities in the JV, which is in the form of a limited liability partnership with GIC and is worth more than $1 billion, will be located in the Amsterdam, London (two sites), Frankfurt (two sites) and Paris markets, on some of Equinix’s existing International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre campuses.

VODAFONE CONDUCTS EUROPEAN TRIALS IN OPENRAN TECHNOLOGY TO EXTEND RURAL INTERNET ACCESS Vodafone has initiated the first European trials of Open Radio Access Networks (OpenRAN) in the UK and may extend to more of its markets on the continent. The company, which has already started working with a number of new vendors supplying OpenRAN technology, says that the trials have been undertaken to enable more consumers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Mozambique – which have largely rural

communities and are near the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index – to make mobile calls and to access data. “We are pleased with trials of OpenRAN and are ready to fast track it into Europe as we seek to actively expand our vendor ecosystem,” said Nick Read, CEO OF Vodafone Group. OpenRAN improves the network economics enabling us to reach more people in rural communities and that

supports our goal to build digital societies in which no-one is left behind.” The trial sites across the three countries will provide 2G, 3G and 4G services, with 5G possible over OpenRAN in the future. The company has already carried out lab trials of OpenRAN with Vodacom South Africa, and in Turkey has deployed the technology to deliver 2G and 4G services to customers in both urban and rural parts of the country.

NEWS IN BRIEF The ETSI Industry Standards Group for network function virtualisation has begun work on its next specification release, known as release 4. MEF and ONUG have partnered to ensure that enterprises have communications services optimised for digital transformation in multi-cloud

environments. Business Telecommunications Services (BTS) has announced that it is to join the GLF’s Communications Blockchain Network. Sky and BUUK Infrastructure have entered into a strategic partnership that will see Sky given wholesale access to BUUK’s full fibre network across the UK.

Orange and Deutsche Telekom are waiting on the Romanian government to decide the future of the fixed-line operations of Telekom Romania. Netherlands operator KPN has withdrawn the appointment of Dominique Leroy as its next CEO, naming Joost Farwerck as her replacement.

october/november 2019

europe | 05

EQT BUYS GERMAN FIBRE NETWORK INEXIO FOR €1BN EQT, the Swedish infrastructure investor, is buying a German broadband fibre company, Inexio, for a reported €1 billion. Inexio provides high-speed internet access to more than 110,000 customers and 6,000 businesses in the Saarland in south-west Germany. It has more than 10,000km of fibre infrastructure. David Zimmer, who founded Inexio 12 years ago, said: “From our excellent position today, we will continue to invest heavily to bring modern and reliable fibre-optic infrastructure to two million German households by 2030.” Earlier this year Inexio celebrated its 100,000th customer with a dinner in Saarbrücken.

For the past three years the company has been owned by private-equity company Warburg Pincus, along with a number of minority shareholders, including Deutsche Beteiligungs. Rene Obermann, the former Deutsche Telekom CEO who is now managing director of Warburg Pincus Deutschland, said: “Our investment in Inexio and our partnership with David are textbook examples of our strategy to back first-class founders and entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses for the future. David and his team have done an excellent job and we wish them all well in the future.” EQT, based in Stockholm, is the company that is partnering with Marc Ganzi’s US group to buy Zayo for $14.3 billion.

OPENREACH TO UNVEILS 29 NEW LOCATIONS FOR FULL-FIBRE ROLLOUT Openreach has published its plan for 29 towns, cities and boroughs where it will be building out fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) over the next year-and-a-half. This latest announcement confirms Openreach’s plan to extend its build from 12 to 18 months, supporting its plan to achieving its target of reaching four million homes and business by the end of March 2021. The roadmap covers 103 locations across the UK including Aberdeen; Bradford; Billericay; Brighton; Balham; Chorley Wood; Derby; Lichfield; Molesey; Northampton; Norwich; Newcastle (N.I.); Ormskirk; Portrush, Portstewart, Rickmansworth; Royal Tunbridge Wells; Stanecastle; Swindon; Thames Ditton; Tonbridge; Watford; and Wickford. “Full-fibre broadband provides a reliable, future-proof, consistent and dependable service that will be a platform for economic growth and

Capacity Openreach FTTP rollout

prosperity throughout the UK for decades to come,” said Clive Selley, Chief Executive of Openreach. “We’re now building at a massive scale. Every 28 seconds we pass a home or business with our new futureproofed full fibre network. This has given us ever greater confidence in the level and accuracy of whatever we announce – which is why we’ve now laid out our build plans right up to the target delivery date of four million premises by March 2021.

HURRICANE ELECTRIC LAUNCHES POP IN LAMDA HELLIX DATA CENTRE Hurricane Electric has launched its first point of presence in Greece at the Lamda Hellix data centre in Athens. The new PoP will provide enterprises and residential IP providers with high-speed connectivity, load balancing and congestion management in the delivery of next-gen IP connectivity services. “Having a Hurricane Electric PoP in our data centre campus is a big deal” said Alexandros Bechrakis, CCO and CTO, Lamda Hellix. “It is also a great example of the new post-crisis Greece becoming a digital hub in South East Europe & East Med. capacitymedia.com

Through the collaboration Lamda Hellix customers will have access to a number of new connectivity options as well as access to Hurricane Electric’s IPv4 and IPv6 network through 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Additionally, customers at the Lamda Helix data centre are able to exchange IP traffic with Hurricane Electric’s vast global network, which offers over 20,000 BGP sessions with over 7,500 different networks via more than 200 major exchange points and thousands of customers and private peering ports.

PCCW GLOBAL AND DE-CIX PARTNER TO EXTEND GLOBAL FOOTPRINT PCCW Global and DE-CIX have partnered to extend the reach of DE-CIX’s cloud and data centre offerings via PCCW Global Console connect SDI platform. Through the collaboration the two will also give Console Connect customers direct on-demand access to the DE-CIX platform through the self-providing platform. “It has always been DE-CIX’s ambition to make interconnection as easy as possible anywhere our customers need our services on the planet,” said Ivo Ivanov, chief executive officer of DE-CIX International. “This collaboration with PCCW Global is just the right step to getting interconnection even closer to the edge. We are thrilled to be the first IX globally to join the Console Connect SDI platform.” The Console Connect SDI platform is a platform for software-define interconnect delivering DE-CIX customers a real-time self –provisioning, pay-as-you-go ecosystem that offers on-demand virtual connection to 37 countries, together with provisioning to key cloud such as AWS, IBM Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Google Cloud. In addition, the platform also delivers direct, private connectivity to an additional 120 data centres in key markets throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and North America. “It also enables DE-CIX customers to purchase on-demand services via our platform from key cloud partners around the world and extend their IX platform to over 120 on-net data centres in 37 countries. This is another step in assuring SDI platform for carriers, SD-WAN providers, IX platforms, and other SDN operators, helping them extend their reach and interconnect together via traditional Network-to-Network Interconnection using our self-provisioning portal, or integrating via API at any of our access points,” added Michael Glynn, vice president of digital automated innovation, PCCW Global.

Michael Glynn, PCCW Global

International WHOLESALE Services

Connecting your world As a leading global provider of integrated communication solutions, Telefónica provides customers with high quality connectivity, digital platforms and a wide range of innovative, end-to-end solutions. When combined with our extensive international network, cutting edge infrastructure and global footprint, it means we are where you need us to be with the services you expect. Telefónica International Wholesale Services provides services to ﬁxed and mobile operators, service providers, wholesale carriers and OTT-Media companies. With particularly strong presence in Latin America and Europe, our global portfolio includes new digital platforms and solutions for enterprises, as well as more established carrier services: • Voice • Carrier Enterprise • Mobile • Satellite • Security • Cloud • IoT • Big Data wholesale.telefonica.com sales.wholesale@telefonica.com

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Winner

Best Latin American Wholesale Carrier

Best IPX Service

Telefónica

Telefónica Business Solutions

europe | 07

TATA GROUP BACKS £250M PROJECT TO BUILD FIBRE IN SW ENGLAND

Michael Maltby, CEO, Jurassic Fibre

The consultancy division of Tata is helping a rural carrier in the UK build a fibre broadband network over the next five years. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is

GOOGLE CLOUD TO LAUNCH NEW REGION IN WARSAW, POLAND Google Cloud is entering into a strategic partnership with Poland’s Domestic Cloud Provider (DCP). Under the terms of the agreement, DCP, which was founded jointly by PKO Bank Polski and the Polish Development Fund, will become a reseller of Google Cloud services in Poland and will build managed services capabilities around Google Cloud. For Google Cloud, this will enable them to boost its support for Polish enterprises, providing advanced infrastructure and software that suits their needs. Additionally, over the next five years Google Cloud will train experts to help Polish businesses on board to the cloud, as well as provide insights and strategic advice on how companies can maximise the benefits of their cloud deployments. “This is an important moment for the Polish economy,” said Michał Potoczek, CEO of Domestic Cloud Provider. “We are very proud to partner with Google Cloud and to see them bring a new cloud region to Warsaw. We believe in a multi-cloud strategy. A Google Cloud region, together with our own infrastructure, will allow us to build hybrid services which will bring even more value to our customers.” The company also confirms plans to open a Google Cloud region in Warsaw, Poland. With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) will benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions, and will launch their portfolio of key products. capacitymedia.com

working with Jurassic Fibre to build the ultra-fast full fibre broadband to towns and rural communities in the south west of England. Carol Wilson, head of Europe and the UK for TCS’s communications, media and information services business unit, said: “Fibre optic broadband connectivity will enable residents and businesses across the south west of England to realise the potential of digital technology. Around the world businesses are using digital technology to harness new opportunities and transform their operating models.” Jurassic Fibre CEO Michael Maltby, a former CFO of the Digicel group in Jamaica, said: “This is a big step forward for connectivity in the region and absolutely

vital as more and more of the world goes truly digital.” The company says the project is “part of what ultimately is expected to be a £250 million investment in the broadband infrastructure of the south west”. After starting up in villages near Exeter, the construction project will move on to larger towns in the area. “Jurassic Fibre will be taking the internet experience for families and businesses to a whole new level, allowing people to be ‘truly digital’ in their day-to-day lives making the digital plumbing of the South West a reality in the 21st century,” said Maltby. The company has been owned by London-based renewable energy specialist Fern Trading since earlier in 2019.

SPARKLE LAUNCHES TWO NEW POPS IN MILAN Sparkle has expanded its network reach in Milan with the launch of two new points of presence (PoPs). Located in Cornaredo and in the city centre, the new sites extend Sparkle’s city Capacity ring in Milan creating a digital ecosystem that is unique in Italy and competitive in Europe. In addition, the increased infrastructure will meet the increasing connectivity needs of the city and of its industrial ecosystem. Based at DATA4 data centre in Cornaredo and at Equinix Milan International Business Exchange (IBX) in Milan. The new PoPs add to the three existing sites in the metropolitan area, which increases the capillarity of Sparkle’s city ring, a protected and redundant

system fully interconnected with Sparkle’s Tier-1 global IP backbone. Additionally, the expanded infrastructure will give local and international ISPs, content and application providers, access to high-speed and diversified global connectivity to the biggest cities in Europe, North and Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In addition to the IP transit service Seabone, Sparkle offers a complete range of IP and data services, including City2City, which offers dedicated and secure capacity to the main urban centres worldwide, and Virtual NAP, that allow customers to access the main internet exchange points without the need of building any proprietary infrastructure.

ORANGE LAUNCHES 5G EXPERIMENTATION PLATFORMS IN 26GHZ BAND Orange has said it will start testing in Châtillon and Rennes following ARCEP’s approval to assign experimentation frequencies in the 26GHz band. The company says that it will use this call for projects as an opportunity to assess the performances of these new frequency bands as well as the technical and environmental conditions in which these bands can be used. In addition, it is also an opportunity to evaluate the benefits of this technology for innovative applications in very busy areas (railway stations, airports, stadiums, concerts, etc.) and to draw lessons for future developments of 5G. “The 26GHz spectrum band will allow us to explore new services based on 5G,”

said Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière, deputy CEO and chief technology and innovation officer of Orange. “We are aiming to set-up experimental platforms that will stimulate collaboration on these new usecases across all economic sectors.

Jégo-Laveissière: Orange exploring new 5G-based services

Capacity

10 | SPONSORED Q&A: GEORGE NIKOLOUDIS

THE DIGITAL FUTURE OF THE INTERNATIONAL WHOLESALE MARKET OTEGLOBE’S COO, GEORGE NIKOLOUDIS, SHARES HIS VIEW ON THE FUTURE OF WHOLESALE TELECOMS AND HOW OTEGLOBE PLANS TO FACE THE CHALLENGES THAT LAY AHEAD. Q. New technologies such as 5G, IoT, AI, Blockchain, etc. are changing the landscape in the telecom industry, but what could their effect be on the international wholesale market?

structure. So it’s not only about investing but doing it also in a smart way to add intelligence to our networks and services. Timely adoption of new technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) or Network function virtualization (NFV), could be the key in streamlining our operating and capital expenses (OPEX and CAPEX) and remaining competitive in the market today. At OTEGLOBE, having identified our customers’ needs for seamless connectivity, we are continuously enhancing our international backbone network with innovative capabilities, by deploying an Intelligent Transport Network platform. This For starts and as we fully programmable transport infrastructure, combined with see it today: moreCapacity data OTEGLOBE’s flexible and uniform network architecture, provides over our networks; high-performance, secure, and flexible connectivity solutions to our which essentially means customers, while also supports automation and fast delivery of new investing in new fibre services. routes, more subsea or At the same time as part of our voice business, where terrestrial cables and OTEGLOBE operates a carrier-class 4 Voice network that carries better networking to cope with the increased demand. And since more than 6 billion minutes running over IP, we started the more data flowing over our networks means also a bigger impact migration of key Voice Network Elements to NFV. Our company’s from network outages, as wholesale carriers we need to plan for strategy is to move gradually more network elements to NFV shortly diversity, resilience and high availability to build robust network to benefit from the cost elasticity, flexibility and redundancy that infrastructure. such a solution provides. As the leading regional carrier in South-East Europe OTEGLOBE has already expanded and redesigned its backbone network by leasing new fibre across Europe and the company now owns more Q. So, in the end, is it all about networks and services? than 21,000km of dark fibre stretching from Greece to Western Europe. Our unique network footprint connects Greece and the No, in the end, it’s all about the customer. Customer experience is Balkans to major European hubs such as Frankfurt, London, the key element of business success and our customers’ expectations Marseilles, Paris, Milan, Sofia etc. with four diverse fibre routes, two have increased dramatically over the last few years. routes transiting Balkan countries and another two routes transiting Future wholesale services are no longer about connecting 2 or Italy. more points with good reliability and performance. New flexible By investing also in the Asia Africa Europe – 1 subsea cable and agile services are needed, offering full visibility and enhanced we aim to connect the major Internet Hubs of Hong Kong and interaction between wholesale carriers and their customers. Singapore as well as countries in Asia, Middle East and Africa where Furthermore wholesale carriers that provide such services need the cable is landing, to Europe. Traffic coming from Asia and routed management tools that can meet the almost real-time demands to through AAE-1 subsea cable to OTEGLOBE’s landing station at keep their customers satisfied. Chania will utilize OTEGLOBE’s unique and diverse terrestrial At OTEGLOBE we’re currently developing business tools that network to reach Europe, offering more connectivity options and use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies to better resilience in the region, to our customers. perform analytics on the real-time and historical data that traverses our network, offering better services in respect to today’s advanced customers’ expectations. By interacting with real-time data as it Q. In your view then the future looks promising for streams through our network, we can get a deeper understanding international wholesale providers? of true customer profitability, project future demand patterns and automatically adjust our resources to our customers’ specific needs. I wouldn’t call it promising but rather challenging. More data Amid shifts in technology and customer behavior, the future does not necessarily mean more revenues or higher profitability. remains uncertain in international wholesale. Still, there are a lot of The challenge here is how to use our available network resources opportunities today, for those industry players willing to reinvent to improve our service provisioning and at the same time our cost their network and services capabilities, to drive growth.

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october/november 2019

asia and asia-pacific | 11

CHAYORA SECURES $180M SERIES C FUNDING FROM ACTIS

Oliver Jones, CEO, Chayora

Actis Asia Real Estate Fund (AAREF) and Chayora have reached an agreement for AAREF and other Actis managed funds to invest $180 million equity in Chayora’s series C round of funding. The news was

also followed by the announcement that Chayora has completed the $64 million first tranche of the investment. In March 2016, the Actis team made the original series B investment when it was part of Standard Chartered Principal Finance Real Estate, a result of that AAREF became a majority holding in Chayora. “We are very pleased to have concluded this agreement,” said Oliver Jones, CEO, Chayora. This Series C funding will give Chayora expansion capital for its data centre development projects. Combined with project debt of $250 million, it will enable Chayora to complete two hyperscale data centre facilities on the Chayora’s Tianjin campus and acquire land for further growth. Under the terms of the agreement, all land and property interests

previously held under separate ownership structures will be integrated and become 100% owned by Chayora, thanks in part to AAREF holding majority of Chayora’s ordinary shares. This includes the land and first data centre building already completed on the 80 acre, 300MVA Tianjin campus. In addition, the company confirmed that it is launching its first colocation data halls designed to Tier III ‘concurrently maintainable international standards’ to accommodate the high demand for smaller scale data storage requirements alongside the build-to-suit services available to both international and Chinese domestic hyperscale cloud service providers. The new facility will be managed in partnership with an unnamed colocation operator.

TRUSTWAVE LAUNCHES CLOUD-BASED CYBERSECURITY PLATFORM FOR SINGAPORE ENTERPRISES Trustwave, the cybersecurity division of Singtel, has launched the Trustwave Fusion platform, a cloud-native platform that delivers its cybersecurity offerings for customers based in Singapore. The platform enables powerful cybersecurity capabilities to address a constantly evolving threat landscape while running completely in-country, adhering to Singapore’s data sovereignty laws and legal regulations. “Enterprises today are challenged not only by skilled adversaries adept at

capitalising on theCapacity smallest vulnerability or gap in defences, they are also contending with stricter regulations on how customer data is handled and stored,” said Toh Lee Chiang, general manager of Asia-Pacific and Japan at Singtel’s Trustwave. “These restrictions can have adverse effects...should a breach occur.” 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 using simple point and click navigation. “The Trustwave Fusion platform is the latest example of how Trustwave continues to push cybersecurity innovation and make security intuitive, scalable and customer value-driven,” added Cathy Huang, associate research director, Services and Security, IDC Asia Pacific.

MC DIGITAL REALTY TO ACQUIRE LAND IN TOKYO FOR NEW DATA CAMPUS MC Digital Realty, a joint venture between Mitsubishi Corporation and Digital Realty Trust, has signed an agreement to acquire an additional plot of land in Tokyo. The deal, which is due to close in the first quarter of 2020, will see the construction of a new site strategically located in Greater Tokyo’s Inzai data centre cluster, in close proximity to the five-acre parcel MC Digital Realty acquired earlier this year, likewise located in the Inzai data centre cluster and expected to support the development of a 38-megawatt facility called NRT10. “Japan is a high-priority market for our customers, and we’re excited to be expanding our footprint in the country,” said William Stein (pictured), chief executive officer, Digital Realty. “The acquisition of additional land in Tokyo capacitymedia.com

will not only enable us to meet the region’s growth in cloud adoption and need for lowlatency infrastructure for new technologies such as AI and 5G but will also bring the benefits of our connected campus model to accelerate the business growth of our local customers.” As part of MC Digital Realty’s Tokyo Connected Campus @ Inzai development plan, the first site to be built on the new land will be a 36MW facility - NRT11, followed by a 30MW facility-NRT12 and an 18MW facility-NRT13, each in response to growing customer demand. “Tokyo is home to a number of leading local and international organizations and remains one of the key data centre markets within the Asia Pacific region and around the world,” added Mark Smith, Managing

Director, Asia Pacific, Digital Realty. “We look forward to strengthening our presence in Tokyo to further serve Japan’s growing digital economy.”

William Stein, CEO, Digital Realty

12 | asia and asia-pacific

BARNEY QUITS AS CEO OF RCOM TO FOCUS ON GCX RESTRUCTURING Bill Barney has stepped down from his previous role as CEO of troubled Indian operator Reliance Communications (RCom), so that he has focus on his other task, as head of RCom subsidiary Global Cloud Xchange (GCX). A statement last night from the two companies said that he will “focus full time at the helm of GCX during its corporate restructuring process”. This process took a new turn last week when GCX officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US. Barney said: “It has been an honour to be entrusted with the leadership of RCom over the past three years. With GCX’s recent voluntary Chapter 11 filing, it will be in

Bill Barney, CEO, GCX

the best interest of both RCom and GCX for me to step down at this time to focus on GCX restructuring. Upon emergence

from this process, GCX expects to be well-positioned to aggressively pursue our business plan independent of the overhang caused by our corporate parent’s challenges.” Legally GCX remains a subsidiary of RCom, but RCom has lost all power and influence over it. The Chapter 11 filing of the US Bankruptcy Code effectively cedes control to GCX’s creditors, which are looking for at least $366 million for the company. But at the same time GCX has put itself up for sale to a private equity or industry buyer – perhaps one prepared to pay more, even as much as the $1.1 billion that, Capacity understands, was being discussed by potential buyers a year ago.

VERIZON AND NEC COMPLETE FIBRE OPTIC POC Verizon and NEC have completed a proof of concept (PoC) that used existing fibre optic cables as distributed optical sensors to collect information on city traffic patterns, road conditions, road capacity, and vehicle classification information. The trial used new optical sensor technology developed by NEC with software supported by artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, companies have had to lay purpose-built fibre very shallow in the ground with fibre at pre-determined intervals to gather and synthesize the information. “This test marks an important milestone for technology that could provide a huge leap forward for those building smart cities and those tasked to manage them,” said

Adam Koeppe, senior vice president of technology planning and development, Verizon. “Instead of ripping up tarmac to place road and traffic-sensing technology, cities will be able to simply piggyback Verizon’s existing fibre optic network.” Capacity Now combined with optical sensor technology from NEC, Verizon is able to use non-purpose built fibre already laid in the ground to gather similar data. Through this partnership, the technology could lead to or improve other solutions that support public functions such as helping first responders detect and respond to gunshots and enhancing the ability of municipalities to detect deterioration of bridges, tunnels and other infrastructure. The trial was carried out using a fibre sensing system that

coexisted with existing Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) communication channels on the same fibre with minimal impact to data communication capacity, making it suitable for deployment even in traffic congested networks. “NEC has a strong history of leadership in the area of optical fibre technology,” added Atsuo Kawamura, executive vice president of NEC. “The results obtained from this joint research program with Verizon are a great advancement for smart city business opportunities, especially for safer city solutions such as the conservation of roads and the utilization of traffic information. We are confident that these cutting-edge solutions will provide meaningful new value for optical fibre networks.”

STERLITE BUYS UK DESIGNER AND BUILDER OF HYPERSCALE DATA CENTRES Mumbai-based fibre and wireless networking company Sterlite has bought a UK company that designs and deploys large data centres. Impact Data Solutions (IDS) specialises in data centre network infrastructure design and deployment, said Sterlite. “The massive growth in data transmission and high bandwidth applications are driving a large need for edge compute and localised data centre, which makes this an extremely attractive space for investment,” said Anand Agarwal, group CEO of Sterlite – also known as STL. Ben Parker, CEO of IDS, said: “Joining the STL global platform will enable us to fast-track our expansion with the quality, scale and breadth of competencies needed to meet our customers’ complex design and deployment requirements.”

STL said the privately held IDS group is a niche solution provider of design and deployment offerings for hyperscale data centres. IDS is a key partner to two of the top four global cloud companies for their data centre connectivity needs – with one relationship extending continuously for the last 10 years. The £12 million transaction is structured to acquire an eventual 100%. STL has acquired just 80% at first, with the remaining 20% to be acquired based on an earn-out model over the next few years. STL said the acquisition solidifies its position in the cloud and data centre market and brings access to two of the top global cloud providers into its customer pool. “It is our endeavour to be more and more relevant to our customers’ data network creation needs across the globe,” said Agarwal. “Ben and team have established

Anand Agarwal, CEO, Sterlite

IDS to be a very strong contender in this space, making this acquisition extremely well aligned to our stated strategy of strengthening our solutions to our cloud provider customer segment, and taking our network services business global.” october/november 2019

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14 | asia and asia-pacific: subsea

SOUTHERN CROSS NEXT CABLE GREEN-LIT FOR DEVELOPMENT

Southern Cross Cable Network (SCCN) has officially announced construction of the Southern Cross NEXT subsea cable is due to begin shortly. The company confirms that conditional agreements have now been signed and regulatory approvals have been obtained.

ASN has been granted CIF to build the new high capacity cable, once complete, will be the lowest latency path from Australia and New Zealand to the US. “The achievement of CIF is the result of a massive amount of effort by Southern Cross and the Sponsor teams over many months on the project,” said Laurie Miller, Southern Cross’ president and CEO. “The addition of the new Southern Cross NEXT route to the existing platform will provide existing and future customers with further resiliency and connectivity options between Australia, New Zealand and the United States. We are delighted to have successfully achieved this key milestone, and all focus will now turn to the timely implementation of the new system, and the continued development of product

enhancements to meet our customers growing and changing requirements.” The announcement also follows an agreement for Telstra to become a 25% shareholder in SCCN, joining existing shareholders Spark, Singtel and Verizon. The shareholders have agreed to release the necessary equity funding to enable Southern Cross NEXT to proceed with additional funding raised from debt and SCCN cash reserves. Although the deal is still subject to some conditions, these standard procedures and expected to be completed over the next few days. Due for completion by January 2022, the new 13,483km, 72Tbps system will also provide critical international cable connectivity to the Pacific Islands of Fiji, Tokelau and Kiribati.

ORANGE, PCCW GLOBAL AND PEACE SIGN AGREEMENT TO DEPLOY PEACE MED Orange, PCCW Global and PEACE have signed an agreement to deploy the PEACE Med subsea cable, making it the first Chinese private cable in France. The news follows the draft agreement that was signed during Capacity Europe 2018 between PCCW Global and HENGTONG Group, which was followed by a landing party agreement between PCCW Global and Orange a few months later. PEACE Med is the Mediterranean section of the larger PEACE cable system. “For Orange, PEACE is a major investment as it will provide greater route diversity, improved connection security and guaranteed support for increased capacity across all regions in the Indian Ocean zone, particularly Réunion and Mayotte,” said Jérôme Barré, chief executive officer, Orange Wholesale and International Networks.

