The panellists – including Holger Magnussen, SVP of Deutsche Telekom ICSS, Dumitri Vlad, director of Cosmote and Romtelecom carrier services and Daniel Sjoberg, CMO for EMEA at Level 3 Communications – also discussed the potential of the region becoming a hub between Europe and the Middle East.
“The region’s telecoms growth will explode,” said Sjoberg. “It is just a matter of whether it will happen in the next two to three years or a little longer.”
Neighbouring Turkey presently serves as a hub for Europe and the Middle East, and Sjoberg believes the fact that the Balkans is an open market could work in its favour.
“You cannot make a decision to become a telecoms hub, you have to facilitate it,” he said.
Sjoberg added that investment and generating local content was essential for countries in the Balkans to become established as a local hub.
“Most countries [in the Balkans region] have the ambition of becoming a local hub and I think it is still up in the air as to who it is going to be,” he suggested.
Magnussen stressed the importance of IP migration for growth, and explained Deutsche Telekom’s strategy for creating a region-wide, all-IP network.
“I believe in the concept of IP migration and what we want to do is to change our networks to IP-only,” Magnussen said. “In the relatively small market of Macedonia we have achieved that already.”
Capacity Balkans 2014 continues today and tomorrow (April 7 and 8) in Bucharest, Romania.