Under the terms of the agreement, Orange will supply and operate the cable landing station in Marseille, linking it to Capacity one of the city’s major data centres and giving it onward connectivity the European Network as well as the Americas thanks to access to the transatlantic network accessible from France. “The PEACE project has been

progressed very well and the equipment manufacturing has been achieved more than 60%. The system will be ready for service on time based on its schedule,” continued Wu Qianjun, vice president of Hengtong and CEO of PEACE. “We are confident that PEACE will provide lowcost capacity for those fast-growing regions and enhance the routing diversity in Asia, Africa and Europe.” Totalling 12,000km in length, PEACE (Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe) will connect France to Pakistan through a single point in Marseille by 2021. The system will use the Europe to Asia route and the city of Mombasa in Kenya via a short route towards the Indian Ocean. In taking this path, PEACE is set to benefit from low latency connectivity and there is also the option to extend to South Africa in the future.

VOCUS ADDS HAWAIKI CAPACITY TO ITS NETWORK AMIDST UPGRADES Vocus has added a large amount of capacity from the Hawaiki subsea cable to its network, alongside a multi-million investment in network upgrades. “Telco battle lines are being drawn at a network level. Our customers demand high-quality services with redundancy that ensures world-class connectivity,” said Mark Callander, chief executive of Vocus NZ and Wholesale and International Australia. “Investments like this greatly improve the quality of service that Australian and New Zealand customers will receive.”

According to CIO New Zealand, the deal with Hawaiki comes at the same time as number of network investments, including the rollout of next-gen optical hardware from Infinera along its Auckland to Hamilton route. The upgrade also allows 200Gbps per wavelength as well as this, Akamai capacity increased 400% with multiple 100G deployments into Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to ensure the network is ready for the Rugby World Cup. Callander also confirmed that Vocus has also seen an increase in bandwidth at its

Vocus Albany data centre, which is largely due to hosting an Azure ExpressRoute at the facility that has boosted capacity to 800Gbps. “Businesses are demanding high performing cloud services and platforms, such as those provided by Azure, and these platforms require world-class networks and continual development and investment if you truly want to unleash their full potential,” continued Callander. “As a telco and network expert, we are dedicated to ensuring our customers get the best service and experience.” october/november 2019

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16 | middle east

NUAGE NETWORKS STRIKES SD-WAN 2.0 DEAL WITH OMNICLOUDS

OmniClouds’ Eid with Nokia’s Lozano

okia has confirmed that its Nuage Networks SD-WAN 2.0 solution has been implemented by OmniClouds to optimise cloud connectivity for enterprise customers in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. The news is set to support enterprises in

the region that are currently experiencing a shortage of native cloud service providers and difficulty reaching public cloud data centres. Under the terms of the collaboration, Nuage Networks will build and operate its SD-WAN 2.0 network, enabling OmniCloud to connect enterprise customers over a large coverage area, connecting all key public cloud data centres with dedicated infrastructure. For its part, OminCloud says that it is focused on easing its customers’ migration to hybrid or full public cloud. “OmniClouds is using Nokia Nuage Networks SD-WAN 2.0 solution as a powerful platform for offering cloud services to MEA regional businesses,” said Roque Lozano, vice president of IP &

optics for Middle East and Africa, Nokia. “It not only manages cloud connectivity, but also automates and simplifies many operations, eliminating any boundaries imposed by the underlying connectivity technology.” “We are the trusted partner of enterprise customers in the Middle East and Africa region when they need help in migrating to the cloud,” added Amr A Eid, chief executive officer and board member of OmniClouds. “The Nuage Networks SD-WAN 2.0 solution plays a critical part in smoothing their move to the cloud by simplifying the operational side and providing the security and assurance they need for such a critical part of their business.”

TELESTAX PARTNERS ZAIN JORDAN ON CPAAS OFFERING Zain Jordan has entered into a strategic partnership with Telestax to deliver Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) offering to organisations across the country. “Zain looks forward to offering expanded CPaaS capabilities to our enterprise customers,” said Fahad AlJasem, chief executive officer of Zain Jordan. “For example, banks need two-factor authentication services now. These omnichannel capabilities enable better and

more secure customer engagement for our banking customers. By partnering with Telestax we canCapacity deliver these needed services quickly and reliably—gaining more business and opportunities with our key accounts.” Through the partnership, Telestax allows Zain to begin offering full CPaaS capabilities such as programmable SMS and voice to its customers. These services include two-factor authentication (2FA) with SMS, voice, and email, SMS account reminders and interactive voice response

(IVR), to name a few. “With Telestax, we are able to hit the ground running,” added AlJasem. “With the training materials and support, we can cut our set-up costs in half, while nearly quadrupling average customer value.” In addition, as part of the Telestax ecosystem, Zain can use support and partner tools like the Telestax CPaaS Playbook to learn best practices and grow their business through focused sales enablement strategies.

ETISALAT, ORANGE AND VODAFONE SETTLE $120M EGYPTIAN INTERCONNECT DISPUTE The Egyptian arms of Etisalat, Orange and Vodafone have settled a 10-year dispute over the cost of interconnecting calls. Amr Talaat, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology, attended the signing of a settlement between the three, negotiated with the regulator, the National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA). The companies used different ways of calculating prices, leading to disputes over sums that the NTRA put at more than two billion Egyptian pounds ($120 million). The NTRA said: “Such disputes have had a negative impact on the stability and clarity of relations between operators in the Egyptian ICT sector, thus representing an obstacle for foreign investors when infusing new investments that can be

harnessed to improve the quality of telecommunication services provided to citizens.”

Mustafa Abdel-Wahed, NTRA

The agreement was signed by Mustafa Abdel-Wahed (pictured), acting executive president of NTRA, with Orange Egypt CEO Yasser Shaker, Vodafone Egypt CEO Alexander Froman, and Etisalat Misr CEO Hazem Metwally. The NTRA said Hossam El-Gamal, the associate minister for networks and ICT infrastructure “held intense meetings over the past months with the disputing parties to reach a compromise and resolve the disputes to satisfy all parties”. It added: “The meetings resulted in an agreement between the parties to sign settlement agreements, as a result of which judicial disputes were ended.” Talaat said: “The agreements will have a positive impact on the investment landscape in the sector, thus reflecting on the companies’ abilities to develop the services provided to citizens.” october/november 2019

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18 | middle east

NOKIA AND ETISALAT TEAM UP TO ACHIEVE MORE THAN 50TBPS IN NETWORK FIELD TRIAL Nokia and Etisalat have claimed a world first with the completion of a single-carrier terabit-per-second (Tbps) field trial. Carried out over Etisalat’s fibre network in UAE the tests sets a new optical transmission capacity record. The trial successfully achieved speeds of 50.8 Tbps using multiple wavelengths, each with a net information rate of 1.3Tbps, over a 93-km fibre route of Etisalat’s wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network. “This ground-breaking trial with Etisalat is testimony to Nokia’s commitment to continue to invest in coherent and optical component technologies required to meet the 5G networking challenge at the lowest total cost of ownership for our customers,” said Sam Bucci, head of optical networking at Nokia. Using a single optical carrier operating at 100 Gigabaud, the terabit wavelengths used

Nokia and Etisalat: Collaborating on the landmark trial

Nokia Bell Labs-pioneered probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS), to intelligently shape the signal to achieve maximum capacity for the specific fibre route. “We are pleased to have partnered with Nokia Bell Labs to demonstrate that our optical network is capable of transporting a terabit per second over a single

wavelength, and a total per-fibre capacity of over 50 terabits-per-second,” added Esmaeel Alhammadi, senior vice president of network development at Etisalat. “Increasing network capacity helps us to provide bandwidth-hungry services such as 5G extreme mobile broadband, fibre-tothe-home and DCI for enterprises.”

ZAIN SET TO BOOST CLOUD OFFER WITH ORACLE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE FASTCONNECT

Henri Kassab: We are decicated to the government and enterprise markets

Zain is to offer dedicated and private access to Oracle Cloud through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect. The company, based in Kuwait, said the deal will boost its own cloud-based

activities that Capacity allow customers to connect their offices and data centres to Oracle’s Cloud over Zain’s international MPLS network with dedicated bandwidth options ranging from 10Mbps up to 10Gbps. Henri Kassab, Zain’s group managing director for international, wholesale and roaming said: “We have identified the government and enterprise market as key strategic customers and we are dedicated to providing them with the latest and most robust tools and solutions for them to go about their businesses successfully.” Zain, which operates in eight markets across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), said its Zain Cloud Connect is an innovative platform that connects customers and different cloud service

providers in a simple and cost-effective way. Kassab said: “Zain has been a pioneering company since inception and so we are proud to introduce another first to the communications sector in the MENA region through the availability of Oracle FastConnect. We believe strongly that innovation is driven by the delivery of cutting-edge solutions, and Zain continues to seek out partnerships with market-leading technology providers to achieve this goal.” Vinay Kumar, VP of product management at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said: “With the FastConnect service, customers can provision the dedicated and private connections they need today and easily scale with their growing business demands.”

STG AND EDCH SOFT LAUNCH A2P MESSAGING INITIATIVE Sudatel Telecom Group (STG) and Etisalat’s Emirates Data Clearing House (EDCH) have confirmed the soft launch of the A2P messaging initiative. The inconvenience of routing international SMS as local by aggregators has led to significant losses to MNOs as their network resources are used for free or at low changing rates, while aggregators make significant profits. “We wish to lead our markets by giving our subscribers a cutting-edge experience and ensure that their critical messages from banks and other vital services are delivered

on time every time,” said Mohammad El Fatih, chief commercial officer, Sudatel. “So we believe through this partnership solution we can identify grey routes, monetise every message that is terminated in our network giving us competitive advantage and regulatory compliance. We also wish to negate spam being sent to our subscribers from illegitimate sources” Using EDCH’s SMS monetisation solution MNOs are able to start generating visible incremental revenue. The goal of the partnership is to maximise the benefits for Sudatel customers and expand this

new business model to its other operating countries. “STG and EDCH aspire to take this partnership in A2P messaging to further heights in creating a unique model for that region,” added Nasser Salim, general manager of EDCH. “We believe that our optimised and bespoke solution which is already disrupting the messaging industry is offering complete transparency in operations, billing and reporting. Another advantage is that we do not demand exclusivity and neither do aggregation creating the no-conflict of interest with mobile operators. october/november 2019

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20 | africa

ENEA PARTNERS CMC NETWORKS FOR NEXTGEN SD-WAN

Marisa Trisolino, CMC Networks

MC Networks has selected Enea’s NFV Access as the software platform for its second generation software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) solution.

The Enea NFV Access is a virtualisation and management platform optimised for deployments on Universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE). It gives CMC Networks’ SD-WAN solution, CMC - Rapid Adaptive Network, with a compact and open virtualisation layer, giving carriers and service providers the flexibility to bring their own Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and build best-of-breed solutions. “We are excited to bring our new solution to market, since SD-WAN is important to make carrier and enterprise customer networks reliable in a region where network access is often inconsistent.” said Marisa Trisolino, CEO, CMC Networks. “Thanks to Enea NFV Access, we can offer the most flexible

SD-WAN service possible, and build a platform from which we can easily extend our customers’ SDN offering beyond SD-WAN, without changing any of the edge-based infrastructure.” CMC Networks’ customer portal and orchestrator are integrated with the Enea uCPE Manager, providing end-to-end management and automation including Zero Touch Provisioning. The CMC - Rapid Adaptive Network is currently available to customers in the African and Middle Eastern region. “We are very proud that CMC Networks, the largest communications service provider in the Middle East and Africa, choose Enea as their uCPE software platform, added Adrian Leufvén, SVP OS business unit at Enea.

MAINONE TO BUILD NEW DATA CENTRE IN GHANA MainOne has announced the expansion of its data centre brand, MDXI, into Accra, Ghana with the launch of a new facility. The news comes as part of the company’s West African expansion plans, building on MainOne’s existing infrastructure and service profile in Ghana. Based in Appolonia City, the new facility is to be a mixed-use development located 20km from the centre of Accra and is due for completion in Q4 of 2020. The facility will meet the growing demand for colocation and interconnection services for multinational and local businesses. “As an organisation committed to providing broadband infrastructure solutions across West Africa, we are excited to make this investment to support the digitisation journey of our customers with the new data centre facility,” said Kazeem Oladepo, regional executive, MainOne. “Over the past few years, we have grown our business in Ghana to serve

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Kazeem Oladepo, MainOne

major enterprises and we are delighted to bring our world-class data centre expertise to deepen the Ghanaian market. The Ghanaian economy continues to build industrial capacity to show strong economic growth and we need to deploy our best solutions to service the market.” The Tier III facility will be constructed on 4,047sqm of land and built to international standards. The 100-

rack facility will give customers the opportunity to host infrastructure in a facility guaranteed to deliver high levels of availability and connectivity to a global network. As with other MDXi’s infrastructure the new facility will feature private data centre suites, enterprisegrade 24x7 multi-level security and video surveillance, precision cooling, safety and fire suppression systems with multiple redundancies built into the power, cooling and security infrastructure. Additionally, the new site will offer open access connectivity options to all the leading telecoms networks in Ghana and direct access to MainOne and other subsea cable systems. The facility will offer access to various Internet Exchanges including the GIX (Ghana), IXPN (Nigeria), LINX (London), DECIX (Frankfurt/Lisbon), and Cote d’Ivoire Internet Exchange (CIVIX), as well as the West Africa Internet Exchange (WAF-IX).

LIQUID TELECOM ‘SET FOR $375M STAKE’ BY SOUTH AFRICAN PENSION FUND South Africa’s pension fund for government employees is likely to take a stake in a Liquid Telecom share offer, according to reports. The Bloomberg news agency said three “people familiar with the situation” have told it that the Public Investment Corporation has set aside $375 million to invest in Liquid’s parent company, Econet, or in Liquid itself.

Such a large share, if it is taken up, will put in the shade the $180 million stake in Liquid Telecom taken last year by UK-based CDC, a development-oriented and government-backed investment group. Reports said that investment gave CDC a 10% stake in Liquid Telecom, which implies the Public Investment Corporation stake might be closer to 20%. Liquid’s CEO Nic Rudnick recently

told Capacity: “CDC likes to invest in high-impact companies, which is also a reflection on the impact that we are having on the countries and communities which are using our network across Africa.” Contacted by Capacity about the report of an even bigger stake to be taken by PIC, a Liquid Telecom official said: “I’m afraid that we are unable to comment.” october/november 2019

africa | 21

AMN LINKS 525 BASE STATIONS ACROSS AFRICA VIA INTELSAT Intelsat has now connected 525 base stations across Africa, thanks to a deal with African Mobile Networks (AMN). The satellite company is using three of its high-throughput Epic satellites and 23 additional satellites to reach AMN’s tower infrastructure. Jean-Philippe Gillet, Intelsat vice president and general manager of networks, said: “Through this partnership, we are now providing access to mobile coverage for the first time to approximately 1.7 million people living in remote communities across several countries that many thought were impossible to connect.” AMN provides network infrastructure on behalf of operators in Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria and Zambia. According to its website it plans to expand to Benin, Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Niger, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda. Michael Darcy, AMN’s CEO, said: “When you close the connectivity gap in

Jean-Philippe Gillet: Intelsat helping to connect 1.7 million people

sub-Saharan Africa, you can bring about significant positive change in people’s lives. Using Intelsat’s technology, our two companies can make that vision a reality.” Gillet added: “As both a global corporation and a global citizen, Intelsat is committed to investing in accelerating the adoption of mobile connectivity in subSaharan Africa – and throughout the world – and closing the digital divide.”

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The companies said that the cost of expansion and geographic complexities in remote rural areas of Africa have made establishing connectivity for the communities, individuals, and businesses in these regions extremely difficult. AMN says it has developed a low-cost solution, powered by a highly reliable small cell solar-based system that can be rapidly deployed in less than six hours.

22 | analysis: africa

TRANSFORMING AFRICA

he African Development Bank has stated that Africa has seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies. A recent article from McKinsey notes consumer spending there is projected to reach $2.1 trillion by 2025 and expects that by 2020, half of all Africans are expected to own a smartphone – up from 18% in 2015. This, in turn, is driving adoption of mobile technology. Africa is in transition, and it is that evolution and transformation that best described this year’s Capacity Africa conference. Welcoming delegates from across the region, more than 250+ executives gathered to discuss the biggest trends in the sector and how best to capitalise on these opportunities. As we know, the network doesn’t exist without the infrastructure to support it and that was precisely the topic of conversation during the keynote panel. Comprised of Craig Lowe, COO of CMC Networks, Oyovwe Okorodudu, assistant vice president of HGC Global Communications, Adil El Youssefi, CEO of Liquid Telecom Kenya, and Peter Nyamukusa, CTO of Wananchi Telecom, the session stated what we already guessed: Africa is in need of infrastructure and lots of it. According to Liquid’s El Youssefi “development of fibre networks is key. While satellite and microwave technologies have its use, it’s not what you build future networks on”. Speaking on the mobile network piece he added that there is a need to “leapfrog and go straight to 4G and other new technologies that can support development”. An often overlooked part of the infrastructure conversation is satellite, according to Lowe there is a role for low earth orbit but there is a need to invest in diverse technologies.

During his presentation, Brian Jakins, regional vice president of Intelsat Africa, echoed this sentiment saying “48% of the world’s population today is not connected to the Internet and 60% of unconnected populations in the world live in rural areas”. According to Jatkins, there are many benefits to including space-based cellular Capacity backhaul to your network planning strategy, including the ability to provide coverage to 99% of the world’s populated areas and distance, topography, even line-of-sight are not constraints. One of the biggest obstacles identified in the deployment of infrastructure on the continent is regulation and the wellknown fact that it is not harmonised. Meaning that it is often a long and arduous task to build cross border systems, a definite turn off to potential investors. In the data centre space, power was brought up as a recurring issue, pinpointing the need for alternative sources of

Development of fibre networks is key” Adil El Youssefi, CEO, Liquid Telecom

energy across the continent, not unlike the Nordics. Interestingly a comment was made that Africa does not have the scale in data centres yet to attract the hyperscalers. They added that hyperscalers typically follow usage and start with initially deploying caching nodes before any full scale builds. During his panel session, Lloyd Mutetwa, head of wholesale and carrier services at TelOne, noted that in his

experience, there was sufficient terrestrial network available but added investment was need in access technologies. He also said that their needs to be more education around cloud to drive usage. On the topic of 5G, it was surprising to learn that it will continue to be a luxury in region for at the least the next 5 years. Aside from the fact that most of the continent has yet to move onto 4G, the use cases for 5G still need to be defined in order to justify its development in the short term. For this very reason, voice still remains prevalent in the region, generating the most money but fibre to the tower is a worthwhile investment due to the dependency on mobile communications in the region. In the subsea space, the continued explosion of submarine cables brings with it not, increased digital opportunities and development for the countries its connects, but all also falling transit prices, that continue to force operators to find new ways of monetising their systems. Additionally, with a slew of new systems in the pipeline from the major OTT players like Google with Equiano cable system along the west coast of Africa and Facebook’s yet to be confirmed Simba cable that will encircle the continent, content continues to be a growing trend on a global scale. Recognising the various opportunities across the continent and not just the wholesale space. Capacity is doing something new for 2020, with the launch of Digital Infra Africa – the only digital infrastructure event on the continent. Made up of Capacity Africa, Datacloud Africa, Women in Telco & Tech Africa, Subsea Africa and more, this new event will encourage collaboration between data centres, cloud providers, content providers & carriers. We hope to see you all there! october/november 2019

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24 | latam

EQUINIX MOVES INTO MEXICO WITH $175M AXTEL ACQUISITION

Jon Lin, Americas president, Equinix

quinix has expanded into Mexico after entering into an agreement with Axtel to acquire three of its data centres in a $175m all-cash deal. The facilities, which serve the Mexico

City and Monterrey metro areas, will help the global interconnection and data centre company expand Platform Equinix to new strategic markets as businesses continue to move IT infrastructure to the digital edge. The news follows an interview Capacity carried out with CEO Charle Meyers in our June/July issue, where he said, “I’ve talked about a number of markets where we see gaps in the platform that we would like to fill over time...We are not in Mexico yet and that’s a market that we’re interested in over the next few years.” Other market opportunities identified to Capacity at the time included India, Africa and an expanded presence in Canada.

LLA TO BUY AT&T’S OPERATIONS IN LATAM FOR $1.95BN Liberty Latin America (LLA) has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire AT&T’s wireless and wireline operations in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands for $1.95 billion. The all-cash deal will enable LLA to offer consumer mobile and B2B services in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, excluding DIRECTV customers. Under the terms of the agreement, AT&T will support LLA for up to 36 months following the acquisition enabling the efficient transition of services. Following the acquisition, customers in the Acquisition Assets will continue to benefit from free roaming services between Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and mainland US, Mexico and Canada. LLA will continue providing leading enterprise services for AT&T’s retained global business customers and support AT&T’s FirstNet program for first responders in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

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Balan Nair, president & CEO, LLA

“This acquisition is at an attractive valuation, in the mid-6s in terms of EV to OCF1 excluding synergies, and consistent with our disciplined approach towards M&A,” said Balan Nair, president and CEO, Liberty Latin America. “With this combination, we will achieve: in-market consolidation with significant associated synergies, expand our product portfolio with the leading post-paid mobile network, add a predominantly subscription-based business, increase our distribution channels on the island and our B2B presence.

The addition of these three facilities in two strategic technology metros in Mexico is part of Equinix’s strategy of extending its global leadership into attractive large-growth markets. “Digital transformation is forcing more businesses to evolve their IT infrastructure from centralised to distributed architectures. Customers are seeking new locations to keep their data in proximity to points of consumption and as a part of this evolution, our enterprise and service provider customers have a strong desire to interconnect at the digital edge in Mexico,” said Jon Lin, president of the Americas at Equinix, appointed in June 2019.

SINCH ENTERS BRAZIL WITH $44.6M TWW ACQUISITION Sinch, a cloud communications provider, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire TWW do Brasil for $44.6 million. TWW is Brazil’s third largest connectivity provider, currently serving more than 3,000 businesses that includes some of the country’s leading enterprises in banking, retail and education. “Sinch has won the trust of some of the world’s largest enterprises through highquality message delivery and international reach,” said Oscar Werner, CEO of Sinch. “The acquisition of TWW further strengthens this value proposition and gives us domestic presence in a rapidly expanding, dynamic growth market.” “The success of our business is built on quality delivery and an unflinching focus on customer satisfaction,“ added Anthony Pain, CEO and chairman of TWW. “Together with Sinch, we can continue our growth journey and launch new products.

SEABORN NETWORKS PARTNERS EDGEUNO FOR MANAGED CLOUD SERVICES Seaborn Networks is expanding its partnership with EdgeUno with the launch of Latin American managed cloud and data centre services. “We live in a results-first world where a product list is no longer of interest to customers. They need customised solutions, and each customer’s needs in this space are very specific,” said Andy Bax, COO, Seaborn Networks. “Seaborn has built a reputation for delivering creative, customer-

centric solutions; and our partnership with EdgeUno integrates our capacity/IP solutions into the bare-metal and cloud computing markets with a level of coverage customers can’t find elsewhere.” Seaborn recently launched IP and SD-WAN networks on Brazil and in collaboration with EdgeUno, a managed service provider, the two companies have deployed unique virtualised cloud infrastructure technology to provide clients

with both physical and virtual infrastructure as a service across the region.

october/november 2019

Capacity

26 | north america

AVAYA PARTNERS RINGCENTRAL ON $500M CLOUD TRANSFORMATION

vaya has entered into a strategic partnership with RingCentral on a new cloud offering worth at least $500 million. Through the exclusive partnership, Avaya will introduce Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral (Avaya Cloud Office), a new global unified communications as-a-service (UCaaS) solution. Avaya Cloud Office, due for launch Q1 2020, expands the company’s existing portfolio to offer a full suite of UC, CC, UCaaS and CCaaS solutions to a global customer base, which includes more than 120,000 customers, “Avaya and RingCentral’s joint investment and commitment to bringing Avaya Cloud Office to market creates an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate the transition to

the cloud with attractive economics for our customers and partners,” said Jim Chirico (pictured), president and CEO of Avaya. “This also gives us the opportunity to unlock value from a largely unmonetised base of our business as it brings compelling value to our customers and partners. We believe this highly complementary partnership is a game changer that expands the total addressable market for Avaya and creates value for Avaya and RingCentral.” Avaya Cloud Office combines RingCentral’s UCaaS platform with Avaya technology, services and migration capabilities to create a highly differentiated UCaaS offering. “This strategic partnership leverages the respective strengths of Avaya and RingCentral to provide a definitive

Jim Chirico, president and CEO, Avaya

differentiated solution,” added Vlad Shmunis, founder, chairman and CEO of RingCentral. “We are excited to bring RingCentral’s leading UCaaS platform to Avaya’s installed base of over 100 million users and over 4,700 partners, providing long-term growth opportunities for both our companies.”

ARYAKA ADDS HYBRID-WAN TO GLOBAL SD-WAN SERVICE Aryaka adds HybridWAN to the company’s global managed SD-WAN service. The new offering extends Aryaka’s global managed SD-WAN solution to sites where paired with Aryaka’s Layer 2 core connectivity and Aryaka’s managed internet connectivity creates a flexible experience. The core option delivers resilient performance for business-critical traffic, while the internet option offers costeffective transport for non-critical traffic, creating an ‘internet-first’ paradigm for enterprise connectivity that tracks the ‘cloud-first’ paradigm for applications.

This also helps enterprises consolidate their Capacity branch appliances resulting in a lower TCO. “For enterprises undergoing digital transformation, Aryaka’s new capabilities further ease SD-WAN adoption by offering flexible WAN connectivity and security options,” said Lee Doyle, principal analyst at Doyle Research. “A managed SD-WAN offering that integrates connectivity, security, application optimisation and multicloud access helps shield the enterprise from operational complexity and increase their WAN transformation ROI.” Aryaka’s HybridWAN is combined with

two innovations to help secure SD-WAN adoption; zone-based firewall capabilities and micro-segmentation in support of multi-tenancy. These innovations are made possible by the Aryaka service, which integrates edge intelligence, security, application optimisation and visibility to deliver a seamless HybridWAN experience to the enterprise. Zones extend Aryaka’s existing northsouth access firewall to east-west, such as separating employee, DMZ and external LANs. Micro-segmentation then extends this partitioning, across the SD-WAN.

QTS, TELIA CARRIER TEAM UP IN ATLANTA QTS Realty Trust (QTS) has announced that Telia Carrier has upgraded its network presence in QTS’ Atlanta Metro mega data centre.

Ivo Pascucci, VP of sales, Telia Carrier

Telia Carrier’s presence in QTS addresses growing demand for high-capacity services in Atlanta and throughout the Southeast including access to international subsea cable landing stations in Miami and Richmond, VA. Telia Carrier’s extensive fibre network and advanced network services further expands QTS’ ability to provide low latency connectivity and reinforces QTS as one of Atlanta’s market leaders based on capacity deployed for hybrid colocation and hyperscale customers. “QTS is pleased to welcome the world’s top ranked Internet backbone to our Atlanta facilities as we continue to expand, adding to our ability to provide a wide range of carrier-neutral connectivity options,” said Clint Heiden, chief revenue officer of QTS.

“Direct access to reliable Internet connectivity and diverse high-speed 100G wavelength services are prerequisites for all businesses in the digital age.” At 970,000 sq ft, QTS’ Atlanta Metro is one the world’s largest multi-tenant data centres and home to some of the biggest brand name cloud companies and enterprises seeking hybrid colocation and hyperscale capacity. It features its own onsite Georgia Power substation and direct fibre access to a wide variety of carrierneutral providers. Ivo Pascucci, VP of sales at Telia Carrier, added: “Telia Carrier is committed to building differentiated global IP and Transport networks that exceed customer expectations, with highly flexible and diverse route options.“ october/november 2019

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28 | north america

DC BLOX PARTNERS MICROCORP TO EXPAND DATA CENTRE SERVICES Data centre provider DC BLOX is partnering with is MicroCorp, a distributor of telecoms, cloud and data centre services, as a part of its channel partner program. As a result of the collaboration, DC BLOX is now an official supplier partner to the MicroCorp ecosystem of partners and MicroCorp was selected due to its extensive Southeastern coverage and strong data centre presence. MicroCorp’s services simplify the purchase and management of telecoms, cloud and

data centre services for business customers through its extensive base of partners. “Adding this strategic data centre provider will significantly increase our partners’ solution offerings to their customers,” said Sean Patrick Tario, VP, MicroCorp Cloud. “MicroCorp looks forward to winning together with DC BLOX.” By tapping into DC BLOX’s footprint which is largely concentrated in the South East of the US in traditionally underserved cities, enables MicroCorp’s partners to use

CROSSLAKE FIBRE SELECTS HYLAN TO BUILD CANADA TO NEW YORK NETWORK

ADTRAN PARTNERS TALKIE COMMUNICATIONS ON FIBRE-OPTIC NETWORK IN RURAL MARYLAND

Hylan has been selected by Crosslake Fibre to support the design, engineering and construction of its Lake Ontario fibre network leg in upstate New York. Crosslake Fibre’s Lake Ontario network is an unrepeated subsea cable system, the first across Lake Ontario to directly connect Toronto, Canada and Buffalo, New York with dark fibre. “Hylan’s ability to be flexible and nimble in mobilising experienced teams in the field nationwide quickly validated them as our partner of choice to complete our North American fibre-optic network,” said Mike Cunningham, CEO of Crosslake Fibre. “We were delighted to leverage Hylan’s full suite of fibre installation services from design to finished product.” Hylan has built 40 miles of fibre-optic infrastructure at the shore end in New York state, which completed the link that provides an alternate route connecting Canada to the US. “We were thrilled to be a part of this historic route that has changed the landscape of fibre optic connectivity across North America,” added Joe Cecin, CEO of Hylan. “Hylan is proud to have partnered with Crosslake Fibre to expand its critical telecoms infrastructure that connects New York to Canada with our proven, turnkey capabilities and customer commitment.”

Mike Cunningham, Crosslake Fibre

Adtran is collaborating with Talkie Communications to build a 100% fibre, 10G communications backbone network along the Eastern coast of Maryland. Once completed, the new network will connect underserved communities in the area and drive overall economic development in the region. “We are rolling out multi-gigabit services Capacity right now in Kent County, where it’s mostly farmers and residents who had no choice before and now have access to the best and most affordable internet thanks to Adtran’s 10G XGS-PON fibre solution,” said André DeMattia, president, Talkie Communications. The news comes as part of a 5-year, $100 million plan to accelerate infrastructure investment in the state and connect hundreds of thousands of residents by 2023, which was previously announced by Larry Hogan Governor of Maryland. “It’s exciting to be a part of these kind

new data centre options for their clients. Additionally, this partnership will expand the DC BLOX channel program. “We are very excited to become a MicroCorp data centre partner,” said Rick Williams, chief revenue officer, DC BLOX. “MicroCorp’s increasing focus and expertise in the data centre market, combined with DC BLOX’s strategic focus on building data centres in Tier 2 cities across the Southeast, will bring significant value to MicroCorp’s partners.”

Mark Ogden, regional VP sales, Adtran

of important community-based economic development efforts to improve lives and spark a world of possibilities,” added Mark Ogden, regional vice president, Adtran. “We see it all over the world, fibre transforms communities and all of us at Adtran are proud to support companies like Talkie Communications by building tomorrow’s networks today.”

HURRICANE ELECTRIC DEPLOYS POP AT WEBAIR NY1 DATA CENTRE Hurricane Electric has added a new point of presence (PoP) at Webair’s NY1 facility in Garden City, New York. The newly expanded network presence will provide Hurricane Electric customers with more roiust connectivity options. We’re excited to be partnering with Hurricane Electric to bring our customers additional connectivity options,” said Justin Moran, vice president of sales at Webair. “Having access to Hurricane Electric’s global network will provide added value to enterprises in our facility.” Webair, a managed cloud-base infratstructure solutions provider, will deliver through its New York data centre, Long Island’s more secure, fully redunant

Tier III data centre. It also features 25,000 sq ft of raised floor space with eight different carriers and multiple points of access to the facilities. The news also marks Hurricane Electric’s 85th PoP in the US and will give enterprises in the New York area with improved fault tolerance, load balancing and congestion management in the delivery of next-gen IP connectivity services. “We are thrilled to be working with Webair to provide performance and flexibility for customers in the New York area,” added Mike Leber, president of Hurricane Electric. “This new location continues to build on our commitment to provide high speed connectivity.” october/november 2019

SPONSORED Q&A: GEORGE SLOAN | 29

CALL TO ACTION: OUR JOURNEY TO FRICTIONLESS COMMERCE GEORGE SLOAN, VICE PRESIDENT OF AT&T, EXAMINES THE STEPS CARRIERS CAN TAKE TO SIMPLIFY PROCESSES, ACCELERATE PROVISIONING TIMES AND OPTIMISE OPERATIONS. Q. We heard you talk at ITW in Atlanta in June. We know you are very energised around the call to action for our industry to reduce the friction in our commerce. What is the background?

Q. What is the API work to which you are referring?

APIs are Application Programing Interfaces. They enable automated communication between systems. Partnering with the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), we are working to build standard APIs for quoting, ordering, trouble ticketing, etc., that can be adopted by the industry. This work is in large part initiated by the Global Leaders Forum (GLF) vision to make commerce between carriers and customers seamless. AT&T and others have partnered with MEF to build the first four APIs which include Address Our customers, not Validation, Site Inventory Retrieval, Quote and Order. The key to just those of AT&T, enabling these APIs to drive fundamental efficiency improvement but the customers of all is for the APIs to become the industry standard and thus avoid carriers in our industry,Capacity carriers building custom interfaces for each carrier with which they are asking for faster do business. provisioning cycle times. Our CIO customers are also being served by Q. What progress has been made? more nascent industries such as cloud computing that are able to provision capacity of In June of this year, AT&T and Colt were the first two carriers processing power and data storage in real time. These same CIOs to announce the use of these 4 APIs in their production systems. want the same real time or near real time provisioning cycle time This first implementation was a key signal to the industry that for capacity from our industry. Yet, today it can take days or weeks standardised APIs have moved from theory to reality. Since the or more for our 100+ year old industry to provision data access June announcement, there are now 12 additional carriers in some capacity, for instance. It’s time for our industry to embrace and form of development to adopt the 4 APIs into their production invest in the journey to frictionless commerce to remain relevant systems. Another 19 carriers are in the first stages of exploring the and meet our customers’ expectations. APIs. Given that the first 4 API standards were defined just 12 months ago, that’s fantastic progress! Q. What needs to be done? What are the priorities? Today, commercial interactions between carriers can be cumbersome. In many cases carriers are using phone calls, emails, and proprietary web portals to quote, order, provision, bill and manage trouble tickets. These interactions are manual, error prone, expensive and slow. The good news is that our colleagues in our respective network organisations are working to build seamless network interoperability through open standards such as ONAP at the OSS layer, which is a key foundation to true capacity on demand. Our priority as commercial leaders must be building frictionless interoperability and commerce at the BSS layer and doing so in a standard fashion. This means we must evolve from manual interactions and proprietary automation to industry standard APIs.

Q. What are the next steps? Our next steps are clear and centre around design and adoption. The Metro Ethernet Forum and its supporting carriers are currently working to design the next set of APIs including delivery notifications and service ticketing. Long term we must build out an entire suite of APIs to automate the full set of commerce between carriers. The MEF and its supporting carriers are working earnestly to design APIs that can be accepted as a standard by most carriers. The more carriers that join the MEF work & invest in the design phase, the more likely the APIs will be acceptable to the majority of the industry. Just as importantly, to drive real change, we must foster broad adoption of these standard APIs across our industry.

Carriers interested in exploring the benefits of these APIs should contact: Aidan Anderson | aidan.anderson@intl.att.com for more information. This article represents a call to action to carriers to join us in both designing and adopting these APIs as our standard as a key step in our journey to frictionless commerce.

capacitymedia.com

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Veon’s impatient manager with high expectations of her team Ursula Burns speaks to Capacity's Alan BurkittGray about how she is leading a radical reversal of her predecessor’s strategy at Veon

eon has reversed the centralisation policy of previous CEO Jean-Yves Charlier and the group is now insisting each of its 10 operating countries makes its own investment cases. At the same time, Ursula Burns, who first became chairman of Veon, then executive chairman, and then chairman and CEO since last year, has pursued a cost-cutting exercise across the group. I met her at the company’s capital markets day in London, where she was addressing investors and advisors about the performance of the company. Annual rate of revenue growth has risen from 3.2% in early 2018 to 7.5% in the second quarter of 2019, she told investors and analysts. But that’s only part of what’s happened in the past six quarters. Since Burns took over as CEO, Veon has completed the sale of its 50% share in Italy’s Wind Tre to CK Hutchison, the Hong Kong owner of the Three/Drei/Tre mobile operations across Europe. And in the last few weeks it has spent

Capacity

$723 million – including a tax bill – on taking over 42.3% of Global Telecom Holdings (GTH), an Egyptian company that controls Djezzy in Algeria, Bangalink in Bangladesh and Jazz in Pakistan. Veon bought most of that group for $6.6 billion a decade ago, when GTH was Orascom Telecom, owned by Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris. What sort of manager is she, this woman who trained as a mechanical engineer and then spent most of her career at Xerox, starting as a new graduate in 1980s and leaving in 2017 as chairman of the board, having also been CEO for many years? She was the first African American woman to lead a Fortune 500 company.

High expectations “I have extremely high expectations,” she tells me. “I can be very impatient. I expect my management team to engage and help us make the right decisions.” And by engage, she means engage vigorously. “I like conflict. I like my team to come forward and I want people to disagree. I have no love for my idea being the best.”

If you’re CEO, says Burns, “you have to have a broader view, a fully integrated view.” As CEO she often sees “a picture that’s more integrated”, but she accepts that if her management colleagues disagree, then “I’ve probably missed something”. She accepts she can be wrong. How often? “At the beginning, once a day,” she smiles. Burns did not expect to be CEO of Veon when she accepted the role of non-executive chairman in July 2017, when the board wanted to bring in external skills after a rocky time. In 2016 the company agreed to pay a total of $835 million in settlement fees to US and Netherlands authorities after admitting it paid huge bribes to enter the Uzbekistan market ten years earlier. Other companies that got caught up in telecoms corruption in Uzbekistan were MTS, Telia and, in addition, Telenor, which had been a 33% shareholder in what was VimpelCom. All the people from that time have gone, but Burns came into the company to help introduce and enforce ethical standards. “Originally I was just a board member, though chairman,” she says, but quickly she october/november 2019

the big interview: ursula burns | 31

1980

Summer intern, Xerox Then advanced through several engineering and management positions

1991

Executive assistant to chairman and CEO, Xerox

1997

VP and general manager, departmental business unit, Xerox

1999

VP of global manufacturing, Xerox

2007

President, Xerox

2009

CEO, Xerox

2010

Chairman of the board, Xerox

2017

Retired from Xerox

2017

Non-executive chairman, Veon

2018

Executive chairman, Veon, and later CEO and chairman

became executive chairman and then CEO, something she didn’t expect when she retired from Xerox. “The only reason I’m doing this was the need for a leadership change at the top. Replacing Jean-Yves was something that was decided.” Charlier was CEO of Veon from 2015 to 2018 and is now executive vice-chairman and CEO of the Digicel group. Veon set about to search for a new CEO, but without immediate success. “Our portfolio means management is very difficult,” says Burns, who took on the role. The management changes have continued, she smiles – rather fast. “My tendency has been to be less patient. I was able to be flexible when I walked into the business because I was not involved before,” she says. As a result, “we have made quite a lot of changes around here”. Burns has replaced five out of 10 managers, “now we will see a fair amount of stability for years to come”. She’s still looking for a group CFO, to replace Trond Westlie, who was due to leave at the end of September after about two years in the role. capacitymedia.com

Digital development She very quickly unravelled Charlier’s plan to centralise its digital development. He had set up a number of centralised development centres, including one just off London’s Old Street roundabout, seen as a hotbed of high-technology. The aim had been to develop what he called a personal internet platform which would be deployed in all Veon operating companies, from Beeline in Russia to Jazz in Pakistan. Burns closed down the London development centre – though there is still a small business presence in the city. She’s also reduced the costs of the Amsterdam headquarters: Veon says it’s on track to halve them by the end of 2019. “One thing I know how to do is run a good business and run it well,” she says. Now the CEO of each operating company has the job of cutting costs and proposing spending plans to the board. “Every CEO has a target for cost intensity,” she says. “This allows us to deploy our capital in the right way across the business.”

I like conflict. I like my team to come Capacity forward and I want people to disagree” Ursula Burns, chairman and CEO, Veon

This is a 180-degree turn on Charlier’s policy. “The way we approached digital in the past was wrong footed,” she says. The company was “trying to deliver a digital platform for the different countries with a big bang approach”. The head office “would write a cheque for $150 million and say, go off and find a home for it”. Now the company takes a market-bymarket approach – which still means technology and ideas can be shared. For example, Beeline has a digital TV service and the company will use the Russian lessons if it wants to offer similar services elsewhere. It offers digital financial services in Pakistan, and lessons from there will inform other operating companies. “There are more of these types of activity,” she says. But “it is very different from the past and the risk is lower”. The overriding principle of the Burns administration is that CEOs have to put a business case to get cash to develop products for their markets. However two of her recent management appointments show Burns is perhaps more flexible than she indicates. In February 2019 she hired Alex Kazbegi, a former banker, as

chief strategy officer; and in September Sergi Herrero, the global director of payments and commerce partnerships at Facebook, became chief operations officer of Veon Ventures, a new unit. Herrero’s role includes both setting up global partnerships and to develop centres of excellence.

Russian cornerstone The biggest of these operating companies is Russia, which accounts for almost half of all Veon’s business. The company calls this its “cornerstone”. Veon is third in the market, “but it is cash generative”, she says. “It is a big piece of our business and we run it fairly well. We are going to invest to improve it. I’m pretty confident about our position.” Then there are four operations that are growth engines – Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. “There’s population growth, there’s technology growth. They are dying for services and they’re dying for access.” Veon’s operating companies in those countries are first in each market, she says. There are five that are classified as frontier markets, the two largest of which are Bangladesh and Algeria. The others are Armenia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Veon is looking here to the future potential. “We invest appropriately. If we see a turn, we will invest more. But we have to be very careful about how we play them,” she says. “We manage them seriously and we expect returns, but they still have a long way to go.” One of the things Veon isn’t doing is 5G, she says. “If anything miraculous happens and it moves faster than we expect then we will look at spending money on it.” And Burns herself, what does she make of her future? She grew up, the child of Panamanian-born parents, in the Lower East Side of New York. She went to high school, where she found herself good at maths and went on to university – at a time when it was rare for a woman to study engineering, still rarer for a black woman.

Diversity challenges She’s a strong believer in diversity, though she admits that this isn’t currently reflected in Veon’s senior management. There’s only one other woman, the chief people officer, on the team and – from their pictures – no other person of colour. She retired once, from Xerox, where she spent 36 years, and planned to offer her experience by taking on non-executive board positions. Burns is on the board of ExxonMobil, Nestlé and Uber. She joined the board of Veon, where she was landed with more responsibility than she expected. “My expectation was not to spend the rest of my life as a CEO,” she smiles. “I’m CEO of Veon until we select the next one. Before I walk out of the door we will have a great CEO.”

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DRAGGING THE INDUSTRY KICKING AND SCREAMING INTO A DIVERSE WORLD Capacity

THE ROUTE TO TRUE INCLUSIVITY AND DIVERSITY IN THE INDUSTRY NEEDS LEADERSHIP FROM THE TOP, SENIOR WOMEN FROM TELECOMS AND TECHNOLOGY TOLD A CAPACITY CONFERENCE. Ç§ REPORTS

f a company is serious about diversity and inclusivity, that policy has to be led from the top. And for that policy to be achievable, women need champions and allies. Speaker after speaker â&#x20AC;&#x201C; from all parts of the industry â&#x20AC;&#x201C; at Capacityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first-ever Global Women in Telco & Tech conference, held in September, made the point that diversity and inclusivity is not just a fair and equitable way of running a company and employing people â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but actually benefits a companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s performance. Gagun Gahir, Telstraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s regional manager for voice, agreed: â&#x20AC;&#x153;It really does need to be led from the top.â&#x20AC;? Telstra itself is â&#x20AC;&#x153;putting inclusivity and diversity into every geographyâ&#x20AC;?. She insisted: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s got to change from the top. What are the actual opportunities that come about from diversity? Companies do better with more gender and ethnic diversity do better.â&#x20AC;? Louisa Gregory, chief of staff at Colt Technology Services, said: â&#x20AC;&#x153;We have a CEO who values diversity. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s very focused on pushing the organisation to do more.â&#x20AC;? That CEO, of course, is Carl Grivner. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hard, though, said Gregory: â&#x20AC;&#x153;We have set five-year targets,â&#x20AC;? though

sometimes they were imposed with â&#x20AC;&#x153;some kicking and screamingâ&#x20AC;?, she noted. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We have an inclusivity and diversity council: itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s at the heart of everything we do.â&#x20AC;? Middle managers are the hardest to win over, said Debbie Forster, CEO of Tech Talent Charter, in a forthright opening presentation. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get people to be inclusive by telling them to be inclusive.â&#x20AC;? People need champions and allies, not just mentors. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We need these powerful allies and champions.â&#x20AC;? It has to be managed from the top, said Carmen Au, software engineering manager at Facebook, the lead sponsor of the conference. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Everyone takes a course in managing inclusion, and what it means to be included in a team.â&#x20AC;? A recruiter, Carrie Charles, CEO of Broadstaff, agreed: â&#x20AC;&#x153;It starts from the top down. The leadership directs the recruiters.â&#x20AC;? But she warned that the way many job descriptions were worded â&#x20AC;&#x153;starts the attrition process. The hiring manager doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need all the boxes ticked.â&#x20AC;? Ingrid Silver of law firm Reed Smith and regional president of the Global Telecom Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Network, noted that â&#x20AC;&#x153;typically 50% of new talent is femaleâ&#x20AC;? but for true gender parity the industry needs to think

about retention as well. What are the benefits? Au of Facebook identified one, to huge applause from the audience at the London conference: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m home for dinner with my five-year-old and two-year-old every single night.â&#x20AC;? Remote working and other factors are important, but â&#x20AC;&#x153;Flexible working? That can be hard to get through middle managersâ&#x20AC;?, said Forster. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not enough to offer flexible working hours, said Telstraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gahir. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We still donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t talk about any of the unspoken biases.â&#x20AC;? Silver retorted: â&#x20AC;&#x153;We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t talk about the menopause.â&#x20AC;? Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something that women still find hard to talk about if they want to work from home or go home early. Au at Facebook observed: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a manager but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not like I have a single woman in my reporting chain all the way up.â&#x20AC;? Lawyer Stephanie Liston interviewed Sonalee Parekh, a banker, on the stage about the reasons there are fewer women at the top. â&#x20AC;&#x153;After maternity leave I went from being on a steep trajectory in my career to being on a plateau,â&#x20AC;? said Parekh. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I left a year or so later. Little comments chipped away and theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re absolutely undermining. You lose the women just at the point at which they can take on big roles. october/november 2019

analysis: gwtt | 33

It’s about finding ways to incentivise us to come back.” Charles of Broadstaff noted how the workforce mix has changed. “More than 80% of technology workforce is millennial and now there are four generations in the workforce,” she said. “I’m 51 – and we’re not retiring as fast as we used to.” There was one all-male panel at the event, chaired by Lara Srivastava, a lawyer and regulator. “We are celebrating the men who championed equality,” she said. Nigel Bayliff, CEO of Aqua Comms, said: “The job of a leader is to make sure you have the widest and the best expertise – and then get out of their way. Everyone on the team is a chief diversity officer.” Aaron Russell, of Facebook’s network investment operation, said the social media company has “36% women of its staff today, but wants 50%. We have a lot of work in the next five years.” But what about the male dinosaurs at the top of a company who are resisting change? “They’ll die out,” said Bayliff. Pay came into the discussions a number of times during the day. Amy Marks, CEO of XSite Modular, a company that designs and builds cable landing stations, said: “Women with MBAs don’t ask. Men get $4,000 more on average. Over a career that means a woman can earn $500,000 to $1 million less.” She noted: “Some women don’t even ask. They don’t know they can. Women ask for raises more often, but men are

aggressive. I just want the money and the job. I’m responsible for a lot of people’s mortgages and their kids.” Mary Clark, CMO of Synchronoss, said: “I want more women leaders with profit and loss responsibility, sitting at the executive table. It’s like a journey up Mount Everest today.” A good reason is that “our consumer is as diverse as it gets”. Yes she is faced with “the same-looking male gender sitting round the table”, she complained. “Are you going to get the growth you want?” Telefónica International Wholesale’s Marta García Lopez agreed: “The inertia is so huge against diversity. Make diversity an everyday topic. It has to be in every meeting.” Clark added: “How do we make sure there is awareness of unconscious bias? I don’t think we talk about it.” Getting there can be a challenge. Alexandra Gartrell, general counsel of SSE Enterprise Telecoms, said: “When you’re in a smaller organisation or a very male dominated organisation, it’s hard to know where to start.” But, “when hiring, that’s the moment to step in and say don’t forget the diverse candidates. We need to move fast but we’re building a diverse team.” Ruth Redding, Capacity VP of Infinera’s operation in the UK, Ireland and South Africa, said: “In the UK there are five women, of whom I’m one. Get your younger female employees excited about the industry – and know that they’re not

Everyone on the team is a chief diversity officer. The dinosaurs? They’ll die out” Nigel Bayliff, CEO, Aqua Comms

more likely to get them.” Asking for more money “is like going to the dentist”, she said. “I’m aggressive. You should not hire me if you think I’m not capacitymedia.com

just surrounded by middle-aged white blokes.” Chandy Ghosh, COO of Inteliquent and founder of Women in 911 US and

Canada, said key performance indicators are essential. “You have to be able to show value at the end.” Regulation is helping, said Clark, who in a previous role worked for a company owned by private-equity investor that was expecting rules on diversity and inclusivity. “They wanted to be told this is the law. I think it’s great that it’s out there.” California is moving this way, said Infinera’s Redding. “Isn’t it fantastic that any company headquartered in California is going to have to be diverse at board level?” she said. “I want to be sure this doesn’t just apply to boards.” There’s a “diversity panic takeaway”, said Tech Talent Charter’s Debbie Forster. The organisation she leads was set up in March 2017 but had already got 400 companies signed up by the date of the Capacity conference. But there’s a lack of information. “No one including government knew who was doing what. We’re getting members to submit data.” That should lead to a benchmarking report, said Forster. She wants a wider remit than diversity and inclusivity. “Don’t fall ill or be injured. Never have any mental health issues. Never have any crisis in your life.” Marisa Trisolino, CEO of CMC Networks, said: “In Australia every company has to set diversity policy. But it’s got to start with people in the company. You’ve got to send the elevator down. If you keep hiring at the rate you do today equality is not going to improve by more than 1%.” She said: “In previous companies people have come to me, saying they’re pregnant and they don’t know how to tell their boss.” Echoing – or confirming – Parekh’s earlier point, she said: “50% of people think that when they come back they will be in a negative position.” She warned: “Make sure you can work from home.” Caroline Puygrenier, director of strategy and business development at Interxion, warned: “Even if we make the right noises, every company I’ve worked for has been male dominated. We are changing slowly but surely. But in 20 years not much has changed.” Even less so in some parts of the world, said Katia Gonzalez Gutiérrez, head of fraud prevention at BICS. “Latin America is still another world. You’re in a meeting and they just look at your male colleagues. Because we are a global company we can spread the word. We have the duty to spread the word.” Speak up, she said: “I am a big believer in speaking up. Whenever I hear any comment that is sexist, I say. If you don’t, sometimes they don’t realise. We really need to speak.”

34 | SPONSORED STATEMENT

EXPERIENCE 2022: TRANSFORM, OPTIMISE, GROW CENGIZ OZTELCANÇĄ Č? Č&#x17D;ÇĄ

End users are operations to cater to the future needs of not just their immediate transforming customers, but partners, enterprises, and end users. This is why we have launched our Experience 2022 strategy the subsea cable industry. In the era at GBI, which is committed to accelerating the delivery of optimised digital experiences for our partners, customers, and of cloud, content, consumers. The strategy will ensure Qatar and the Middle East and real-time have the network infrastructure to support the cloud, content, communications, and real-time communications services of the future. it isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just about Experience 2022 is about using GBIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solid foundation to connecting A to Capacity support long-term innovation locally and across the region, B, but optimising and to consistently deliver for the entire value chain. We are networking preparing for massive data transfer, hyper-sensitive services, and to deliver the delivery of real-time mission-critical applications. differentiated end user experiences. Successful network Our strategy builds on our years of financial stability, a robust operators, now business model and long-term commitment to the market, while and in the future, refocusing infrastructure development by optimising application, are focused on and service experience. It also simplifies our internal processes to going beyond basic better support customers, and partners end-to-end. connectivity to The key features of Experience 2022 are: serve the entire value chain, and meet specialised end-user demands. â&#x20AC;˘ Transforming processes from basic connectivity and The content and over-the-top (OTT) players that have restructuring customer service and support, to enable a superior entered the subsea cable market have taken an active role, and user experience. are pushing existing network operators to refocus on digital experience. â&#x20AC;˘ Upgrading to the latest available technologies, to improve the Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft already have sole, network uptime, minimising outages and ensuring multiple major or part ownership of over 25 unique subsea cables between diverse options. them. These new entrants are behind about 80% of transatlantic cable investment planned between 2018 to 2020, up from under â&#x20AC;˘ Focusing future investments on unique, low-latency and 20% in the 3 years through 2017, according to TeleGeography. differentiated routes. The growing influence of these players represents the need to reprioritise and focus on serving the entire value chain. â&#x20AC;˘ Adopting an adaptive policy of continual transformation. Organisations that fail to understand the importance of end user experience, and do not progress with this industry shift, face Underpinning our approach is our international carrier-grade being pushed out of the market and labelled â&#x20AC;&#x153;legacy providersâ&#x20AC;?. fibre-optic network. It includes a mix of submarine cables At the same time, emerging technologies like the Internet of systems and terrestrial infrastructure, connecting financial and Things (IoT), Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Smart communications hubs across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, City innovations, are all driving capacity demand, and network and Asia. operators will need to go beyond â&#x20AC;&#x153;best effortâ&#x20AC;? connectivity. Experience 2022 will enable our partners, customers and end Network operators locally in the Middle East, and across users to have the freedom to deploy and use mission-critical the globe must be prepared for these future technologies to applications and services, with the best possible user experience. reshape the networking market and transform their businesses GBI is dedicated to removing the barriers to innovation in the accordingly. Middle East and supporting the growth of global cloud, content The winners in our industry will be the operators that make and real-time communications. concrete plans to evolve their businesses and reshape their

capacity

october/november 2019

| 35

WITH THE WORLD UNDER PRESSURE TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE, WHAT ARE THE TELECOMS AND DATA CENTRE INDUSTRIES DOING TO HELP? GUY MATTHEWS EXAMINES WHO IS DOING WHAT TO CUT EMISSIONS AND SAVE POWER.

he world is increasingly dependent on critical data infrastructure, driving demand for more data centre capacity as well as faster networks to move data around. Traffic volumes are set to reach something in the ballpark of 25 zettabytes by 2025, four times the levels of 2016. More data obviously equates to higher demand for electricity to power and cool the infrastructure that manages the flow of information. In fact forecasts indicate that within five years, one fifth of the world’s electricity could be consumed just in powering our data centres. So what does this mean in terms of environmental impact, given that data centres and associated connectivity already account for something like 3% of all carbon emissions? New approaches are needed and they are needed fast. For a start, it’s time to rethink where we locate infrastructure, argues Mattias Fridstrom, vice president and chief evangelist at Telia Carrier. “We saw an opportunity up here is the Nordics,” he says. “We know that data centres need cold air. They need renewable power – from hydro, sun, wind. We’ve got all that, and also have no earthquakes and a fairly stable political climate. We saw Sweden, Denmark and Norway all remove tax on data centres to get them to locate up here. That’s probably the most positive impact that carriers and data centres can have – moving facilities to where they should really be. We’re seeing a movement towards the north of Europe by people like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.” Network operators, he admits, have their part to play: “In the carrier world we need to make sure our networks are going to these less convenient places,” says Fridstrom. “You can’t put a data centre capacitymedia.com

where there’s no connectivity.” How data centres are built matters too. Alessandro Bruschini is infrastructure manager with Italian data centre operator Aruba S.p.A whose most recently opened facility, IT3, runs entirely on green energy, produced on-site. Capacity “As around 40% of the total energy data centres consume goes into cooling IT equipment, alternative modes of cooling, such as natural cold-water cooling, can help them reduce one of their main energy expenses,” he claims. “Through on-site power generation, such as photovoltaic or hydraulic power, data centres should be able to reduce not only their carbon footprint but also their energy bill.” Gavin Murray, regional director of data centre engineering and operations, EMEA at data centre operator Rackspace, agrees that newer cooling technologies will have a radical impact: “One approach is liquid hardware cooling, which involves chilled water entering the cabinets in the data centre cooling design,” he says. “This reduces the distance between the cooling system and the data, decreasing the need for data centre air conditioning and making the cooling process more energy efficient. Another approach is outside air-cooling technology. This highly efficient method uses outdoor air to cool data centres, considerably reducing the total energy consumption, and it has the potential to provide a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.15, compared to the average data centre rating of 1.7.” Ian Whitfield is CEO of ENGIE Impact, a specialist in helping companies with sustainability transformation. He believes that data centre operators have a growing range of tech advances at their disposal: “Newer IT equipment, for

example, has a higher operating temperature, so less energy is required to mechanically cool it,” he says. “Google has dropped its energy usage by 50% since 2014 through advance temperature management practices and, while the average data centre provider can’t invest to the extent Google has, it sets a great industry standard to work towards.” Less power-hungry compute power is clearly a piece of the jigsaw. For Kevin Deierling vice president of marketing with Mellanox, a vendor of Ethernet and InfiniBand intelligent interconnect products, the solution lies in deploying better technology inside the data centre: “One key way to combat global warming is by making data centre more efficient because if you can use fewer computers to do more work, than the carbon impact will be smaller,” he explains. “The network that connects all the computers together in the data centre plays a large role in the efficiency of the data centre. Using high performance, high bandwidth interconnect actually makes the data centre compute

Google has dropped its energy usage by 50% since 2014 through advance temperature management” Ian Whitfield, CEO, ENGIE Impact

Image: Adobe Stock

The climate question

36 | feature: climate change

more efficient. Because after all from a data centre energy consumption perspective the best computer is the one that doesn’t need to be installed, because the other computers are running more efficiently.” Eltjo Hofstee, managing director with hosting company Leaseweb UK, agrees that better technology generally makes for a better environment: “A solution to achieving sustainability is virtualisation,” he suggests. “This enables IT teams to fully utilise the capacity of a physical server, which means in most cases you can run the same environment on less physical servers, without performance decrease. Newer servers also use less energy, which is why Leaseweb is investing significantly in newer models as a way to reduce overall energy consumption.” It is an inconvenient truth however that some technology designed to promote efficiency is counterintuitively accompanied by a higher carbon overhead. Tate Cantrell, chief technology officer with Icelandic data centre operator Verne Global points out that more and more, companies are turning to AI and machine learning applications to drive innovation: “Behind the scenes, this is ramping up demand for cloud optimised data centre facilities,” he fears. “Yet, the environmental impact of this trend is all too often left out of the picture. The machine learning training processes behind AI applications require an enormous amount of energy in order to function, and if the power-hungry machine learning applications are housed in fossil-fuelpowered facilities that do not take a forward-thinking approach to environmental sustainability, a company’s green credentials are quickly voided.” Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall has a liquid immersion cooling system to mitigate the power demands of high

New ways of reducing carbon emissions are emerging” performance computing (HPC), and an onsite array of solar panels that can support the data centre’s full power requirements of 500KW with local wind power to be added to the mix shortly. Chris Roberts, head of data centre and cloud, says the use case for HPC, AI and machine learning is often altruistic, including researching ways of reducing the impact of climate change and improving crop yield: “The irony is that it takes high performance computing with a high carbon footprint to undertake this intense processing,” he says. “While some organisations pay lip service to the issue with carbon offsetting, this is not enough. Fortunately new ways of reducing carbon emissions are emerging.” Owen Pettiford, data expert at data migration specialist Syniti, believes that one Capacity such way lies in simply managing data better: “It is clear that data processing needs optimising,” he says. “Computing power is needed to collect, prepare, analyse and store data, so, when data comes in large volumes and is poorly managed, it is extremely costly for the environment. Care must be taken to ensure data is of pristine quality in the first instance. Businesses should formulate a solid data governance, conduct an audit into the relevance of their data and ideally employ data advocates to maintain data cleansing is at the top of employee’s agendas.”

Something has to give, simply because customers want it that way. Tesh Durvasula, president, Europe with CyrusOne, a real estate trust that invests in carrier-neutral data centres, says customers are putting a lot of pressure on data centre providers to be more efficient and provide services that are sustainable and costeffective in the long-run: “Even as we work to getting power efficiency under control, the data centre industry must continue to develop initiatives and technologies to reduce our impact on local communities,” he says. The power industry has its part to play. Vincent de Rul, director of energy solutions at EDF Energy, says data centre managers should look at alternative ways to reduce their energy consumption by understanding exactly when and where energy is being used: “By using real-time monitoring to understand live energy usage, managers can identify simple steps which can help them make significant energy savings, in turn reducing their carbon emissions,” he says. In a recent study analysing over 4,000 businesses, he says EDF Energy found that these firms could unlock over £45million in savings per year by making simple energy changes: “But there are not only monetary savings to be had,” he concludes. “These energy savings would also have a significant environmental impact, and could save over 147,671 tonnes of CO2 per year. To put this into context, it’s the equivalent to the amount of CO2 offset by more than 3.6 million square metres of woodland, or the environmental cost from 80,256 flights between London and Sydney.” An equally long distance lies ahead for the IT and connectivity sectors if they are to pull their weight ecologically. But there is clearly scant time for that ground to be covered.

What is the tech sector doing for the environment? • A coalition comprising the UN Global Compact, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and the We Mean Business project has coordinated a pioneering group of 28 companies, including carrier names such as BT, Singtel, Telefónica, Telia and Vodafone, and persuaded them to commit to more aggressive climate targets. All have agreed to play their part in keeping global temperature increases within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and reaching net-zero emissions by no later than 2050. • As part of the SBTi initiative, the GSMA has developed a mobile industry climate action roadmap in line with the Paris Agreement. More than 50 mobile operators,

representing around two thirds of mobile connections globally, have agreed to disclose their climate impacts, energy and greenhouse gas emissions, enabling full transparency for investors and customers involved in the mobile sector. • Telia Carrier has entered into a partnership with EcoDataCenter, the world’s first climate-positive data facility. Under the terms of the partnership, EcoDataCenter customers will have access to the full suite of Telia Carrier services, all while hosting their data with EcoDataCenter. Located in Falun in Sweden, the site uses 100% renewable power, and its electric and cooling systems have been built for the highest energy efficiency.

• Italian carrier Sparkle has adopted stateof-the-art energy efficient equipment at its Istanbul Data Center. Several energyrelated interventions have been carried out to improve the centre’s environmental sustainability, reliability and efficiency while providing additional power and space to new and existing customers. • Microsoft has established an experimental data centre in the sea off the coast of Orkney to investigate whether energy efficiency can be maximised. The white cylinder has been built to sit on the sea floor for up to five years, and is connected to the shore for power and the transfer of data.

october/november 2019

Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s talk about blockchain.

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38 |

Cinia moves full speed ahead with Arctic Connect As Cinia’s Arctic Connect cable is finally given the green light, Capacity speaks to Aki Uljas, business development director and Eeva Liljanto, director of Capacity international sales, When we have built this cable, Europe about the project is going to be one hop away from Asia. That will open up lots of new opportunities” Aki Uljas, business development director, Cinia

ast year Capacity reported that Cinia was embarking on an ambitious cable project, Arctic Connect, a 18,000km system still in development stages that will connect Europe, Asia and the US. Once built, the $700 million cable will offer capacity of between 10 to 24Tbs per fibre pair, with a total of 6-8 fibre pairs and branching units to connect various landing points along its route. At the time Capacity spoke to Ari-Jussi Knaapila, president and CEO of Cinia, but giving us an update this year at the Subsea EMEA in July was Aki Uljas, business development director and Eeva Liljanto, director of international sales at Cinia. The most recent announcement in early June 2019 was the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that the company entered into with MegaFon for Arctic Connect. Speaking to Uljas, the deal marked a change in the project with the participation of a leading Russian carrier. “We’re not in Russian territorial waters with the cable but we are in their continental shelf, so you can’t do this

project without the Russians,” he explains. “The purpose of the MoU is that we will establish the project company, our joint venture with MegaFon.” “MegaFon are the second largest and one of the most interesting players in the Russian telecommunication market at the moment,” he adds. “They have more than 200,000 km of fibre network, 69,000 base stations and have won the Ookla Speed Test for mobile networks, for the third year in a row. It’s a major player in the market. Finding a Russian partner was one of the key tasks for Cinia so having MegaFon on board is a major benefit to the project. “It was a big task convincing the Russian players that this is actually not competing with their terrestrial business. It’s complementary – as it’s serving a different market,” Uljas says. “Yes, and actually, it could create an interesting ring to support their network, if you look at the Arctic and its terrestrial links,” adds Liljanto. One of the biggest drivers behind the Arctic Cable project according to Uljas has been new connectivity and route diversity.

Although the system has some latency benefits that’s not where the emphasis is being placed. Although, neither Uljas nor Liljanto are downplaying the potential for new business opportunities once the system finally goes live. “When we have built this cable, Europe is going to be one hop away from Asia. So I think that will open up lots of new business opportunities.” “Since we started working on this initiative, there’s been quite a large interest from the Asian market,” adds Liljanto. As a part of the One Belt, One Road initiative, the two share that China Telecom has expressed in the news that it is heavily interested in the Arctic Connect cable system. Though regional specialists, there are a number of unique challenges that come with building a cable in the Arctic from a technological perspective – namely ice. “We have a lot of ice management,” says Uljas. “We have at least about 3,000km of ice to deal with. There is multiyear ice and seasonal ice. Multiyear ice is ice that has survived at least one season. Seasonal ice varies every year and more easily navigable, allowing operating mostly in open waters october/november 2019

the big interview: aki uljas, eeva liljanto

Now that operating season starts approximately in July.” The company works alongside the Finnish Meteorological Institute, which assists Cinia with global ice predictions and forecasts how things will develop or change in the future. “Also Arctia, which is the Finnish ice-breaking company, have been sailing through both the Northeast and Northwest Passage. So they have a lot of knowledge on what actually has been happening there, what kind of capabilities you need to have operating over there,” he explains. As attendees of the 2019 Subsea EMEA event in Marseille, one the big topics this year was the growing interest the Nordic region from a connectivity perspective. As a company based in the region I was curious to know why they thought this was and where the interest stemmed from. Having data centres in the Nordics, has less environmental impact. I think that’s really the key issue,” says Uljas. He explains that in warmer climates you have to use water to cool down the chiller, which is not an environmentally friendly way of cooling your data centre especially considering the wastage? “I like to think of all data centres like heat transformers. You put electricity in and you get heat out. In Finland and in the Nordic market, there’s actually a market for the excess heat. We can heat housing; we can heat the water.” “We have actually some energy companies in Finland who already use the excess heat from the data centre for other things,” adds Liljanto. “I think the environmental organisations are starting to look quite deeply into the data centre because they’re consuming a lot of energy,” Uljas says. As a solutions provider, Cinia benefits from a unique relationship with the carriers and OTT players, a relationship that Uljas says is no different than the one carriers have with each other. And that OTTs are keeping the market alive. “OTTs are somewhat dominating. But then again, I think they are enabling the growth at the moment. We have a lot of new development, partly thanks to them.” One possible model for future development, according to Uljas, is public-private partnerships. “I think public-private partnerships with OTTs also on board might be the way forward. So you need to have the government as well as the carriers and the OTTs,” he says. With the Arctic Connect cable only just entering the stage of becoming a fullyfledged project, there is undoubtedly a long road ahead for the company. “The roadmap right now is to launch the desktop study for permitting,” saysUljas. capacitymedia.com

| 39

Capacity We are partnering with the Russian carriers and we have interconnects at the Finnish-Russian border” Eeva Liljanto, director of international sales, Cinia

“We hope to complete this as soon as possible so that we can start the permitting, which takes about nine months. This is a completely new project, which nobody has done this before, so we should not be in a rush to complete this. If we need to push it one year further, that’s totally fine, because there are so many things that need to be taken into account that we should not rush into things.” When it comes to Cinia’s existing networks such as the C-Lion system, a 1,173km, 120Tbps cable, which connects Finland and Germany, the Arctic cable has generated added interest towards this older systema and Finland in general. “So we are of course trying to capture that business opportunity to run up more customers on C-Lion” explains Liljanto. “We are extending our network to Sweden, so we then have an opportunity to also provide a diverse route from Finland through C-Lion via Sweden to Europe. So we are currently offering our services through our own platforms in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam and soon in Stockholm as well.”

But that’s not all the plans for Cinia in the subsea space, since the success of C-Lion1, Uljas shares that the company is “looking at opportunities of adding another cable as well in the Baltic Sea.” Interesting as our interview draws to a close Liljanto mentions the opportunity for Cinia to offer services as part of offering, a type of ‘one-stop-shop’ so to speak. “We are partnering with the Russian carriers and we have interconnects at the Finnish-Russian border,” she explains. “This enables us to support customers who want connectivity to Russia or through Russia to Asia and vice-versa.” Overall Cinia is building a portfolio of solutions to meet as many customer demands as possible.“ From a technology perspective, through our C-Lion system, we provide dark fibre, Layer 1, Layer 2 and Layer 3 services. From a capacity perspective we have seen a growing demand for larger bandwidths. As well as the latency benefits that our direct route between Central Europe and Northern Europe through C-Lion1 offers," says Liljanto.

40 |

LINX takes first steps into Saudi Arabian IX market As it celebrates its twenty fifth anniversary, the London Internet Exchange is working with STC to set up an IX in Jeddah. Alan Burkitt-Gray interviews new CEO Kurtis Lindqvist about what makes LINX Capacity different from most companies in the industry

new collaboration with STC to build an internet exchange in Saudi Arabia could become a model for further partnership projects in other parts of the world. The London Internet Exchange – better known as LINX – is just celebrating its twenty fifth birthday with a raft of international announcements. The STC project is one, and another is a partnership with AMS-IX in Amsterdam and DE-CIX in Frankfurt to develop a common application programming interface (API) that will allow users to self-manage their existing and new interconnection services. These initiatives take place under the watch of a new CEO, Kurtis Lindqvist, who is now in charge of LINX after the internet exchange (IX) was run by John Souter for almost two decades. Like Souter, Lindqvist is an internet veteran, in the business since the 1990s. He joined LINX as CMO in 2016 after a long spell with Netnod, the Swedish IX. He’s talking to Capacity just a short time into his new role in the company.

First, though, what’s his real name? It’s officially Kurt Erik Lindqvist, but “it’s been Kurtis as long as I can remember”, he tells me. LINX is different from many IXs and from most other companies in the internet world. Its owned by its members as a not-for-profit organisation, able to focus on investing service and membership fees into strengthening all LINX network services. This is one of the features that attracted Lindqvist to LINX. He tells me: “LINX is a unique company in that it doesn’t have shareholders or equity. You get a much clearer idea of where it is going. You have to do things where they are needed.” Does he expect any changes as he succeeds Souter in the CEO role? “No, we have a very clear sense of direction, and we will stay true to it. I see it continuing in this way.” He adds: “I’ve always been fascinated with LINX and the membership aspect of it. I’ve always appreciated LINX’s ethos.” The company is “three times the size of Netnod”, he points out. During the almost 14 years he was there Netnod grew from a

local IX to become the fourth largest European IX, with a global customer base and a global DNS service portfolio. At the same time he was an active adviser to the Swedish government, advising ministers on data retention and IT strategy in general. He has also been active with the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) – as well as representing Netnod in a number of policy forums. He notes on LinkedIn that we was “one of Netnod’s representatives to the National Telecommunication Cooperation Group, the joint crisis management group of Swedish operators run by the Swedish regulator. Despite its name, LINX reaches much further than London. “We are in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff,” he says. In the US, “we have our own presence in northern Virginia”. He adds: “We have a wide international aspect. Now 850 networks in 82 countries are connected to LINX.” And, of course, “we’ve just launched a collaboration with STC in Jeddah”. This is an intriguing october/november 2019

the big interview: kurtis erik lindqvist | 41

1992

Founder, Alandia On-line

1996

Founder, Ålands Telekommunikation

1997

Technical director, Sweden

1998

IP networking engineer, KPNQwest

2002

CEO, Netnod

2004

Chairman, Euro-IX

2016

CMO, LINX

2019

CEO, LINX

as a key hub for telecoms connectivity. Is this possibly the first of many partnerships – or at least a number? “We’d be open to similar partnership projects,” says Lindqvist. “But we need to add value, not compete on price. We need to build on the ethos of LINX.” What is this ethos? It’s hard to define precisely, but it is part of “the role LINX plays with its members and the community – the role of a neutral player, not taking sides”, says Lindqvist. “Members really value this neutrality. The membership trusts LINX to continue to do this in their own interest.” It’s all to do with trust, and “trust can be a very transient thing”, he warns. “We connect to each point, and you have to be able to trust us.” As a not-for-profit company LINX does actually make a tiny profit – just around 1% of its 2018 turnover of £15.8 million, with £11.9 million kept as retained earnings. Lindqvist observes: “We are not driven by short-term financial gain, so we are not

LINX is a unique companyCapacity in that it doesn’t have shareholders or equity

Kurtis Lindqvist, CEO, LINX

project. JED-IX, the Jeddah IX, will be run by STC, but with LINX’s advice and guidance. “We were approached by them,” says Lindqvist. “They wanted knowhow. It’s a very exciting project and has massive potential. STC operates in a large country in terms of population and has high internet usage. “It’s an interesting market.” The IX will serve as a neutral internet traffic exchange platform interconnecting global networks in the Gulf region. LINX will offer its expertise to support the operation of JED-IX as it offers services to network operators and content providers in the Gulf from a fully redundant switching platform located in an STC data centre in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. At the time of the JED-IX announcement in December 2018, Souter said: “The exchange will allow networks to stop ‘tromboning’ traffic to London and back again, and will help increase resilience by creating a new centre for interconnection in the KSA.” The partnership is part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, which seeks to establish the country capacitymedia.com

driven by results. Members expect us to run a very stable, and financially efficient, operation, and at a price point – so it’s a scale business.” Over the 25 years since it was set up LINX has cut its prices “in every year but two”, he says. That, he notes, is an example of what LINX has been able to do by being a not-for-profit company. “Prices have dropped 10-15% year on year.” That creates a return for members. Overall, “the value this provides is bigger” that if LINX were a conventional for-profit company, he argues. Would the members ever think of selling, either to an established commercial operation or to a private equity investor, for example? Lindqvist gives a resounding no to that question. “If we were sold, we’d have different objectives, and trust might not be part of that,” he says. “Trust is something we have to have. There will be no sell-off. I do not see private equity taking over the company.” He adds: “Either a company has this background or it doesn’t. It’s not a question

of allegiance, but you have to have respect for the company.” Nevertheless LINX has to survive in a changing market. “There is transformation and disruption. We have ethics and there is still room for manoeuvre. It’s not going to be a revolution.” Does he have a whiteboard on his wall listing objectives? “I don’t have a wall chart,” he says. He gives an example of how the market is changing. “When we started, 85% of the traffic went to single servers in the US,” he says. “Now 85-95% doesn’t leave the access network. That’s a massive change in the industry. And that’s going to be a change for me to work on. There’s a challenge, but from the market, from outside LINX.” In most ways, LINX operates pretty much like any other company in the market, “except there are no stock options”, he notes. “But otherwise it’s no different to work for.” So how did Lindqvist get into this business? “I started by founding my own internet service provider in the early 1990s with a friend.” This was Alandia On-line, based in Åland, a group of islands off the south-west coast of Finland where the main language is Swedish. In the late 1990s he moved to the Swedish operation of EUnet, an early commercial internet access company. That was bought by US telco Qwest, which formed an ill-fated joint venture with KPN, the Netherlands incumbent that was then expanding worldwide. But KPNQwest went spectacularly bust in 2002, at a point that it was carrying 50% of European IP traffic. “I was there until the end,” recalls Lindqvist. But he was quickly hired by Nednod, “the internet exchange in Sweden – and I stayed there until I moved to LINX”, he says. “I’ve always been involved in network engineering, standards, the IETF and advising the Swedish government.” And, now, it’s party time. LINX carried its first traffic on 8 November 1994, and on 11 November this year it has a “members’ meeting to mark the 25th anniversary, with friends from the industry. That’s going to be the big celebration,” he says. “There will be key speakers from the early days of the industry, people who built the data centre industry in the UK.” And the future? “There are 5,000 networks with AS [autonomous system] numbers in the UK – but only 350 are members,” he says. That’s plenty of scope for growth. “Having a wide diversity of members is an attraction of LINX. London has long been the hub for transatlantic capacity, linking Asia, the Middle East, Africa and subsea cables. South American networks come into London, and there’s a lot of interest in these international segments.”

Aqua Comms: The Trans-Atlantic Specialists

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SPONSORED STATEMENT | 43

NGOF PRESENTS MOVES TOWARDS ALL OPTICAL NETWORK AT ECOC 2019 At the end of a busy week at ECOC in Dublin, delegates packed into a large room for the opening session of the ON2020 workshop. ECOC is the largest conference and exhibition on optical communications in Europe and ON2020 is an IEEE Industry Connections Activity that provides a forum for operators and optical solution vendors to share visions and develop technology roadmaps and evolution scenarios to ensure the right solutions are available. This first session consisted of a series of presentations from NGOF (the Next Generation Optical network Forum). NGOF was formed in China towards the end of 2017 to drive the optical innovation needed for the 5G and cloud era. NGOF is growing rapidly and now has more than 50 member companies, Capacity up from 26 in September 2018, including leading carriers, equipment suppliers, test instrument vendors and semiconductor vendors. These companies are both Chinese and international. Changliang Zhang, representing the NGOF core team, explained that they had formed five technology working groups covering 5G transport, optical modules for metro applications, cloud and private line bearing, high-capacity WDM technology and submarine transmission. 5G is seen as a key technology driver requiring a mix of technologies to support 5G front haul and 5G back haul connections. Next generation OTN and WDM are required to a look at the solutions for low cost WDM in metro applications support both 5G transport and metro and long-distance transport that include both coherent and direct detect options. The infrastructure. These are the top priority topics in NGOF together coherent solutions could use CFP2-DCO, OSFP or QSFP-DD with cloud and private line bearing technology. NGOF provides modules or a specially developed alternative. a platform for members to exchange ideas, discuss requirements The workshop session concluded with a presentations from He and trigger innovations. Changliang Zhang emphasized that Zhang from China Unicom on OTN for cloud and private line the NGOF is open to all members with a common mission and bearing and a presentation from Lu Liu from the China Academy welcomes potential cooperation with other organizations. of Information and Communication Technology on optical Anxu Zhang from China Telecom was representing the NGOF modules. He Zhang explained that the requirements for private High Capacity WDM Transmission System working group. Anxu line networks are changing significantly with cloudification and Zhang started his presentation with a review of the emerging demands for high bandwidth, low latency and rapid provisioning services that bring challenges, including high bandwidth, low in many applications including hospital, government and finance latency and network cloudification, to the optical network and networks. NGOF has developed a five-star specification for then went on to discuss many of the solutions being proposed and premium private lines that will help ensure solutions meet these implemented. Developments already happening include 200G needs. The best solution for premium private line is seen as being long haul, 400G DCI, a shift towards all optical networks using based on a combination of SDH, OTN and packet technologies. ROADM mesh connections and solutions to bring OTN and The next-gen OTN standard is also being discussed in NGOF, WDM to the edge. which will introduce smaller granularities for switching compared Anxu Zhang presented recent field trials of 200G WDM, with current OTN technology. The NGOF expects this new reaching 1,142km using 16QAM modulation and 50GHz OTN standard to provide a more flexible business-oriented channel spacing and 2,174km using QPSK and 75GHz channel container to better address the enterprise market. spacing. He also presented all optical, ROADM-based, solutions This session provided a great overview of the work being done for example backbone and metro network applications in China. within NGOF and an insight into some recent developments The NGOF High Capacity WDM Transmission System working in China. All the presenters emphasised the importance of these group is developing several solutions to extend long haul spectrum developments and the benefits they can bring within China and bandwidth. These include extending the 4THz C band to 6THz more widely through cooperation with other organisations and (C++ band) and using C+L bands. Anxu Zhang concluded with companies. capacitymedia.com

44 |

Telstra: Enabling Connectivity Capacity’s Jason McGee-Abe caught up with Oliver Camplin-Warner, head of Telstra International, to hear how the carrier is increasingly helping to boost connectivity in today’s fast-paced Capacity digital age

amplin-Warner, who joined Telstra just over seven years ago, took over the reins of the international business last year after Ellie Sweeney departed the role of executive director of global international sales. Sweeney subsequently became COO at Vocus Communications in March 2019 and Camplin-Warner has really hit the ground running. He previously led Telstra Enterprise’s major accounts team and the firm’s government sales team. His first role was in operations, where he led a team of about 2,500 technicians and a similar number of contractors. The former IBM man tells me that the international business is one of the company’s “critical growth areas” and it’s clear that he’s relishing the work across 20 countries around the world. “Telstra International enables so many things around the world, whether that be Stock Exchanges, banks, individuals on social media, manufacturers, or people sitting on their sofas at home watching TV,” he says.

“What we enable day in and day out makes me so proud. I’ve got one of the best jobs in the world and I talk with real pride about working in telecommunications.” And he certainly does. He also believes that some people in the industry take the carrier and wholesale function for granted, stating: “We don’t blow our trumpet as loudly as we should in regards to the integral work we do.” Speaking to me from his Hong Kong office, this sentiment is clear as the family man describes a recent occasion when he saw a lady visually communicate through sign language to two other people via her phone. “It’s amazing to think that we help to make that call possible.” Camplin-Warner has full P&L accountability of the international business, which is in effect everything outside of Australia. Telstra’s international business is an AUD $1.8 billion one, operating in 20 countries and working with around 1,000 customers. It sits under the enterprise business, which has revenues in excess of AUD $3 billion per annum. Telstra International has over 400,00km

of cable, access to over 2,000 points of presence (PoPs), and owns and operates the largest intra-Asian subsea network. “My focus today is on how Telstra can help its customers quench their hunger and real thirst for capacity,” CamplinWarner tells me. “Whether that be for the financial or manufacturing sectors, the thirst for capacity is relentless. The demand that we’re seeing around the world is second to none, hence why Telstra has invested heavily.” It’s invested heavily expanding its network in strategic areas where it’s seen huge demand from its customers. Significant investments have been made over the past 12 months, especially expanding its stronghold in Asia to Asia-Pacific through subsea projects. Indigo is one such system that Telstra has invested heavily in. The splicing for the new 36Tbps data superhighway completed earlier this year and the cable network has gone live. “The development of the Indigo cable system strengthens the link between our Australian network and the fast-growing Southeast Asian markets october/november 2019

the big interview: oliver camplin-warner | 45

Jan 2010

Head of Financial Markets, IBM

Jan 2012

Director Business Development Service Delivery, Telstra

Nov 2013

Jan 2016 July 2017

Director of CSD Professional Services, Telstra Executive Director Government, Telstra Executive Director Government and Enterprise, Telstra

May 2018

Executive Director Global Sales, Telstra

Aug 2018

Head of Telstra International

planning but we must ensure that the demand is there before doing so,” Camplin-Warner tells me. Always On is one of Telstra’s key differentiators. “We’ve had it in the marketplace for some time now and when a cable has been taken out, the ability to leverage our extensive network to quickly switch data to an alternative route has been so key. Previously it was a rather manual exercise taking many hours to get the engineer on site to switch it over. Now, through that’s down to minutes.” Looking at virtualisation, agility and flexibility, the company offers the Telstra Programmable Network (TPN) to its customers. It has gained huge traction and came about via the Pacnet acquisition. “TPN is a leading digital platform for enterprise network services built on software-defined networking (SDN)”, Camplin-Warner says, adding that it is transforming the networking experience.

My focus is on how Telstra can help its customers quench Capacity their hunger and real thirst for capacity” Oliver Camplin-Warner Head, Telstra International

and will deliver our customers faster connectivity and dramatically improved reliability,” he says. “Our vast subsea network is a key part of our international growth strategy and we will continue to invest in additional capacity to meet our customers’ increasing demand for data and maintain our network leadership in the Asia-Pacific region.” Telstra has also invested in the 10,000km FASTER and New Cross Pacific subsea cables, while acquiring a 25% stake in the $350 million Southern Cross NEXT cable. “Other than adding extra capacity, we’ve also been strongly focused on getting more value out of our network,” he says. “One such project has seen Telstra work very closely with Infinera to boost its network services for customers with a significant increase in fibre capacity to its subsea infrastructure using Infinera’s Infinite Capacity Engine 4 (ICE4). I enquire whether this will be rolled out globally as it is currently only being deployed across Asia-Pacific. “We will look to do it at some point as part of our capacity capacitymedia.com

“The TPN ecosystem is a very clever piece of technology with many different use cases. Customers can log in themselves and provision a certain amount of capacity for a day or even an hour if they want. Use cases vary but it could be because of it being peak time or there’s an event taking place. Customers see how much it’ll cost and can allocate capacity almost instantly.” The acquisition not only almost doubled the size of its international business but gave Telstra a head start with SDN via the Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN) SDN platform, which was renamed to the TPN. This SDN-driven technology was just one of the strategic imperatives of buying Pacnet. The other was Telstra’s ownership of a very significant business, called Pacnet Business Solutions China (PBS). It was the first and is now the largest foreign-owned IPVPN provider in China. “Pacnet gave us significant scale. We are now the leader in Asia-Pacific networking and carry about a third of the internet traffic in Asia,” he says. Telstra is the leader in terms of US-to-Asia connectivity and it works with all the big OTTs, financial

services companies and IT service providers, and all the carriers. “TPN has given us burstable bandwidth that enables someone to buy capacity by the minute, hour, week, as much or as little as wanted on-demand through a portal,” he says. At the end of 2018, a partnership between the TPN and Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric was formed, unlocking access to more than 70 cloud services from 62 providers in eight markets. “It was a world-first partnership to allow customers to attain access to Equinix facilities around the world,” CamplinWarner says. “So linking Equinix’s capabilities and sites around the world into TPN has been a game-changer and we’re getting great traction with it. TPN is probably leading the market today.” More and more computing workloads are being pulled into the cloud. Once being in the cloud was simply about flexibility and lower costs – now it is about finding the right cloud, for the right workload, at the right time, with the right security. Leapfrogging bottlenecks and the other shortcomings of traditional networks is likewise crucial to the success of any multi-cloud strategy. This is where SDN has come into play, enabling networks to move beyond being a ‘black box’ to offering flexibility and transparency that can be switched on via APIs. China is a key market for Telstra and Camplin-Warner admits that it is one the markets that is growing the strongest in his portfolio. “We’ve been in China since 1989 and are one of the only foreign telcos that are present in the market today.” Telstra has over 200 staff in China now, alongside 47 PoPs and five data centres. “The growth that we’re seeing is spectacular,” he adds. The company is running very significant networks for big-scale IPVPNs and big multinationals that are selecting Telstra, as they want a partner that really understands China – but also they perhaps want to use a non-local player to assist them. In terms of investment, there is significant amounts. Camplin-Warner discloses that Telstra is adding new data centres and increasing the number of sales and technical roles on the ground to keep up with the growth that it’s seeing. Camplin-Warner states the growth they’re witnessing is “very, very significant”. While Telstra is certainly the envy of many of its competitors when looking at the sheer volume and scale of its network investment, it is not just a commodity business or capacity game to CamplinWarner. In him, the carrier has found a rare commodity. Someone who is truly passionate and strives to bring out the very best in Telstra for all its customers.

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48 | executive interview: sara baack

LIVING LIFE ON THE EDGE Capacity speaks to Sara Baack, chief product officier, Equinix, about the company’s plan for network edge services and her personal journey navigating the industry as a woman in telecoms

019 has been a big year for Equinix in terms of product development. Speaking to Sara Baack, Equinix’s chief product officer, I was curious to know what the company’s plans were specifically in its network edge services portfolio after its recent product launch. “In June, we announced Network Edge as a new way to deploy virtual, digital-ready, and vendor-neutral network functions on Equinix’s global interconnection platform,” said Baack. “We designed it to accelerate digital transformation and support network optimisation for global businesses by bringing seamless, low-latency network functions closer to end users, clouds and valuable ecosystems.” As Network Edge is activated across Equinix’s sales organisation, the company continues to add new vendors, functions, features and geographic coverage to the portfolio. “We want to empower companies to be everywhere they need to be to interconnect everyone and integrate everything that matters to their business,” Baack says. Adding to the company’s already impressive suite of products is Platform Equinix. It is the largest global platform of interconnected data centres and business ecosystems. Speaking to Baack I questioned how it will evolve in light of new architecture and hybrid cloud adoption. Will it be up to the challenge of future networking requirements? “Platform Equinix will continue to be more agile and evolve along with our customer needs,” she says. Additionally, Equinix opened the doors to its eleventh data centre in Tokyo. Perhaps an indicator of further regional expansion in the near future? “We are certainly excited about the opening of TY11, which will be the largest data centre in Tokyo and is located close to key venues for the

upcoming Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games,” she says. “But Tokyo is just a small part of our plans. This year Equinix plans to open 12 new International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres and expand 21 existing IBX data centres globally. Unsurprisingly, Asia and Europe are the two key areas of focus, with entry into two new markets. “Upcoming openings include Capacity additional IBX centres in Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore and Warsaw,” explains Baack. “We are also entering two new markets in 2019. We recently announced a new IBX in Seoul, South Korea. We will also be entering Hamburg, which given its proximity to the North Sea will provide easy access for subsea cable landing stations.” As the conversation takes a more personal turn, I take the opportunity to speak to Baack about her experience as a woman in the traditionally maledominated data centre space. In fact, on Equinix’s own executive management page, she is one of two female senior executives listed, out of a total of eleven. Interestingly Baack says its our similarities we need to keep at the forefront of our mind not our differences adding that she had a fairly positive experience of this industry. “We as people, no matter our gender or race or nationality, are similar in a couple of regards. Firstly, we play more than one role. The second way in which I think people are similar is that they tend to gravitate to those they can identify with,” Baack says. “What’s important here is for all of us to recognise that diversity (of all types) in an organisation is a powerful lever to drive bottom line results. You then have to purposefully introduce ways in which a team or an organisation can reduce unconscious bias that acts against diversity. The best organisations in the

industry are the ones acknowledging these issues and taking steps to counteract them. I don’t think I’ve run into many who don’t see opportunities here; they just need tools for action.” No real conversation around diversity and inclusion can create tangible change without first being inclusive of men and influencing the culture of our industry. Baack, shares that it was her network of male allies that helped her in her career. “It’s also worth pointing out that while being a woman in technology has come with obstacles, for much of my career I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by supportive men who have been fantastic partners, sounding boards and sources of counsel,” she adds. For the near future, Baack and her team will continue to evolve Platform Equinix to “meet the changing needs of our customers in the throes of digital transformation.” While on the product side of organisation, she says they will “continue to scale our colocation and interconnection offerings and are incubating a number of new capabilities that we hope will keep us a step ahead in supporting digital infrastructure needs, both physical and virtual.”

We are incubating a number of new capabilities that we hope will keep us a step ahead in supporting digital infrastructure needs, both physical and virtual” Sara Baack, chief product officer, Equinix

october/november 2019

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50 |

Fail fast, move quickly Sat firmly at the helm of Verizon’s mission of transformation, Oliver Cantor speaks to Capacity about the road to that Capacity journey and how other companies can do the same

apacity last spoke to Oliver Cantor, associate director of product strategy at Verizon, back in 2017. At the time, he said a number of things. One, carriers needed to transform themselves in order to enable business transformation for enterprises and that Verizon was in the midst of transformation of its own. “We talk about our own transformation,” he said at the time. “To break the ice we say ‘look at what is happening to us’. We have invested heavily in all of these other areas and services, as well as our network.” Now in late 2019, I was curious to know how that journey of transformation was going and much did the company have left to achieve. With Hans Vestberg, former Ericsson executive of Ericsson, now firmly at the company’s helm, Cantor says he is ushering in the next wave of development. “Just selling on technology, traditional technology like networks, wireless networks, MPLS, and these things that is

not where it is at anymore, we need to be more in the digital transformation that the world is undergoing, industrial revolution – the 4.0 and all of that.” Though Cantor says no one can be sure of how long this transformation will take, he says that Verizon is putting its customers at the heart of it, with the launch of Verizon2.0. Verizon2.0 now focuses on two critical market segments – consumer and business – rather than on the traditional wireless and wireline divisions. In order to reach that desired level of intelligence and integration aka ‘Nirvana’, Cantor says. “We have got to turn ‘the network’ into software”. According to him, the cloud has set the direction. “The cloud has come along and offered this utility-based service driven and user friendly way of saying get your software or infrastructure here, and by the way we have got a lot of compute / storage power so you can get that here as well,” he says. “Everyone has gone to the cloud like the megastore at the edge of town like the giant hypermarket, it’s brilliant because it’s

so dense it gets such a scale you can really buy a lot of good stuff cheap.” But not everyone wants to travel all the way to the Cloud (especially with IoT and Industry 4.0 use-cases), so now we have the Edge. To continue the store analogy it is like having the local supermarkets near to your house (like Tesco local), which are more convenient and for can offer niche use-cases like ultra-low latency machine telemetry or video capabilities. But Verizon is also playing to its strengths with roll out of 5G everywhere, which as Cantor puts it “in pure physics, the things it can do at the edge is quite transformational, even if it only achieves half the hype because we know it is in a hype cycle.”

Move beyond the network One of the other big takeaways from his previous interview was the idea that ‘carriers need to ‘evolve from just offering a network then you’ll be dead in a few years’ and unsurprisingly that message remains that same. “We have made the shift, thanks in part october/november 2019

the big interview: oliver cantor | 51

1993 – 1998

Manager of SW Dev, Ericsson

1998 – 2011

Senior Manager, Verizon

1998 - 2006

Senior Manager, WorldCom/MCI

2006 - 2013

Senior Manager Verizon Business

2013- 2014 2015 - present

Associate Director, Verizon Associate Director of Product Strategy, Verizon

bandwidth changes in each other’s networks through real world live interconnects. It also marked the first time two-way network orchestration between carrier production networks was ever been demonstrated, a first step towards enabling real-time cross-carrier automation. Speaking to Cantor about the significance of that trial and what it all meant, he explained, “That test was us saying, we are going to have to work together. The customers want us to be more like a utility, they don’t want to know that it took us so many weeks to deliver a circuit because we don’t work well or we are not properly bonded with each other.” “If it is going to be a true utility you plug in and get the service that you need when you need it, we have to play better together as an industry. It is only through bodies like MEF and CNTT doing this carrier-to-carrier kind of work that we are going to achieve that,” he continues. Though carriers, last-mile providers and CSPs sit at different ends of the supply chain, when it boils down to the needs for

Capacity We have got to turn everything into software” Oliver Cantor, associate director of product strategy, Verizon

to Hans, to talking about ourselves as being a technology company but we are very much still about our network,” he says. “You run away from the network at your peril because it is the core money but we are now more of a technology partner to these customers as well.” To Cantor, it’s all about diversification – for example over the top content and media. “When you look at the media side of it, which you know in principle isn’t attached to any particular network it is just about how you make money in this digital world, that is a completely new business play,” he explains. Another example is Verizon Connect, which offers GPS tracking for connected cars. Though this is an offering more closely connected to the network, Cantor says its “abstracted a little bit from the networking” and adds to the diversity. Lest we forget, Verizon played a major part in the demonstration of two-way inter-carrier software-defined network (SDN) orchestration last year. During the showcase, the two companies where able to make real-time capacitymedia.com

business transformation, they are ultimately the same. “Both sides need more agility,” says Cantor. “If we didn’t need agility and speed we wouldn’t have to virtualise particularly fast or we could let that happen more organically if you like. You would have time and space to put boxes in place and grow and plan those boxes and change those technologies, the need to automate and have far more flexibility for enterprise. We have to move at the speed of software!” Culture, legacy networks and technology all factor in as some of the challenges in properly initiating business transformation. But above all Cantor says it’s the aversion to risk. “We have to change culturally, not shy from risk in certain areas and say no let’s move a bit quicker, let’s not blame each other for this risk. Let’s get away from the old cultural existence in engineering, which is engineers should resist change because it means risk. We have to give engineers, planners and operational teams more room to manoeuvre.”

Part of that aversion could be that many are still trying to keep with the everchanging cloud and other such key technologies. Perhaps that could be why the proliferation of the hybrid cloud only continues to accelerate, because it is the middle ground between risk and safety. “We absolutely do the hybrid network between MPLS and public internet; eventually it will all just be network in the end of the day.” The MPLS versus public internet debate continues to wage on, particularly when it comes to matters of security. Often increased digitisation and virtualisation leads customers to fear increased security risks – a fact that Cantor does not entirely agree with. “If I take it as a whole system whether that is hardware or software – virtualisation just means I will do more of it in software irrespective of the hardware. It is not because we are creating software that it is creating larger attacks surface per se, it is just that the whole system is getting bigger because there are more digital end points and more use cases.” No conversation on transformation could take place without mentioning 5G and IoT. On the former, Cantor says that its impact on things has yet to be realised and that technology does not really drive change initially but it enables it.

The enabler of change “I don’t think technology really drives change, it may enable change. Technology only stays around if it is useful and if it is used – think 5G will be the same. Like with 4G you have to get the use cases. But we believe that 5G will ultimately be transformational.” He says that it’s a similar story with IoT, adding that we’ve had the capability for this technology for years, we only now have the need. “We have been able to do IoT for years you can do it with 2G networks, 3G – if what you need to do is just control things wirelessly. Looking ahead, the roadmap for Verizon and particularly Cantor’s area of focus is virtualisation all the way. “So we are integrating SD-WAN with 5G slicing, enabling a business to define a user group or a type of traffic, so we’re adding that to 5G. In addition, everyone wants SD-WAN. Customers need to solve their core business ICT problems, so why should they need to learn about this SD-WAN provider and all of their new APIs or that firewall provider. So Verizon are writing is a Policy Engine which is vendor agnostic and has a simple API. You will see a lot of work from us on what they call Intent Based networking.”

52 | SPONSORED Q&A: SERGIO GRASSI

EOLO, THE ITALIAN CONNECTIVITY RESPONSE FOR INTERNATIONAL CARRIERS EOLO: PRODUCT INNOVATION, STRENGTHENING OF THE CUSTOMER SUPPORT STRUCTURE AND INTERNATIONAL WHOLESALE SALES CHANNEL TO CONTINUE IMPLEMENTING THE DEDICATED BUSINESS UNIT. Q. Tell us a little bit about EOLO as a company…

20 seconds from the request for support. Our proprietary wireless network is totally separated from the fiber optic network, so we are also able to provide our customers with the highest level of service availability on the market, an increasingly necessary element to be able to offer guarantees of Business Continuity.

EOLO is an Italian telecommunications operator offering ultra-wideband Q. Growth and innovation are values present in EOLO’s connectivity services DNA, what projects (e.g. FTTH/FTTC) are you currently in wireless and wired working on? technology, for the residential Capacity and For several years now, the company has been committed to business segments. product innovation (particularly for wireless services, with The company’s the proprietary EWG technology launched in 2017) and to mission has been strengthening our customer support structure, both Retail and clear since the Wholesale, for all phases of the sales, delivery and assurance Sergio Grassi, Chief Marketing & Sales beginning: to process. In order to support the wholesale market in the best Officer, Eolo bring the Internet possible way, last year we created a Business Unit consisting of to people where a pre-sales and design (system engineer), project and service other providers are unable to, positioning itself as an enabler of management structure, as well as a sales network. We have also Digital Transformation throughout Italy, thanks to a proprietary launched an international wholesale sales channel, which is technology (EWG) that allows providing bands up to 1 Ggbps dedicated to international operators who need to serve their on licensed frequencies at 26-28GHz, and thanks to the Fiber customers in Italy. In the next two years we will be engaged in Optic network that allows you to serve its customers with FTTH consolidating this Business Unit, completing our EWG wireless connections up to 1Gbps in more than 80 cities. network coverage in southern Italy and expanding our coverage EOLO has more than 500 employees, is planning to close of fiber services, both FTTH (already marketed in 80 cities) and the current FY at about 160 M€ of turnover and to continue FTTC (available for the wholesale market from next year). the important investments of the last three years (300 M€) to complete territorial coverage while maintaining its DNA strongly devoted to innovation. EOLO operates in over 6,000 Italian Q. Sergio, you’ve worked at Telecom Italia, Edisontel, municipalities, and allows more than 1.2 million people and Albacom, BT Italia, and Infracom Italia, how has the carrier almost 10,000 companies to have high performance connectivity, community changed over the years in your experience? thanks to a network of over 2,800 BTS (radio repeaters) and 10,000 km of fiber optic backbones. The carrier community has always felt the need to find a balance between the continuous pursuit of innovation and the sustainability of the investments needed to support such Q. What is the company’s main offering and how is it innovation. In the last 20 years this challenge has become more enhancing connectivity today? complicated, as market bandwidth requirements and technology disruption grow much faster than the investment capabilities of Our offer includes services for different reference markets: companies in the industry. For this reason, we have been living RETAIL (consumer and business) and WHOLESALE. For the for some time now a necessary action of consolidation of a part latter in particular, we have built a modular offer that allows you of the TLC companies, which try in this way to put in common to give a timely response to every connectivity need, in FWA the investments in platforms and infrastructure, reducing the technology and FTTH fiber optic, wherever the end customer costs of implementation and management of the same. Certainly is, with particularly stringent SLAs. Thanks to the presence of this trend will continue and grow over the years, leading to some almost 2,000 certified partners for the installation and assurance extent to an enhancement of disruptive realities, which have phase, we are able to guarantee a delivery time of only 5 working chosen technological solutions and innovative business models, as days from the order and a response to our contact center, within I think EOLO has done and is doing.

capacity

october/november 2019

special report

SDN/NFV October/November 2019

CONTENTS 55 SDN/NFV news summary A look at all the latest SDN/NFV related industry news

56 MEF advances SD-WAN standards Capacity speaks with Nan Chen, president, MEF

Capacity

57 MEF LSO advances automation Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF, talks LSO Sonata APIs

58 Software is king We consider how software-defined technologies have influenced the market and what lies ahead

60 Telstra Q&A Capacity talks with Nadya Melic, head of international products and technology, Telstra

61 20 SDN Market Leaders Capacity lists 20 of the most prominent names in the SDN space

capacitymedia.com

Capacity

56 | Q&A: NAN CHEN

MEF ADVANCES SD-WAN STANDARDISATION, RAISES BAR WITH CERTIFICATION ÇŻ Ç§ Ç¤ NAN CHENÇĄ ÇĄ ÇĄ ÇŻ Q. What role do you see MEF playing when it comes to SD-WAN?

Q. What is in the current SD-WAN standard? MEF 70 describes requirements for an application-aware, overthe-top WAN connectivity service that uses policies to determine how application flows are directed over multiple underlay networks irrespective of the underlay technologies or service providers who deliver them. Among other things, the standard defines (1) service attributes that describe the externally visible behavior of an SD-WAN service as experienced by a subscriber, (2) traffic handling rules, and (3) key technical concepts and definitions like an SD-WAN UNI, the SD-WAN edge, SD-WAN tunnel virtual connections, underlay connectivity services, etc.

We published the SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services (MEF 70) standard to help accelerate SD-WAN market growth and enable creation Capacity of powerful new hybrid networking Q. What is next for SD-WAN standardisation? solutions optimised for digital MEF already has begun work on the next phase of SD-WAN transformation. standardization, MEF 70.1. This work includes defining (1) service MEFâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s SD-WAN attributes for application flow performance and business importance, work is not being (2) SD-WAN service topology and connectivity, and (3) underlay done in isolation. connectivity service parameters. MEF also is progressing related Where needed, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re working with other organisations, including standards work focused on (1) application security for SD-WAN most recently, ONUG, to accelerate the development of standards services, (2) intent-based networking for SD-WAN, and (3) and related certifications that yield the greatest benefit for industry information and data modeling standards that will accelerate LSO participants and end users. API development for SD-WAN services. The MEF19 event this 18-22 November will bring together all the key players involved in MEF SD-WAN work. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll have many SDQ. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s happening with ONUG and why is it important? WAN-related presentations and panels, along with multiple live MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept demonstrations tied to the SD-WAN topic. In October, MEF and ONUG, which represents Fortune 2000 enterprise, announced we are collaborating to ensure that Q. How does SD-WAN relate to MEFâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role in the broader enterprises are provided with SD-WAN services optimised for digital connectivity services market? transformation in the multi-cloud era. MEF will leverage ONUGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hybrid multi-cloud enterprise end user requirements to accelerate SD-WAN standardisation is taking place within the context of the development of MEF 3.0 SD-WAN standards and certifications. MEF 3.0 Global Services Framework. It is part of our initiative to define, deliver, and certify a family of dynamic carrier ethernet, Q. What is the status of MEFâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s SD-WAN certification programs? optical transport, IP, SD-WAN, and security services orchestrated across automated networks using LSO APIs. MEF will soon publicly introduce our new MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Combining standardised overlay SD-WAN services with dynamic Certification program that will enable service and technology high-speed underlay connectivity services will enable service providers providers to validate that their solutions conform to MEF 70. MEF to offer MEF 3.0 hybrid networking solutions with user and 3.0 SD-WAN certification will be a valuable reference baseline for application-directed control over network resources . users choosing a service provider in the inevitable confusion of a fastAs Shawn Hakl, a MEF board member and SVP of business growing and relatively new market. Interest in certification is strong, products at Verizon, noted, SD-WAN is the way to interface policy and we already have companies lined up to participate in the pilot. with an intelligent software-defined network. Standardisation makes On the professional front, MEF will be formally introducing a it easier for integration to work across multiple types of underlying new MEF-SDWAN Professional Certification program that will transport services. In the end, the combination of standardised help organisations overcome skills gaps that can impede successful and orchestrated overlay and underlay services will provide a network and service transformation in the domain of SD-WAN. We better customer experience with improved service capabilities and expect the MEF-SDWAN Professional Certification exam will be guaranteed resiliency. generally available in mid-December 2019.

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october/november 2019

Q&A: PASCAL MENEZES | 57

AUTOMATING INTERPROVIDER SERVICE DELIVERY WITH MEF LSO PASCAL MENEZES, CTO, MEF, TO EXPLORES WHY SERVICE PROVIDERS ARE EMBRACING THE LSO Ç§ Ç¤ Q. How would you characterise the broader market when it comes to service provider automation and what role do you see MEF playing?

demand retail services to off-net locations. In a nutshell, LSO Sonata APIs promise to help the market operate much more efficiently through automation. Q. What LSO Sonata APIs are available today, and what others are planned?

In June 2019, MEF announced the availability of LSO Sonata SDK Release 3 that includes a set of deliverables that enable market Our industry adoption of LSO Sonata APIs for serviceability, product inventory, is in the midst quoting, and ordering. The SDK includes published and draft of a multi-year standards covering business requirements, use cases, and attributes transformation to that serve as the basis for the associated APIs and data models. Capacity dynamic and assured MEF intends to continually enhance standards related to LSO services across a Sonata APIs for serviceability, product inventory, quoting, and global ecosystem of ordering while also advancing standards work related to LSO Sonata automated networks, APIs for trouble ticking, contracts, and billing. Stay tuned for our as envisioned upcoming LSO Sonata SDK Release 4 that will be available in the in the MEF near future. 3.0 framework. Service providers Q. What does the timeline look like for LSO Sonata API must become more cloud-like and automated to deliver powerful implementation? networking solutions that provide unprecedented user and application-directed control over network resources and services. As you know, during ITW earlier this year, AT&T and Colt Going forward, service providers must transition from operating announced that they were first service providers to implement as independent islands of excellence to being integral players in a LSO Sonata APIs in production environments. This represented worldwide business federation of cloud-like networks that support a major milestone for these companies, MEF and the broader standardised dynamic services across multiple operators. This will industry. We anticipate many more companies will begin production unleash industry innovation on a massive scale while simultaneously implementations of LSO Sonata APIs over the next 12 to 18 months. helping maximise return on SDN and NFV investments. To realise this vision, MEF has advanced initiatives related to a full Q. Can you provide an update on the LSO Sonata Certification family of standardised MEF 3.0 services, including carrier ethernet, pilot program? SD-WAN, optical transport, IP, and SECaaS for SD-WAN, as well as standardised MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata APIs that are foundational to A core group of service providers, with representation from every orchestrating these services across federated networks. major geographic region of the world, is lining to participate in the LSO Sonata pilot certification program, leading the industry shift Q. What are LSO Sonata APIs and what specific issues are they from manual inter-provider processes to dynamic service automation. addressing? We look forward to sharing more news on this front in the coming months. MEF has been developing LSO Sonata APIs as part of a comprehensive effort to standardise multiple sets of APIs enabling Q. How can people learn about LSO Sonata APIs in action? service automation across providers and over multiple network technology domains. LSO Sonata APIs relate to the interface We invite everyone in the industry to attend MEF19, where you will reference point within the LSO Reference Architecture that supports be able to see sophisticated demonstrations involving LSO Sonata business-to-business interactions between service providers. The full and other LSO APIs in the MEF 3.0 proof of concept showcase. We suite of planned LSO Sonata APIs deals with serviceability (address also have multiple conference sessions on inter-provider and intravalidation, site queries, product offering qualification), product provider service automation, including a special session focused on inventory, quoting, ordering, trouble ticketing, contracts, and billing. the business case for implementing LSO Sonata APIs. The current friction in the system has impeded the ability of MEF19 will be held 18-22 November 2019 at the JW Marriott innovative service providers to efficiently extend the reach of onLA LIVE in Los Angeles. capacitymedia.com

58 |

Software is king Ç§

Ç¤ Ç¤

oftware-defined technologies like SDN and NFV are starting to impact the way wholesale telecoms providers run their businesses, as well as how network services are consumed by applications and users. For example, software now dictates how traffic can be reliably directed to its destination based on application type and defined policy. And with 5G now being rolled out, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re seeing software-defined technologies enabling and accelerating the consumption of a new generation of services. The software-defined journey has a long way to go, but in some ways its origins seem distant. Fahim Sabir, director architecture and development, network on demand, with carrier Colt recalls how back in the day, SDN was considered at best a means to save money: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Originally SDN was adopted by wholesale organisations to reduce costs,â&#x20AC;? he recalls. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s happened over time is that SDN and NFV have turned into commercial differentiators.â&#x20AC;? Wholesalers, he believes, are measured on two things â&#x20AC;&#x201C; cost and speed of delivery: â&#x20AC;&#x153;SDN has impacted in both these areas,â&#x20AC;? he concludes. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Now itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time for the next step in the evolution which is all about API integration. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re seeing a lot of appetite among our wholesale customers for consuming our services via API. The SDN capability is really being pushed with providers now turning to providing services on demand â&#x20AC;&#x201C; letting customers access services via a portal in near real time. Ultimately weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re heading for a cloud-based network consumption model where services are charged in very small increments â&#x20AC;&#x201C; hours, minutes or in some cases seconds.â&#x20AC;? Mattias Fridstrom, vice president and

chief evangelist at Telia Carrier agrees that we should not forget that the wholesale world was very manual until relatively recently: â&#x20AC;&#x153;That was partly about trust in dataâ&#x20AC;? he claims. â&#x20AC;&#x153;If you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t trust your data then you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t rely on automation and so you need to rely on the Capacity human element. We now have more trust in data, so weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re starting to see things like provisioning on demand and self-healing networks that SDN helps to deliver. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll have more impact over the next couple of years. There are so many things that wholesalers will be able to do more quickly and more accurately than in the manual era. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve only scratched the surface.â&#x20AC;? There is not however universal agreement about what has really been achieved so far, with some voices claiming that SDN and NFV have simply not been as successful as originally envisaged. Derek Long, head of telecoms and mobile, Cambridge Consultants, believes that the hoped for Capex reductions have not materialised as cost reductions achieved by replacing bespoke hardware with commoditised hardware have been offset by the higher complexity and the

Enterprise networks are becoming significantly more complexâ&#x20AC;? Derek Long, head of telecoms and mobile, Cambridge Consultants

higher Opex cost that resulted. He sees future potential though: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Benefits include simplified management through centralised control configuration management and monitoring which will lead to reduced Opex costs,â&#x20AC;? says Long. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The nature of enterprise communications is evolving. Enterprise networks are becoming significantly more complex as they no longer only want to interconnect branch offices but also connect cloud provider, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;as a serviceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; providers and in future OT automation systems.â&#x20AC;? In the near future, he foresees that security-based applications are likely to be a driver for the introduction of SDN technologies: â&#x20AC;&#x153;SD-WAN in particular, is likely to come into focus as enterprises work to create an efficient and secure overlay over their existing connectivity infrastructure,â&#x20AC;? he concludes. Long sees regional divides in wholesale approaches to software-driven automation: â&#x20AC;&#x153;In the US the impact has been larger but still not breakthrough,â&#x20AC;? he concludes. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Outside the US, interest has been limited. I would segment the wholesale market into virtual network operators, enterprise communications and international communications. For virtual network operators I would say there has been little interest. For enterprise it is different. Enterprise communications is now driven by hybrid cloud applications and a high requirement for flexibility and security.â&#x20AC;? As both enterprise networks and telecoms networks come to increasingly resemble data centre networks so the requirement for SDN will grow, expects Long: â&#x20AC;&#x153;In international backbone communications which require high performance big iron solutions there are some exceptions such as the use of IMS Â&#x2018;Â&#x2026;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2018;Â&#x201E;Â&#x2021;Â&#x201D;Č&#x20AC;Â?Â&#x2018;Â&#x2DC;Â&#x2021;Â?Â&#x201E;Â&#x2021;Â&#x201D; Í&#x161;Í&#x2DC;Í&#x2122;ÍĄ

feature: sdn/nfv | 59

for voice services on a global scale where software-based solutions have come into use,” he adds. SDN, being about the separation of the data, control, and management planes of the network, is supposed to reduce dependency on single-vendor solutions, contributing to reduction in equipment costs, and improving the flexibility of the infrastructure to deliver bandwidth on demand. But that’s only part of the story. In the next few years, we will see a shift of focus towards the edge of the network, driven by a new generation of applications that generate large amounts of data, believes Marcio Saito, CTO at network monitoring specialist Opengear: “We’ll also see the deployment of faster mobile and last-mile technologies as well as the virtualization of network layers,” he says. “The impact of SDN on the telecom market has already been recognised, but the transformation is just beginning.” SDN’s strengths will be truly apparent, says Saito, with new applications emerging in the next years, such as broad use of AR and VR, orchestration of autonomous vehicles, game streaming, interactive video communications and IoT: “These will generate vast amounts of disposable data and demand very short processing latency,” he expects. “Without network virtualisation, carriers and service providers cannot cope with the new demand for flexibility and high bandwidth.” The software-defined era has already seen a loosening of reliance on what are now rather old technologies and models – such as MPLS and IP-VPN. Among the newer ways of approaching wide area connectivity are intent-based networks, which are all about defining a global policy and ‘intent’ in a way that spans heterogeneous environments across domains - data centre, branch office, cloud – aiming to ensure a consistent user experience and minimize security risks. “Changes in intent are updated automatically and enforced automatically by the infrastructure,” says Rami Rammaha, head of product marketing at Apstra, speaking at the recent NetEvents global IT summit in San Jose. Apstra is one of the pioneers of intent-based networking. “An intent-based system continuously validates in real-time the infrastructure is delivering on intent, therefore operators can be confident the policies they’ve defined are indeed being enforced.” To ensure a successful roll out and adoption of these technologies by wholesale telecom services, a broad and holistic approach must be considered, he maintains: “Customers are on a digital capacitymedia.com

transformation journey and without a total and comprehensive approach, the transformation is going to be slowed down.” In the software-defined era, it is the application that is king, not the physical network, agrees Galeal Zino, CEO of NetFoundry, also speaking at the NetEvent summit. NetFoundry is pushing a model of application-specific networking whereby you can deliver an application to wherever you wish to, independent of platform or of the network. “It provides a level of trust far in excess of anything you can get today,” enthuses Zino. “The software-defined perimeter that application-specific networking gives you offers hardened security beyond the limitations and vulnerabilities of VPNs, and is essential for an organisation that relies on a cloud or multi-cloud model.” Patrick McCabe, marketing professional for Nokia’s Nuage Networks, points to SD-WAN fabrics as the software-led answer to an unshackling of reliance on infrastructure: “We are seeing a strong emergence of wholesale SDWAN models, especially in the last 12 months,” he says. “SD-WAN wholesalers Capacity are emerging directly from a hosted SD-WAN service from a vendor but also from service providers themselves. These models allow smaller service providers or system integrators to get in the SD-WAN business in a manner that is very quick to market and with limited risk. It gives them a chance to innovate with offerings and be disruptive with pricing. It also offers a path to sell to very small

enterprises who may not have always been a top target for larger SD-WAN vendors. With these relatively new players we are witnessing many different channels to sell to enterprise customers which will further accelerate the competitive landscape with path to SD-WAN supply to enterprises of all sizes.” Not all SD-WAN offerings are the same, warns Atchison Frazer, another NetEvents speaker and worldwide head of marketing with secure SD-WAN vendor Versa: “The key to enabling a smooth multi-cloud migration path is a versatile and multi-service cloud-native SD-WAN platform,” he claims. “It is important to point out here that not SD-WAN platforms tackle the central issue of security in the same way. Security is one of the main differentiators between the competing claims of the SD-WAN vendor community.” SD-WAN, he says, needs to be about more than just network circuit aggregation and dynamic path selection: “It should of course offer WAN reliability, agility and simplicity, but these should be taken as given in any serious solution,” he argues. “Robust security is another matter, necessitating an SD-WAN solution that combines all the basics you would expect with multi-layered protection.” Several of the carriers and vendors that Capacity spoke to for this feature argued that we are very much nearer the beginning of the software-defined journey than the end. But the journey is underway, and on early showings looks like a significant net gain for wholesale.

What software-defined solutions mean for 5G Recent findings from research firm Enterprise Management Associates suggest that nearly one in two enterprises are planning to deploy 5G as a frontline WAN service. This means that SD-WAN will likely be a vital factor in ensuring that those connections are secure and fully utilised. “5G represents a huge opportunity, but successfully implementing it in the enterprise requires new management capabilities, as the inherently mobile and impermanent nature of a cellular connection demands a flexible and responsive administrative tool,” says Stefan Keller, CTO of Open Systems, a provider of managed SD-WAN solutions. “SD-WAN can not only ensure that new connections are properly configured and provisioned on the fly, but monitor the

quality of those connections and move traffic between them and fixed lines depending on bandwidth and latency demands.” Marcio Saito, CTO at network monitoring specialist Opengear expects that once 5G is broadly deployed and adopted, it will multiply the volume of data coming into the carrier infrastructure by a factor of 10x, but carriers won’t have the ability to scale their revenues to match: “Telecom infrastructure needs redesigning by adopting some of the technologies, architectures and practices developed by the hyperscale internet service providers in the last decade,” he claims. “Software-defined solutions is a key component of that approach to infrastructure design.”

60 | q&a: nadya melic

Q&A WITH NADYA MELIC, HEAD OF INTERNATIONAL PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGY, TELSTRA NADYA MELIC, HEAD OF INTERNATIONAL PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGY AT TELSTRA, SPEAKS TO CAPACITY MEDIA ABOUT ALWAYS ON, THE WORLD’S FIRST INSTANTANEOUS RESTORATION SERVICE ALONG ASIA’S BUSIEST SUBSEA CABLE ROUTES. Q. What type of customers are using Always On?

customer experience and enhance network efficiency.

Our Always On users mainly fall in the following categories:

Several Proof of Concept tests were conducted on the control plane automatic switching before rolling out the service and we are now onboarding our first customers, making Telstra the first in the market to offer automatic switching between three cable routes.

• Enterprises (e.g. banks) that require a high availability solution that is reliable, has high-quality network connectivity with a service level guarantee for bandwidth availability.

Capacity

• OTT and global wholesale service providers that run mission-critical applications.

Q. What does Always On offer to customers? Telstra’s Always On solution is the first in the market to provide high-capacity services with a bandwidth availability service level guarantee between Asia’s three busiest sub-sea cable routes. It is offered on three diverse paths (EAC, C2C, RNAL) which are routed across Telstra’s own highcapacity cable subsea network. Telstra has enabled automatic restoration on its Always On routes which reduces service restoration time from hours to minutes in the event of a failure. As a result, customers will experience minimal or negligible service disruption. Telstra plans to build better connectivity and more efficient topologies using mesh networking, and adding more automated management with optimal resiliency through a control plane. This control plane will enable automated self-inventory, automated connection management, a self-healing network with fast and automatic service restoration, and network optimisation and maintenance.

• Cloud operators who need to increase business reliability. Q. What led Telstra to develop this service? The Asian region presents one of the most challenging environments for subsea cable systems. Busy and shallow shipping ports in Hong Kong and Singapore, high levels of fishing activity and an ecosystem prone to natural disasters, all threaten to disrupt or damage underwater infrastructure. Damage to a subsea cable can take weeks or even months to fix. Launched in 2017, Telstra’s Always On solution is routed across Telstra’s own high-capacity subsea cable network. Based on the fault history report, Telstra carefully selected and utilised the high availability routes/segments for the solution to offer cost-effective high resilience and bandwidth availability. Telstra introduced its Instantaneous Always On Solution in January 2019, a further enhancement that offers automatic switching and restoration. This is done via a Layer 0 control plane on Telstra’s network, helping to improve the

This will enable faster restoration of services from hours to minutes, and customers will also have the flexibility to choose their primary and protection paths between the three different routes. Q. How does Always On compare with conventional means of ensuring uptime? Compared with the traditional method of buying multiple unprotected diverse paths to achieve high availability and resiliency, Always On saves customers the costs and time required to purchase multiple routes for protection, offering them three routes with protection all in one go. This eliminates the need to have multiple vendors and limits the billing and service assurance to only one. Customers receive high-capacity services with a bandwidth availability service level assurance and guarantee. Q. What’s next for Telstra and Always On? Apart from looking to introduce Always On across more routes, Telstra will continue to innovate to keep up with voracious global bandwidth growth, protect multiple terabits of traffic, and avoid outages from inevitable faults, leveraging the size and diversity of our subsea network in the Asia Pacific. october/november 2019

20 SDN N Capacity

Market

Leaders

cross both carrier and enterprise sectors the proliferation of network virtualisation and automation only continues to rise. Greater visibility, on-demand capabilities and the softwarisation of everything is no longer an added feature but a critical component of next-generation networks. With that, Capacity is pleased to share its annual 20 SDN Market Leaders powerlisting, celebrating 20 of the key players leading in the softwaredefined networking space. With every list there are some names that probably should be included that werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, so keep an eye out on the Capacity Media website for next yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nominations and have the opportunity to have your say. Compiled by Natalie Bannerman

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62 |

Mark Middleton ActivePort CTO

Alla Goldner Amdocs director of technology, strategy & standardisation

Geoff Dorna CMC Networks CTO

Rajiv Datta Colt Technology Services COO

Connee Zhang Cypress Telecom CEO

As CTO of ActivePort, Middleton has led its team of developers to create a next-gen SDN orchestration platform that extends SDN services across the last mile from data centre to customer offices all of which are telco-neutral, data centre-neutral and hardware-neutral. In addition, using the service orchestration portal, customers have the tremendous agility to self-provision network services and adjust bandwidth to align with capacity demands. Programmability coupled with policy firewalling, network virtualisation with full policy control keys leads to an SDN revolution. Prior to his time at ActivePort Middleton served as CTO of Acurix Networks.

Recognised as one of the industry’s top female tech pioneers and author of multiple patents (including three new network-orchestration patents filed/pending filing), Alla Goldner plays a key industry role in bridging the gap between the standardisation and open-source worlds for global network-orchestration solution ONAP. As well as being chair of ONAP, Goldner is also a member of ONAP’s Technical Steering Committee, and has been elected as ONAP’s representative to LFN’s Strategy Planning Committee. Goldner was most recently named as Best Woman in Network Orchestration at the inaugural Global Women in Telco & Tech Awards.

With over 25 years’ experience in the telecoms industry it was Dorna’s Capacity vision to leverage CMC’s network and offer a first-to-market strategy providing true next-generation SDN capabilities. The vision birthed CMC’s rapid adaptive network (C-RAN), allowing network operators to extend their SDN capabilities into the African continent via a single pane of glass or north bound API. C-RAN allows the customer to spool up their own NFV and have its service chained to a CMC 128 technology virtual routing instance, offering full orchestration of the uCPE’s VNF instance allowing CMC to take care of all the edge connectivity services for the customer.

In 2019, Rajiv has further driven his teams focus on software-defined networking (SDN), ensuring the Colt IQ Network has innovation and flexibility at its core. Rajiv fosters a culture within his organisation of innovation because he understands that innovation is a cultural dynamic and without placing value in the notion of innovation in all its forms that it can’t extend to the products and the network that Colt delivers. This year has seen the extension of Colt’s previous interoperability trials, with Colt and AT&T announcing recently that the businesses had completed the first successful application of MEF’s LSO Sonata APIs.

CEO of global SD-WAN and cloud service provider CypressTel, Zhang is described as having led the company over the past 10 years from 10+ staff to around 300 in Asia-Pacific and building out 100+ PoPs globally. Earlier this year Connee led the R&D team to launch the new One2C product, which is a network-cloud integration solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your multiple premises to multiple cloud platforms leveraging NFV and SDN technologies. During her tenure CypressTel was selected as one of 11 national SD-WAN standardisation committee members in 2018, in China.

october/november 2019

20 SDN Market Leaders | 63

Jerzy Szlosarek Epsilon co-founder and CEO

David Boswarthick ETSI director of new technologies

Johanne Mayer MayerConsult NaaS and network transformation consultant

Pascal Menezes MEF CTO

Dan Pitt president of Palo Alto Innovation Advisors SVP of MEF

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Since the launch of Infiny in 2017, Jerzy Szlosarek has been focused on building Epsilon’s core network and SDN fabric it was the first step in the company’s transformation from a telco company to an innovative disruptor. The SDN platform constantly adds new connectivity options for customers as Epsilon grew its global interconnect fabric to over 220 data centres in 39 cities. Szlosarek continues to support initiatives towards greater automation to deliver better service delivery and customer experience within Infiny. New enhancements include allowing customers to dynamically increase bandwidth capacity on Infiny without manual intervention.

Part of standards organisation ETSI, Boswarthick joined the group in 1999 as technical officer. In this role he was responsible for supporting 3GPP, TISPAN, M2M, and IoT activities in ETSI. In 2012, he then became director of the committee support centre. Most recently he was named director of new technologies, responsible for tracking and capturing ICT developments. As well as forming links to R&D and academia, EU research projects, EU ICT rolling plan and creation of new groups in ETSI. He is also acting director of SDC team, where he led 18 standards experts in supporting ETSI’s technical organisation.

With over 20 years’ international telecommunications experience, Capacity Mayer was recognised by TM Forum executive management peers and earned the 2010 TMF Distinguished Fellow award. She has helped drive growth and successful product and services differentiation in the OSS market, raising the company profile to a leadership position. Mayer possesses in-depth knowledge and experience in the network as well as operational and business support system (OSS/BSS) processes, applications and services. She is described as a creative thinker with ability to build relationships and work with worldwide cross-functional teams at all levels including business development and sales.

A veteran in his field, Menezes has held the position of MEF’s firstever CTO since 2016. In this role, Menezes works in the areas of cloud scale architectures, real-time media networks, software-defined networks, network function virtualisation and lifecycle service orchestration. Since his appointment, he has been instrumental in the development of numerous new standards and frameworks. Most recently the organisation celebrated the publication of the first global standard for SD-WAN that defines SD-WAN service and its service attributes. The SD-WAN service standardisation was carried out within the MEF 3.0 Global Services Framework.

Dan Pitt is senior vice president of the MEF Forum and as president of Palo Alto Innovation Advisors, his private consultancy, he advises startup companies on three continents as well as established companies such as Layer123. He has been a pioneer of the open-networking movement, serving as executive director of the Open Networking Foundation from its public launch in 2011 for almost six years before joining MEF. He has served as vice president of Nortel Networks and Bay Networks and managed advanced technology and research at IBM Research Zurich and Hewlett Packard Laboratories.

64 |

Aloke Tusnial Netcracker CTO of SDN/NFV

Luciano Salata Neutrona Networks co-founder & president

Raymond Zhang Nuage Networks head of SDN solutions engineering and operationalisation

Paul Gampe PCCW Global CTO

Daniele Mancuso Sparkle chief marketing solutions & business development officer

Aloke Tusnial is the chief technology officer for NetCracker’s SDN/ NFV business, where he is responsible for leading the sales and product strategy for the SDN and network function virtualisation (NFV) initiatives of the company. Prior to this role, he served as is vice president global sales for the SDN/NFV business unit at NetCracker where he is responsible for leading the sales strategy and customer engagement. Before joining Netcracker, he held a variety of pre-sales, architecture, strategy and account management positions serving several customers in North America focused on real-time B/OSS for video and the Internet of Things, the drivers for SDN and NFV.

As co-founder and president of Neutrona Networks, Salata led the company in the launch of the multi-country SD-WAN network across Latin America. With over 20-years’ experience in the region, Salata boosts a company that has the only Latin American network to provide multiple subsea cable systems and terrestrial fibre rings that are monitored and managed with a home-grown SDN solutions. The multi-vendor platform contributes towards a hybrid network that combines the right underlay solutions with overlay advantages of SDN and cloud connectivity. Salata champions the mantra that world-class performance and quality is possible in Latin America.

Having previously worked for such organisations as AT&T, BT and Capacity Alcatel-Lucent, Zhang entered his current position as head of solutions engineering and operationalisation in 2015. In this role, he leads SDN solutions engineering for telco cloud/NFV, software-defined data centre, SD-Security, SD-WAN and NG DCFabrics. In addition, he also develops cloud-native SDN solutions as well as DevOps with automation in continuous platform and services deployments; software development programme delivery for SDN platforms and engineering operations. He also served chief technical officer and director of IP product management at Alcatel-Lucent.

Under Paul’s leadership PCCW Global has become a true pioneer in the implementation of SDN, one of the first carriers to automate their extensive global network and integrate with open APIs to many service providers, cloud providers and software businesses. He has been hugely influential in the evolution from traditional carrier to an agile software-led business. The organisation has been restructured and all processes aligned to enable innovation and rapid service development. The team have successfully implemented SDN across the IP network and are building on this foundation with an extended digital platform of automated network services and communications applications.

In 2019, Mancuso was appointed chief marketing solutions & business development officer at Sparkle and elected as member of MEF board of directors. He is in charge of the strategic guidelines of Sparkle’s products and services portfolio, global partnership and consulting programs. Daniele led the company’s evolution towards network automation, through the programmability and virtualisation, designing and production of Sparkle’s Genome platform. One aspect of this offering is Genome.SDN, a network automation solution that automates complex procedures and operations as well as repetitive tasks, through a single interface.

october/november 2019

20 SDN Market Leaders | 65

Marc Cohn Spirent director marketing & technical strategy

Diego R Lopez Telefónica senior technology expert and chair of ETSI NFV ISG

Viraj Parekh Verizon global managing director SDN/NFV, managed services, PaaS and resale

Vanessa Little VMware director of global telco innovation

Rabi Abdel Vodafone network virtualisation and SDN/NFV lead architect

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Marc has been a thought-leader for the open SDN/NFV movement, holding senior leadership roles in the Open Networking Foundation, ETSI NFV ISG, and open source networking projects including OPEN-O, OpenDaylight, and PNDA. He is also the co-chair of the MEF Certification Committee, and a member of the MEF leadership team. Marc has been privileged to serve as Editor for some of the industry’s most important SDN/NFV publications including the original ONF SDN whitepaper, NFV Insider Blog (SDxCentral) on behalf of the ETSI NFV ISG leadership, and the Linux Foundation Harmonisation whitepaper.

Diego R. López joined Telefonica I+D in 2011 as a senior technology expert on network middleware and services. He is currently in charge of the technology exploration activities within the GCTO Unit of Telefónica I+D. Before joining Telefónica he spent some years in the academic sector, dedicated to research on network service abstractions and the development of APIs based on them. Diego chairs the ETSI ISG on network function virtualisation, actively participating in the ONF, and the IETF WGs connected to these activities, acting as cochair of the NFVRG within the IRTF.

Having previously worked at such companies as IBM, AT&T and Capacity NTT, Parekh now serves as global managing director SDN/NFV, managed services, PaaS and resale at Verizon, leading the strategy and technical leadership for the enterprise networking business globally, covering enterprise, small-medium business, public sector and wholesale/channel segments. He also leads a team that drives P&L, innovation and lifecycle responsibilities for SD-WAN, SDWLAN, VNS, uCPE, hosted network services, LAN, WOS, security, application assurance, intelligent cloud control, secure cloud gateway, and resale business including CPE, software and site services.

A repeat entry in our annual 20 Market Leaders listing, Little leads the team that creates the innovative NFV solutions and go-to-market strategies that use VMware technologies and the vast ecosystem of partners. In addition, she is also responsible for developing the standard for NFV solutions with VMware NFV ecosystem laboratories, creating carrier-grade architectures. A member of Women of Openstack and Women in Comms, Little is active in showcasing and championing women in tech fields. She is also LFN Board member and ETSI Open Source Mano Technical Steering Committee chair.

Rabi Abdel is the lead SDN & NFV architect at the Vodafone Group. His knowledge and experience in the field goes beyond the technology itself and cover various aspects of NFV transformational impacts on operations, business and eco-systems. Rabi held many leading roles in standards and open source organisations such as ETSI NFV, GSMA, OPNFV, ONAP, CNCF, and DPDK. He is currently the lead for IFA002 and IFA003 within ETSI NFV, the vice-chair of LFN compliance and verification committee, and the technical lead and technology steering chair of the newly-formed common NFVI telco task force.

66 | SPONSORED Q&A: HENDRIK RÖLLINGER

MORE THAN JUST FULFILLMENT AUTOMATED INBOUND SERVICE MANAGEMENT MAKES WHAT WAS ONCE A PAINSTAKING AND LONG PROCESS A SIMPLE AND COST EFFECTIVE TASK. a Carrier. The system covers the whole process including Supplier Offer, Impact Analysis and all aspects of the business while still being capable of integrating with existing legacy systems. Q. Axino’s modern systems support open and easy interfacing and integration, how is the company optimising outdated legacy systems and interconnect processes? We built an underlying platform, which we call Business Steering Center (BSC) that allows our customers to analyse and process big data including highly efficient reporting, while having open interfacing to other IT environments. This is the basis of all our new offerings like the International Inbound Services Manager. This approach enables us to address the needs of each customer individually while still deploying standard software, allowing faster Capacity delivery, thus providing a competitive advantage with short time-tomarket for the customer. Even more important and unique is that our brand-new platform is designed to be deployed as an overlaid solution, running side-by-side with the whole existing platform, which is often just capable of handling the more mainstream wholesale business. This has huge advantages for each customer i.e. protecting their investments by keeping the legacy system and as an additional benefit it can be easily and efficiently replaced piece by Q. How are Axino’s solutions and analytics helping carriers to piece, in a continuous process after initial deployment, instead of reinvent their wholesale businesses? an expensive “big bang approach”, which in general entails a high risk for carriers. Since the underlying platform is so flexible it allows Carriers are under a lot of pressure: on the one hand they need to carriers not only to virtually bring any product onto this platform, deal with more complexity while on the other hand the competition but actually the full portfolio can be settled on one platform too. is stronger and margins are declining. But there are still areas in the This really brings carriers forward, enabling them to develop new market where growth is possible, especially with the right systems. business models and handle more complexity with less systems. Hence Axino is focusing on mainly two aspects: how to deal with complexity and what solutions are needed to grow faster in the areas where it is still possible. This gives our customers advantages over Q. Digitisation has fundamentally changed business models, the competition by being more efficient and better able to scale than how much further do you think automation and software others in the market. It certainly has a bigger effect on our customers solutions will evolve over the coming years? and their productivity than trying to improve areas which have already been automated 15 years ago. Particularly in the telco industry, digitisation will progress due to the nature of this business. The whole industry is solely based on digital products. Until recently, certain tasks like ordering and contracts Q. How is your new international inbound services solution were still partly done manually, and here we see the biggest areas helping carriers to evolve even further today? of improvement for the future. Once ordering and contracts are captured on software systems with sufficient interfacing, the entire Compare the area of international inbound services with other areas process can be completely automated while gaining huge benefits and it is still a growing sector. We see new services getting launched in activation time and costs, resulting in lower prices which carriers successfully by carriers and the global industry has various needs to with manual operations can’t compete with. Therefore an automated connect with their customers, call centers and conferencing services. platform that orchestrates multiple products and allows a full view Surprisingly, until recently a lot of work in this area has traditionally on the complete business enables our customers to re-think the been done either manually or partly manually, which certainly limits business and come up with better pricing and new business models. the capacity for growth. A while ago, together with one of our major This is even more important if we consider the bigger picture and customers, we started to think about potential improvements and think about IoT and its solutions. The challenge is to offer great as a result, Axino Solutions has built a market-ready solution that new services on the one hand and be highly efficient processing the embraces more than just fulfillment of the typical requirements of billions of IoT records in the network on the other.

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BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

October/November 2019

CONTENTS 72 The digital transformers: MEF, ONAP, O-RAN Alliance and TM Forum

76 Big interview:

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FrĂŠdĂŠric Dufal, VP strategy, customer experience, digital and transformation, international carriers, Orange

80 Opportunites for applying blockchain in roaming Federico Homberg, head of commercial roaming business development, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier

82 Market trends GLF Fraud Report

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SPONSORED Q&A: ANDREW MCGRATH | 71

VODAFONE DELIVER NEW CAPABILITIES WITH CIENA ANDREW MCGRATH, HEAD OF CARRIER CONNECTIVITY, EXPLAINS THE INTRODUCTION AND ROLL ĆŹ Ç§ Ç¤ Q. Where do you see the wholesale market evolving?

network efficiency, scalability and programmability, and will lay the foundation for a more agile, adaptive network. Ciena has a proven track record in industry-leading coherent technology innovation that has completely transformed the networking The growing adoption landscape. By partnering with Ciena, we believe we are able of cloud technology, to offer our customers the flexible, cost effective services they increasing use of require. At launch Vodafone have the deepest coverage in the applications and the UK of any provider and the most comprehensive Packet Optical ever-rising amounts deployment in the world. The deterministic nature of the product of data going across provides consistent latency, so Financial Services, Healthcare, networks are driving Emergency services and users who are heavily dependent on â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;real Capacity the need for new timeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; application will see this product as the right fit for their levels of speed and needs. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be offering E-Line with national coverage in the UK bandwidth in the together with coverage across the world, while our competitorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; wholesale market. The coverage ramains limited and selective. increased need for lowlatency connectivity and guaranteed bandwidth has put greater pressures on carriers Q. What is VCS Vision for Ethernet connectivity? to develop and expand their portfolios. Rapid growth in new technologies such as IoT, AI and Machine Learning, means that Ethernet connectivity will continue to play a key role in the wider networks need to evolve to become fast enough and flexible VCS connectivity portfolio, supporting our customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; needs for enough to meet new demands. For carriers this means that our fast, uncontended bandwidth. We offer a wide range of Ethernet capabilities and portfolios need to be expanded and enhanced. services in addition to the rest of our connectivity portfolio, To serve their markets rapidly evolving needs, our customers are including Ethernet Wireline, Ethernet VPN, Dedicated Ethernet demanding solutions that offer fast and flexible connectivity. Optical and Dedicated Ethernet - E-Line. These services combine to provide wide geographic coverage and service speeds from 10M to multiples of 100G. Even with this portfolio we see increasing Q. How are you responding with new Ethernet technologies demand for more flexibility in our service offering, hence the and solutions? launch of the E-line service. Additionally we see the continuing demand for more and more bandwidth. Some customers are Two years ago, Vodafone Carrier Services launched Dedicated already using multiple 100G services and the demand for 400GE Ethernet to successfully deliver low-latency, high bandwidth services will soon be upon us. optical capability at 1G, 10G and 100G. We have now launched An area that is always a concern is security and, consequently, a 2nd release of Dedicated Ethernet; Dedicated Ethernet E-Line, encryption. Some customers prefer to operate their own using our brand new packet optical transmission network. encryption and security measures over a transparent service whilst There is a considerable legacy of point to point services still in others are looking to buy encrypted services. Another important use and these services are increasingly difficult to sustain. The area related to security in the UK is CAS(T) certification. equipment supporting these legacy services is becoming End Achieving CAS(T) certification is important for VCS as many of Life and this drives a need to migrate customers from these carrier partners could not use our fixed products as they, like us, services to more modern Ethernet services. sell them to Public Sector customers. Dedicated Ethernet E-Line offers granularity at various We passed the CAS(T) audit and have final accreditation bandwidths, whilst maintaining the key technical capability of and certification. Products now Certified in the UK include all the older â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bandwidth Connectâ&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Private Lineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; leased line the Ethernet services shown above plus our IP-VPN product. products that customers exposed to migrations still require. This Another trend is the need for diversity between sites, to and from has directly led to the birth of our latest product, Dedicated the Internet. For this, we use our extensive network plus other Ethernet - E-Line which utilises a new technology platform providersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to increase access and connectivity options. We also that sits on our optical transmission network, based on Ciena see EAD 10G being utilised across our existing fixed connectivity Packet Optical technology. This platform provides greater products, especially Dedicated Ethernet and UK DIA. Â&#x2026;Â&#x192;Â&#x2019;Â&#x192;Â&#x2026;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2013;Â&#x203A;Â?Â&#x2021;Â&#x2020;Â&#x2039;Â&#x192;Ç¤Â&#x2026;Â&#x2018;Â?

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The [digital] Transformers T

he telecoms industry has a history of collaboratively addressing tech and operational issues through trade associations and standards bodies. Digital transformation has proved a bonanza. Annie Turner looks at four of the main ‘transformers’. The great thing about digital transformation is that it has immensely complex, with many facets. From the tech end of the deal, it is generally seen as shorthand for the necessary overhaul of

O-RAN ALLIANCE The O-RAN (for open radio access network) Alliance was created by the merger of the xRAN Forum and C-RAN Alliance. It caused a stir when announced at MWC in 2018 by its founding members – AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO and Orange. They had two intertwined goals: to evolve the RAN through virtualised radio network elements, white-box hardware and standardised interfaces to gain greater interoperability and reduce costs. More bluntly, they saw the digital transformation of the RAN as being in large part to counter the large, established equipment makers’ (Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia) practice of using proprietary connections between the radios and other elements thereby obliging operators to buy complete, expensive systems. Many smaller and newer market entrants saw the move to disaggregated, virtualised and softwarecontrolled RAN equipment as a good way to compete against their powerful counterparts. As Andre Fuetsch, President AT&T Labs and CTO at AT&T, said at the time, “To take full advantage of the flexibility of 5G, we have to go beyond the new radios and change the overall architecture of the end-to-end system”. The original five were joined by Bharti Airtel, China Telecom, KT, Singtel, SK Telecom, Telefónica and Telstra. These 12

operations, IT and network architecture to support new business models as old sources of revenue erode, including the deployment of 5G. Digital transformation also means being a customer-centric (instead of network- and process-centric) business, and armed to make smarter, data-based decisions by applying analytics and artificial intelligence. It involves adopting DevOps approaches to make operations more agile, network virtualisation, becoming cloud-native and

platform-based, automation, orchestration, partnerships, ecosystems and much more. No wonder the standards organisations and trade associations have been kept busy, typically with clutches of techies working on projects that are impenetrable to most of telcos’ C-suite, not least because of the blizzard of abbreviations and acronyms they generate. Here’s a short guide to the main would-be transformers.

Capacity operators co-signed the Constitution Articles of the O-RAN Alliance at MWC Shanghai in June 2018. In February, the O-RAN Alliance announced the release of the first O-RAN standard Open Fronthaul Specifications which includes protocols for the control, user, synchronisation and management plane. The following week, it ran six demos of the specifications in action. By that time its ranks had swelled to include operators, KDDI, SoftBank, TIM and Verizon (but note not Vodafone – see below). Vendor members include Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu HFR Networks, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Mavenir, NEC, Nokia, Pivotal Commware, Radisys, Samsung Electronics, SOLiD and VIAVI. For some, this might look like turkeys joining the Christmas Club, but you have more influence inside the tent than outside it. Despite complaints that some vendors have a different definition than everyone else of what ‘open’ means and simply can’t kick their proprietary code habit, it seems progress is being made. For example, as we went to press, NXP Semiconductors announced new 5G processors that reportedly work with the Alliance’s specs. Already there is unease in some quarters about the dangers of operators trading in reliance on big equipment makers for dependence on a handful of system

integrators, as operators increasingly turn to them for help in managing larger numbers of smaller hardware and software companies. In step with the shift towards open source by telcos, which was an extraordinarily long time coming, in April 2019 the Alliance joined forces with the open source Linux Foundation on the creation of the O-RAN Software Community (O-RAN SC) to develop software for the RAN. The idea is to draw on some of the Foundation’s other projects, but that is not without its critics either (see Open Network Automation Platform – ONAP – below).

A final note… Do not confuse the O-RAN Alliance with OpenRAN, the project spearheaded by Vodafone and Telefónica since 2017 within the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), which Facebook initiated. Its goals of hardware- and software-neutral, interoperable RANs, at less cost and a greater pool of suppliers are strangely familiar. In October 2019, Vodafone Group’s october/november 2019

feature: digital transformers | 73

CEO, Nick Reid, sent a ripple across the industry when he announced, “We are pleased with trials of OpenRAN [in Turkey and South Africa] and are ready to

fast track it into Europe as we seek to actively expand our vendor ecosystem”. Vodafone’s European rollout will begin in the UK. It will also deploy OpenRAN in

the DRC and Mozambique – after all one of TIP’s original aims was to bring affordable to poorly served communities.

TM FORUM TM Forum is arguably the granddaddy of them all, founded in 1988, but has had a few name changes since, most recently from the TeleManagement Forum to TM Forum. For a long time, TM Forum was primarily about streamlining and improving the interoperability of BSS/OSS, and its eTOM and SID blueprints were and are used by operators all over the world. One of its co-founders, Keith Willetts, was quick to understand the importance of digital transformation to telcos, and after a few false starts, TM Forum hit upon a plan in 2016. Led by Vodafone with BT and Orange, it launched an open APIs programme to help telcos’ adopt platformbased operational and business models. These are the most efficient and effective

models ever devised for bringing disparate parties together to interact, as the staggering success of the FAANGs has illustrated. TM Forum’s suite now comprises more than 50 REST-based open APIs which are contributed by member organisations then rounded out and standarised collaboratively. Whether they will ever be widely deployed by operators to provide digital services to businesses and consumers through an ecosystem of partners, which is the goal, remains to be seen. They are however being used by some (notably BT, Vodafone and Orange) as part of a platform approach to streamline their internal operations. At the launch of its Open API programme in 2016, the Forum said it

would have 200 operators signed up by 2018. AT&T, China Telecom Chunghwa Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Salesforce signed up this year, joining the original signatories taking the total to 17 operators, although most of the biggies are in there, plus 36 others, mostly vendors. Only Ericsson has signed up from the ranks of the very largest. TM Forum’s work on APIs has also led to close cooperation with MEF and ONAP.

Capacity – the term originated with Oracle. The ‘softwarisation’ has brought MEF into the purview of other trade bodies, including TM Forum (see above) and ONAP (see below). MEF and TM Forum are a little like stalagmite and stalactites, getting closer to meeting in the middle. This two-way flow is because the routers, element managers, datacentres and so on that sit below BSS/ OSS typically were traditionally the domain of 3GPP, European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and MEF, but now they are exposing software-enabled services up to the BSS/OSS. Against this backdrop, MEF, TM Forum and the Linux Foundation announced collaborative partnerships in 2017 to better

coordinate their efforts. This bore fruit the following year in ONAP’s second, Beijing Release, published in June 2018. The Release enables orders to be placed and fulfilled as well the monitoring the quality of service, with TM Forum’s Open APIs carrying MEF-defined payloads to provide the northbound interfaces. Their standards and assets have been incorporated in subsequent ONAP releases.

common, open framework is supposed to make it easier to integrate solutions from many vendors. Most of the usual suspects are members, with the notable exception of Telefónica, which is only indirectly involved, for example, NEC and its subsidiary Netcracker have been long-term strategic partners for years with projects in many countries and they participate in ONAP. Naturally there’s trouble in paradise. There are grumbles that progress is too slow and Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO at TELUS, claimed earlier this year that open source is just “the new model of taxes on telcos”. At Broadband World Forum in

Amsterdam, Mansoor Hanif took a pot shot directly at ONAP. He is the CTO of the UK regulator Ofcom and former BT executive, and warned against “over dependency on any single automation platform”. Clearly not everyone is delighted at the rising power of open source and the Linux Foundation in telecoms.

MEF MEF was the Metro Ethernet Forum at launch back in 2001 when it was dedicated to developing and positioning Ethernet as an access network technology. As infrastructure started to become ever more software defined and controlled, and will be even more so as 5G unfolds, MEF moved into standards for virtualised networks and changed its name to MEF Forum (more commonly referred to as MEF). MEF claims more than 200 member companies, and has published more than 60 technical specifications and implementation agreements. Its current scope, MEF 3.0, work includes optical, transport, carrier Ethernet, IP, software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) and cloud services, as well as lifecycle service orchestration (LSO)

ONAP Operators flocked to get involved with the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) in 2017 and 2018, which runs under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. Many had become somewhat frustrated with the ETSI approach, known as OSM for open source management and orchestration. ONAP brought together the ECOMP framework developed by AT&T and the Linux Foundation’s Open Orchestrator Project. ONAP is designed to simplify the operations, management and control of network elements and services across multiple domains, including wireless and optical transport networks. Its capacitymedia.com

74 | SPONSORED STATEMENT

EU’S NEW TELECOM REGULATORY FRAMEWORK PROMOTES FIBER NETWORK INVESTMENT On June 6, 2018, the European Parliament finalized the new telecom regulatory framework of European Electronic Communications Code (EECC) and urged EU member states to update the relevant national laws under the provisions of EECC by December 21, 2020. EECC aims to improve the broadband coverage of all EU countries, enable more citizens to participate in economic digitization, and leverage the socioeconomic benefits of digitization to improve public welfare. The requirements on network investments are as follows:

the DigiNetzG Act to optimize the conditions and efficiency for network construction. The DigiNetzG Act requires traffic construction projects using public investment to support fiber deployment under certain conditions. It will be mandatory to make existing infrastructure such as electricity, waterways and waste water systems, gas and district heating, roads and railways etc. available and coordinated in broadband deployment. The municipal government needs to ensure that new residential areas are equipped with passive fiber network infrastructure. The right of way (ROW) acquisition process must be completed within • The Code encourages investment in new networks in line with three months to avoid lengthy and unnecessary bureaucratic objectives of Broadband 2025, with particular emphasis on approval procedures. The act undoubtedly lays a very favorable Very High Capacity Networks (VHCNs), such as full-fiber legal foundation for the long-term fiber deployment. Capacity network, fiber-to-the-distribution-point, and 5G networks. A trendsetter of network infrastructure rollout in a country also plays a vital role in facilitating ultra-broadband deployment. • Encourage the sharing of civil infrastructure to lower the cost Deutsche Telekom (DT) announced that 50 Mbps broadband of network deployment and bring out the above-mentioned service was available nationwide at the end of 2018, and that investment. 250 Mbps has covered nearly 24 million homes by September, 2019. In 2018, DT started the FTTH deployment plan for new residential areas, commercial campuses, and schools. In addition, • Inspired by successful models in Europe, the EU advocate to cooperation, co-investment, collaborative network construction, create incentives to invest through lighter regulatory and access network wholesale are adopted to achieve the goal of obligations for co-investment and wholesale-only networks. 2 million lines in 2021. DT’s network deployment strategy in • Increase regulatory stability and facilitate network investment response to the Government’s gigabit initiative, to some extent, and business planning. The National Regulatory Authorities also activates market competition. Consumers will have more (NRAs) shall carry out the five-year market review cycle opportunities to select high-quality and cost-effective Internet instead of the current three-year limit. services. The UK also has a deep understanding of the importance of • Assure more predictability for the deployment of new digitalization and full connectivity. In 2018, the UK released the generation’s mobile technologies by guaranteeing a minimum Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review (FTIR), setting targets licensing duration of 20 years for the harmonization of to provide fiber access for 15 million homes by 2025, cover the regional spectrum and more transparency in the renewal rights. majority of the population with 5G networks by 2027, and cover the entire UK with fibers by 2033. A new Universal Service • Simplify administrative rules for deploying wireless access Obligation was also approved for giving every household and points in small areas to facilitate the deployment of denser business the right to request a broadband connection of at least mobile networks. 10 Mbps in The Digital Economy Act 2017. The UK government believes that the most efficient way to build full-fiber networks is Practices in Germany and the UK to encourage competition and business investment. If necessary, Although there are uncertainties and differences between the government will intervene and assist with the process. In addition to the 1.1 billion GBP fund for digital connection, the specific time and determination of the EU members in assist by the UK Government also includes an obstacle task implementing the EECC, we can see that some EU member states have been practicing the investment guidelines over the past force which aims to reduce the cost of building fiber networks by identifying and eliminating deployment obstacles. Key tasks few years. of the task force include simplifying the way leave agreement to Germany launched the Gigabit Initiative of Germany in 2017, aiming to build a converged gigabit network covering facilitate access to multi-dwelling units (MDUs). the whole country by 2025. The German federal government By developing national standardized construction methods plays a crucial role in promoting the deployment of VHCNs to lower the rollout cost and time caused by street work and networks. In addition to continuous network construction ensure fiber connections in new buildings, the UK Government subsidies (about 4 billion euros in 2014–2017, up to 70% of the facilitates ROW acquisition and ensures that new residential areas total investment amount), the German government also decreed can enjoy the fiber broadband technology. The main contractor

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of the UK network construction plan is the Openreach, which is a new independent branch of the BT Group. In August, 2018, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of BT reported the fullfiber broadband deployment plan to the new Prime Minister, mentioned the short-term goal of covering 4 million homes with fiber and long-term goal of covering 15 million homes with fiber by 2025. The estimated total investment is about 30 billion GBP to achieve the copper-out fiber-in gigabit acceleration strategy, which will create 30,000 jobs. The CEO of BT stressed that this is a government task and requires quick and decisive actions and assistance from the government and regulators. If the regulator Ofcom provides investment incentives (subsidies), BT can double the target to 32 million homes.

Four Key Factors to Succeed in Facilitating Fiber Based VHCNs From the VHCNs construction plans of Germany and the UK, we can see that many preferential policies are made in response to the EECC. These policies have effectively promoted the deployment of fiber based networks in both countries. 1 Public investment: For cutting-edge technology applications, especially fixed network technologies, the government must show its determination to simulate private sector investment by public funding and subsidies, so as to effectively facilitate large-scale network deployment. Decades ago, telephony networks were actually invested by state-owned telephone companies. Nowadays, optical fiber rollout also requires government investment, especially in areas with long payback periods. capacitymedia.com

2 Friendly ROW policy: The government should simplify ROW acquisition by setting up laws and regulations. Passive optical fiber cable pre-installation is a good practice of ROW policy. 3 Infrastructure sharing: Reusing existing resources is an efficient way to lower network deployment costs. The government can encourage cross-industry infrastructure co-construction and facilitate the sharing of existing civil infrastructure such as poles and conducts to reduce fiber deployment time, investment costs, street work, and impact on the environment. 4 A trendsetter of network deployment is required: It is better to carry out a national strategy with an entity that has sufficient resources. In Western Europe, operators with significant market power are usually the main contractors of VHCNs. In some cases, new players can obtain a large share of public funding and subsidies through public bidding to rollout VHCNs as well; for instance, Open Fiber in Italy. In any case, deploying VHCNs networks requires an efficient contractor to take the lead. In order to realize VHCNs, fiber deployment policies are of crucial importance. This is because optical fiber is currently the best medium not only for broadband development but an important resource for 5G base station fronthaul and backhaul. Unlike spectrum allocation, optical fiber cable rollout requires more support from government policies and regulations to address the challenges of insufficient funds and difficulty in ROW acquisition.

76 |

Keep customers at the heart of transformation Frédéric Dufal VP strategy, customer experience, digital and transformation, International Carriers, Orange, speaks to Natalie Bannerman about how Orange is keeping its Capacity customers at the centre of all it does

usiness transformation, in wholesale terms, refers to the growing digitisation of processes and products to better serve customer needs and to optimise operations. The key element of any business changes is that it better meets the wants of the end customers, and a clear example of that in the telecoms community is International Carriers, Orange. One of the people at the head of that customer-centric transformation is Frédéric Dufal, vice president of strategy, customer experience, digital & transformation, International Carriers, Orange. In this role, Dufal both managed the definition and implementation of the company’s transformation plan as well as leading the improvement and digitalisation efforts for the customer experience segment.

Customers first Speaking to him about the importance of customer experience to the overall business transformation roadmap, he says.

“Something quite key in the Orange DNA and in how we do digitisation at Orange in general, and at International Carriers in particular, is to make sure that we start from the customers’ viewpoint.” The key he says is listening, responding and not solely on the bottom line. “It’s important to not just push things out, but to listen to what people want and give it to them. I think that is the recipe for success in general in business, but especially in digitisation where the promise of ROI on saving things could basically push you into getting your customers needing to do more work in the long run.” With over 25 years in the telecoms industry, Dufal started his career at France Télécom, before joining Orange Business Services in the early 2000’s and working his way up through the ranks. He even served as vice chairman of the board at the Tizen Association. Looking at the market as whole, Dufal offers his insights into the biggest trends he sees across the sector, and virtualisation is top of the list.

“As in many other industries, wholesale will become more and more softwarebased which will influence networks very strongly. Also, for operators, artificial intelligence may play a very significant role in their relationship with their own customers, especially in mass market where you have huge volumes. With Blockchain experiments starting in a number of places, we may find they prove to be of significant interest.” For its part, Dufal says that International Carriers, Orange, is developing a number of new product solutions with this customer-centric focus in mind. “One is our digital portal, which is mostly focused on customer care today, but we are expanding it. We really designed it starting with a focus group and what customers want, what is their priority, what they expect to find online and under which User Interface, etc. Next he points to the company’s first step into the world of on-demand, although he indicates there is much more to come. october/november 2019

the big interview: frédéric dufal | 77

1999 – 2001

Regional Sales Director, France Telecom

progress,” he says. “Digitisation is really an improvement for the industry, but we have to do it with open eyes. If you do digitisation without being aware of the security aspects and then don’t handle them well, you’re introducing a significant portion of risk.” But all the blame can’t be left on the part of the technology, as security risks can often lie in human error. “Very often risks can just come from how your staff is educated, human engineering etc., explains Dufal. “Therefore, a larger surface might not mean much higher risk if the new surface is well managed. If the small new surface is not managed at all, then most probably it can introduce very significant risks. It’s always a balance.”

2001 – 2003

Group Head of B2B mobile marketing, Orange Business

2004 – 2007

Director of mobile innovation and proposition delivery, Orange Business

2008 – 2014

VP of devices development & technology, Orange

2014 – 2016

VP marketing, international carriers, Orange

Emerging tech

VP strategy, customer experience, digital and transformation, International Carriers, Orange

Digitisation is really an improvement for the industry,Capacity but we have to do it with open eyes”

2016 – Present

As the conversation moves onto the

Frédéric Dufal,VP strategy, customer experience, digital and transformation, International Carriers, Orange

“We launched an offering called Ethernet Now that allows our customers to order Ethernet links or change the bandwidth of their Ethernet links. It’s our first step into the on-demand world, but only a first step.”

Minimise attack-surface As part of the wider Orange group, International Carriers, has strong proximity to Orange Cyberdefense, meaning that it has a number of security products on offer to its customers. “We have thorough sets of services around anti-fraud and security, he explains. “And the more the world is digitised, the more risk you have from hackers and things like that. We help the operator to protect their customer and protect their own network from attacks, which could impede customer experience quite significantly.” Though softwarisation and virtualisation may appear to increase your attack surface, Dufal isn’t one to buy into this idea that all digitisation is bad. “In life if you take no risks you never capacitymedia.com

drivers of transformation, I’m curious as to whether or not Dufal, like many believes that preparation for 5G and IoT is a contributing factor. “5G and IoT will be key drivers for transformation in a series of areas, like smart cities or industry 4.0. So they’re first an enabler for digital transformation, and after that, to me the key transformation advantage is that it allows us to capture data with IoT.” Interestingly, he says that IoT won’t intrinsically change wholesale networks, but rather the way we capture and interpret data. “I’m not sure that IoT will change how we do networks because as we are connected we already knew how to capture the data. I think the analytics side has strong value, and I think the way of properly understanding what the end users want to do and what the end B2B wants to do with IoT and 5G will help to drive the right offers to the carriers in general.” The biggest trend Dufal sees around IoT is the need to combine a series of radio protocols and for its part Orange has been

active in this area. “Orange is already supporting LoRa and 4G, 5G etc. How you are able to combine these, understand them well and know what’s best suited to every customer case is important.” The relationship between carriers and businesses is tightly tethered. The needs of one, directly affect the needs of the other. Interestingly, Dufal said they are the same. “Their needs are mostly the same I think by design as one feeds into another,” he says. “The needs are similar whether you deal with an end user or a customer in the mass market or in the B2B market, or in the carrier to carrier market.” Multi-cloud is another topic high on the list for International Carriers, Orange customers and one that has to be carefully managed from the carrier side. “When you speak of multi-cloud you speak of data, which is spread across a series of locations, and which you need to access quite simply and transparently. Beneath that, you have a lot of software to orchestrate all this, but also services from pipes to transport services, to IP etc. which will create more opportunities for carriers.” In March of this year, International Carriers, Orange, welcomed a new CEO, with Emmanuel Rochas now taking the reigns at the company. At the time Rochas commented: “My intention is to accelerate the growth of International Carriers, and I plan to build on the expertise, engagement and enthusiasm of the teams here to make it a growing entity which continues to be profitable. I plan to leverage the power and the scale of the Orange group and with all the advantages that it brings to our activities, in terms of geographical presence or indeed the innovative resources available.”

The road ahead As the interview draws to a close, Dufal outlines his areas of focus for the future doubling down on two key areas – seemingly echoing Rochas sentiment of profitability and tapping into Orange’s existing security resources. “We’re continuing to work on our newly launched Ethernet Now service, which offers on-demand Ethernet, and there is more to come on the on-demand front in our roadmap for the years to come,” he explains enthusiastically. “The second piece is on security, he says. “Our security portfolio is already very rich, and we’re working more on adding new customers that can benefit from our services. We want our customers to avoid the trap of creating huge security gaps because they did not have access to the right expertise.”

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80 | opinion: federico homberg

OPPORTUNITIES FOR APPLYING BLOCKCHAIN IN ROAMING Federico Homberg, Head of Commercial Roaming Business Development, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier

he roaming business is probably 25 or 30 years old and the wholesale part has not changed much since then. However, on the retail side the importance of roaming has increased dramatically. In Europe, consumers benefit from “Roam-Like-Home”, which means they can use their local rate plans abroad as if they were at home. On the M2M (machine-to-machine) side, as an example, automobile manufacturers equip their cars with SIM cards that need to work globally. For this, they typically work with 4 to 5 large mobile network operators that provide the connectivity for specific regions. For maximum quality and coverage, Deutsche Telekom has wholesale roaming relationships with over 600 other mobile operators. For all these relationships there are contracts which need to be negotiated, implemented, tracked and settled after the term of the contract. It’s easy to imagine the amount of data needed just for the financial agreement and payment issues. Presently, a lot of this is still done manually. However, as technologies like NB-IoT, LTE-M, VoLTE, ViLTE or 5G evolve, the complexity will rise, and increased automation will be necessary. I therefore see blockchain solutions as a great, perhaps crucial, value addition. It can support efficiency of processes and greater transparency as more and more operators work together. A first step towards automation in inter-carrier roaming settlements could be to implement agreements via software rather than manually. This would create one source of truth for rates and discounts that could be stored over a blockchain. In a second step, a smart contract could be created that would automatically request the concluded volume data from either a data clearing house or an internal data source and

apply the pricing and discounts agreed upon in the first step. The result of all that would be a uniform settlement sheet that could be easily compared with those we receive from other mobile operators. In the case of disputes, the smart contract could apply an automated workflow. Contingent on the result of the settlement, a credit or debit note could be generated and even the payment could be automated.Capacity While the latter is probably still a bit further out, the first two steps are relatively straightforward and would already solve significant pain points. One of the major challenges to exploit the potential of blockchain is the lack of industry standards and interoperability between different blockchain protocols. This is something that the ITW Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF) is now tackling with the planned launch of a “Carrier Blockchain Network”. The idea is to: 1. Leverage blockchain technology to manage the contract, agreement, settlement, payment and dispute processes. 2. Ensure interoperability through development of industry standards open to all ICT service and technology providers. 3. Build a governance model and membership process to facilitate speed-to-scale and industry participation. In roaming, this will enable us to handle the increased usage and complexity while: • Limiting the number of employees needed for settlements • Improving cash flow due to real-time

One of the major challenges to exploit the potential of blockchain is the lack of industry standards and interoperability between different blockchain protocols. This is something that the ITW Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF) is now tackling with the planned launch of a Carrier Blockchain Network” Federico Homberg, Head of Commercial Roaming Business Development, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier

capability and shorter settlement cycles • Reducing costs to the Data Clearing House because Call Data Records can be handled via blockchain In addition, there are further synergies created by using a blockchain network for multiple use cases, such as voice settlement or data-on-demand. Another challenge for blockchain is the required network effect. The more users a blockchain network has – the more each one can benefit. With the GLF representing more than 25 of the world’s largest wholesale carriers, I am confident that there is enough critical mass to make the Carrier Blockchain Network a success! And best of all: The Carrier Blockchain Network will be open to non-GLF members. october/november 2019

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82 | market trends: glf fraud report 2019

THE EVOLUTION OF FRAUD MANAGEMENT The ITW Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF) has just released its second benchmark annual report on fraudulent traffic in the international telecoms industry. The GLF report is becoming the annual ‘temperature check’ for the telecoms industry on its fight against fraudulent traffic as well as helping organisations set their priorities going forward. Capacity provides a snapshot of this year’s findings. This is the second of what has now become the benchmark annual report on fraudulent traffic in the international telecoms industry. It demonstrates the on-going leadership on this topic which we in the GLF seek to take to ensure that reducing fraudulent traffic is a key focus on the executive agendas. In this year’s report we have expanded industry engagement, with both carriers and technology providers, to take a deeper look at the trends of the past twelve months and what we, as an industry, need to be focused on going forward.” Daniel Kurgan, CEO of BICS and chair of the GLF fraud working group

COMPARING IMPORTANCE OF FRAUDULENT TRAFFIC IN CARRIERS The telecom industry’s approach to fraud proliferation of access to technology. In has undergone significant change within the last 12 months, since the publication the last few years. Historically, fraud was of the first GLF Fraud Report in October viewed as a “nuisance” or “annoyance” but 2018, fraud continues to be a priority for one that was simply the cost of doing the majority of carriers. business. However, there have been In the 2019 GLF Fraud Survey, 80% of increasing efforts made to manage carriers notedCapacity that fraud is a ‘strategic’ or fraudulent traffic given the increasing cost ‘top’ priority compared with 85% in 2018. that it can cause underpinned by the Furthermore, 56% of carriers said that the

importance of fraud was increasing in their organization, compared with 74% in 2018. Much of the seeming apparent reduction in priority and importance comes from the new respondents to the fraud survey suggesting that prioritisation is highest in the core GLF membership that participated in 2018 also.

Exhibit 1: Comparing importance of fraudulent traffic in carriers Where would you rank the importance of fraudulent traffic as a topic in your organisation?* (% responses)

^ŝŐŶŝĮĐĂŶƚůǇ ƌĞĚƵĐŝŶŐ Staying the same ^ŝŐŶŝĮĐĂŶƚůǇ ŝŶĐƌĞĂƐŝŶŐ

Strategic priority Low priority

n=20

n=45

32%

29%

53%

51%

DĂƌŐŝŶĂůůǇ Žƌ ƐŝŐŶŝĮĐĂŶƚůǇ increasing

Strategic or top priority

Top priority Same as Business as Usual

How has the importance of fraudulent traffic management in your organisation changed over the past 12 months?** (% responses) Slightly reducing Marginally increasing

n=20

n=44

37%

36%

20% 37%

34% 11% 5%

18%

2018

2019

26% 7% 2% 2019

2% 2018

Notes: *n=45, **n=44, respondents without a response were not counted; Source: GLF Survey 2019, Delta Partners Analysis

When comparing a subset of carriers who answered in both years, 80% said that fraud is a ‘strategic’ or ‘top’ priority in both 2018

and 2019. This reduction in priority did not come across in the interviews with carriers and vendors who unanimously

spoke of greater use of a Fraud Management System and a general, gradual shift in carriers’ attitude towards fraud.

october/november 2019

| 83

ASSESSING THE CHANGE IN VOLUME AND IMPACT OF FRAUDULENT TRAFFIC Exhibit 2: Assessing the change in volume and impact of fraudulent traffic How has the volume and impact of fraudulent traffic hitting your organisation changed in the past 12 months? (% responses) ^ŝŐŶŝĮĐĂŶƚůǇ increasing

DĂƌŐŝŶĂůůǇ increasing

^ƚĂǇŝŶŐ ƚŚĞ ƐĂŵĞ

^ůŝŐŚƚůǇ ƌĞĚƵĐŝŶŐ

^ŝŐŶŝĮĐĂŶƚůǇ reducing

2018

25%

20%

30%

20%

2019

13%

20%

34%

13%

Notes: *n=45, respondents without a response were not counted; Source: GLF Survey 2018-2019, Delta Partners Analysis

At an overall level, this year’s survey showed a reduction in the share of carriers that said fraudulent traffic was

increasing in terms of volume and impact from 45% in 2018 to 33% in 2019. Where fraudulent traffic was

‘significantly increasing’ in 2018 for 25% of carriers, this has reduced to 13% in 2019.

Capacity

SUMMARY 1. 80% of carriers cite fraudulent traffic management as a “strategic” or “top priority”. In over 50% of carriers, it has increased its importance in the past year.

9. The digitisation of traffic widens the pool of potential fraudsters as internet-based hackers’ knowledge and methods find applicability on telecoms networks.

2. While IRSF is experiencing the greatest growth, missed call campaign or Wangiri continues to be a top-of-mind concern for many carriers given the challenges to identify and block the traffic.

10. As network technology advances, fraud management tools and practices must adapt to new requirements by improving along three requirements: scale, digitisation and speed.

3. Robocalling is an increasingly prevalent form of fraudulent traffic.

11. Scale: To address the massive scale of the future network security must be embedded from components all the way to network architecture in a layered approach and following the principle of least privilege.

4. Awareness of the impacts of fraud and the actions taken to manage fraud has grown in importance by 58% of surveyed organisations 5. Awareness of fraud is becoming less contained solely in fraud management teams and being increasingly integrated into the course of normal business. 6. Carriers are associating successful fraud management with improved service quality. Direct financial benefit is being recognised as some customers are willing to pay a premium to avoid high-risk carriers. 7. The technology advancements of IoT, 5G, and edge computing have opened potential opportunities for new fraud types such as virtual machines/emulators, bots, man-in-the-middle attacks, and distributed device hacks. 8. IoT’s future scale presents a threat multiplier as more devices bring more vulnerabilities to the network and the volume of traffic and transactions occurring on the network complicate fraud management.

12. Digitisation: eSIMs are a simple but effective measure to digitise a fraud management practice, eliminate a common fraud use-case, and enable more security control over the network by carriers. 13. Speed: NFV opens several new opportunities for fraud management enabling flexible architecture to manage fraud better and enable specific solutions to combat specific fraud types. 14. Carriers perceive fraud management tools to have a significant potential impact on reducing fraud with the most potential associated with AI/ML, big data, automation, and blockchain. 15. Big data is foundational to effectively deploy AI/ML and automation due to their reliance on timely, accurate data with enough volume to build algorithms to discern legitimate from fraudulent traffic. 16. Blockchain is in its early stages but shows promise to overcome the conflicting goals of sharing fraud management information between carriers while protecting proprietary routes.

To view or download the whole report, go to: www.itwglf.com

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31 March & 1 April 2020 Moscow

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26 March 2020 Mainz

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86 | appointments

Justin Dustzadeh Equinix Equinix has named Justin Dustzadeh as its new chief technology officer. In his new role, Dustzadeh will be responsible for developing a technology roadmap to support the company’s wider platform strategy, as well as lead the next-generation technology and innovation function. Prior to joining Equinix, Dustzadeh worked for Uber as head of their global network and software platform. In this position, he led a team responsible for the architecture design, engineering and round the clock operations of Uber’s global network infrastructure and software platforms. “We are thrilled to have Justin join the Equinix leadership team,” said Charles Meyers, president and chief executive officer, Equinix.

Mike Sicoli Internap Mike Sicoli, the former CFO of GTT, is joining Internap, a data centre and cloud solutions company. Sicoli will become president and CFO at Internap reporting to CEO Peter Aquino. In his new position, Sicoli will lead all finance and accounting functions, corporate development, investor relations, information technology and real estate. Sicoli and Aquino have worked together before. From 2005 to 2010 Sicoli was CFO of New Jersey fibre company RCN, where he also reported to Aquino. “It’s a great opportunity to once again team up with Mike to take INAP to the next level in 2020,” said Aquino. Sicoli replaces Jim Keeley, who left the company last Friday. Until Sicoli’s arrival at INAP on 1 October the interim CFO will be Joe DuFresne, who is senior VP for finance, corporate development and treasury.

Johan Dennelind du

Yasutaka Mizutani Colt Colt Technology Services has appointed Yasutaka Mizutani as its new chief marketing officer. Mizutani has been with the company for 12 years and during his time there, has held various positions across Europe and Asia. Before this, he served as head of global business partner marketing, where he and his team were responsible for supporting Colt’s regional sales organisations. In his new elevated role, Mizutani will be responsible for defining and executing Colt’s marketing strategy, underpinned by the company’s goal of being the most customer-oriented business in the industry. . “I couldn’t be more thrilled that someone who has played a fundamental role in how our brand has evolved over the past few years is stepping up to become our CMO,” said CCO Keri Gilder.

du recently named Johan Dennelind, the former CEO of the Telia Group, as its new CEO. Dennelind replaces Osman Sultan, who said in February 2019 that he was going to step down after 14 years from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications, which trades as du. Dennelind, who started as a management trainee at Telia, has had a global career, working as COO, CFO and then CEO of DiGi Telecommunications in Malaysia, and CEO of Vodacom International in South Africa. He returned to Telia in 2013, where his main task was to clear up the effects of the group’s investments in central Asia. After it was fined almost $1 billion for corruption in Kazakhstan, Telia unwound most of its investments outside the Nordic area.

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Jonathan Kini TalkTalk Business TalkTalk Business has appointed Jonathan Kini as its new managing director, suceeding former MD Kristine Olsen-Chapman. Kini will report to Tristia Harrison, TalkTalk’s CEO, and will be responsible for leading and shaping the growth of one of the UK’s largest B2B providers of broadband, fibre and Ethernet data services. “We’re delighted to have Jonathan join the TalkTalk Business leadership team. Jonathan’s breadth of business experience, knowledge and drive for team success makes him ideally placed to ensure TalkTalk Business continues to go from strength to strength,” said Harrison.

Anne Chow AT&T Business Anne Chow has been made CEO of AT&T Business, replacing Thaddeus Arroyo, who moves sideways to be CEO of AT&T’s consumer business. Chow, who joined the company in 1990 and was president of AT&T national business, announced her promotion in a post on her LinkedIn profile and will be responsible for international operations as well as AT&T Business. “This is an exciting time at AT&T, and in AT&T Business, as we have a unique opportunity to provide our customers with the innovative solutions they need to better run their businesses and serve their customers,” said Chow. . I look forward to this journey.”

Gavin Patterson Salesforce Former BT CEO, Gavin Patterson is to be chairman of Salesforce’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). In his new role, he will provide strategic guidance to its rapidly growing business in EMEA, the company’s fastestgrowing region globally. “Gavin is a highly respected leader and innovator, and we’re thrilled to welcome him to Salesforce as our EMEA chairman,” said Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Keith Block. During his tenure at BT, he completed the UK rollout of the superfast fibre broadband and started the deployment of ultrafast fibre broadband. He led the £15 billion acquisition of EE, launched BT Sport, expanded BT’s cyber security practice and championed BT’s social purpose agenda.

Geneviève MaltaisBoisvert Digital Bridge Marc Ganzi’s Digital Bridge has appointed a former renewable energy and climate change advisor as principal on its team. In her new role, MaltaisBoisvert will focus on sourcing and managing investments for the Digital Colony Partners. Most recently, Maltais-Boisvert served as director of infrastructure investments at PSP Investments, one of Canada’s largest pension investment managers, with over $125 billion of assets under management. “Over the years I have known Geneviève, I have seen great value in her unique and strategic perspective on the industry,” said Ganzi. “I am thrilled to welcome her to the firm.”

Tell us your move

Capacity is keen to hear from readers about new roles and appointments in the industry. Send details to natalie.bannerman@capacitymedia.com, with a high-resolution picture

october/november 2019

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88 | innovation report: 5G UK rollout

CSPS HOLD THE KEY TO UNLOCKING 5Gâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S TRUE POTENTIAL KAMAL BHADADA, PRESIDENT, TATA CONSULTANCY Ç§ ÇĄ ÇĄ Íą Ç¤

he race for 5G is heating up, with communications service providers (CSPs) bringing 5G services online in different countries seemingly every week. The promise of 5G to drive a technology revolution for consumers and businesses is much touted: faster speeds will lead to new and improved communications services, as well as more innovative applications such as Internet of Things (IoT) for smart cities. However, the benefits for CSPs are much less frequently explored. According to some reports, the global 5G market is expected to reach $277 billion by 2025, but thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a risk that unless CSPs innovate effectively, they will get stuck at the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;commodity endâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of the ROI spectrum. 5G provides the flexibility to control and steer data traffic based on end-user applications, opening up new product niches and changes to generate ROI.

How CSPs can start making a difference Innovation is happening everywhere. Manufacturing giants like GE and Siemens are leading the way in enterprise IoT: GE launched a new IoT business worth $1.2bn at the end of last year, while Siemens has developed a new operating system specifically for IoT products and services. In consumer technology, Facebook is reported to be working on building video streaming into its Portal device, and Google is bringing augmented reality into its search results. 5G is a critical technology underpinning all these exciting new trends. It stands to reason then, that in an age where every device in our lives relies on 5G connectivity to function effectively, there will be a huge opportunity for CSPs to transform their roles, from merely providers of connectivity into guardians of customer experience, providing the security, privacy and trust that consumers are looking for. A key first step for CSPs is to reassess their monetisation models. Currently, the

majority focus purely on speed, but with 5G there are new ways of doing business. Content owners, streaming companies and consumer device manufacturers will all be heavily reliant on the connectivity CSPs provide, putting CSPs in a unique position at the crossroads of the interests of all these businesses. There is an abundance of opportunities on offer for CSPs willing to take risks with business model innovation. Capacity These opportunities can be summarised in two different models CSPs can look at, both of which enable them to take advantage of this new reality in different ways.

Monetising the network The first model looks at additional ways CSPs can monetise the connectivity services they provide. As connectivity becomes more central to the lives of consumers and the success of businesses, it makes a lot of sense to look at more sophisticated payment models based around plans guaranteeing specific quality of service, reliability or latency. CSPs could also look at creating new tiers of services based on specific B2B or B2C use cases. For example, ensuring broadband connectivity in particularly challenging areas or extra guarantees on reliability or speed where it is business-critical. In the past, communications technology centered around voice and data, whereas today CSPs need to respond to consumer and business demand for pure data in ever-increasing volumes. Against this backdrop, reviewing business models and payment tiers is sorely needed.

Unlock the value of ecosystems Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy to get hung up on consumer devices and broadband connections when thinking about 5G, but there are broader effects as well. For example, 5G will have a huge effect on the manufacturing industry, as enhanced connectivity allows IoT

technology to become more integrated into the production process. The media and entertainment industry, increasingly dominated by internet streaming services, is another industry that will be profoundly affected by the rise of 5G. Beyond providing connectivity, CSPs have the potential to unlock real value, building on their role by playing the role of central hub in a wider ecosystem. Currently consumers and businesses are frozen out of getting the best deals and services through the fatigue of having to liaise with individual suppliers. By shifting their gaze outwards and harnessing the power of partnerships, CSPs can start to aggregate services from different industries and unlock the value of these potential ecosystems. By pivoting their role towards that of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;ecosystem convenerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, CSPs will also be able to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;bring the outside inâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, partnering with businesses working with leading technologies such as blockchain, cybersecurity and big data to offer improved services to customers. 5G will be the currency CSPs use to negotiate and nurture these partnerships. According to recent research from TCS, the telecommunications sector is more prepared to adopt innovative behaviors than other sectors: 44% of CSPs surveyed said that they operate a business model that drives exponential value, compared to a 36% average for other sectors. Using the wider ecosystem to drive mass personalisation will be the key to CSPs putting themselves at the centre of the new digital customer experience. This is no small feat: it requires strong leadership to balance investments in the core traditional business with more new technologies that enable these different business models. The companies that achieve this fine balance will be well positioned to enjoy exponential growth in both customer satisfaction and, as a result, their bottom line. october/november 2019

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