Asia Pacific
Kicking off the first of the regional discussions, Mohit Gidwani, partner of TMT Practice at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants moderated the first panel on Asia Pacific.
Panellists included, Oliver Jones, chief executive of Chayora; Kat Luna-Abelarde, CEO of PLDT Global; and Robert Jones, CEO and founder of Bluefire.
Like all sessions of the day, conversation started on the topic of Covid-19, its impact and what our panellists had witnessed over the last few months.
“Working from home has led to huge capacity changes and one of the things I’m really having my eyes opened to when speaking to cloud and other infrastructure players we’re working with, is what quite a step-change people have gone through,” said Oliver Jones.
“Between 10- and 60-times capacity increases have deployed over the last two months in terms of the ability to spike and peak and not see systems go down. So what I think we’ll see as we enter this new normal, is a scramble over the next six months as we anticipate secondary and tertiary waves of Covid-19, to just make sure that customer organisations don’t get caught without the capacity.”
As conversation moved onto topic of IoT, Kat Luna-Abelarde shared that she feels that the home will become the new centre of everything we do and technology to become the key unifier.
“The home now has become the nexus of everything,” she said. “It’s where the parents work, it’s where the kids go to school, its where you do your workouts, and I’ve seen the shift in consumption from luxury goods, to goods for the home.”
“Everything that people buy now will go into the home, and it’ll be interesting to see how, moving forward, technology will start taking over and connecting everything.”
Talk then shifted to gaming, a huge uptake in which has been noted, particularly in the APAC region. According to the panellists in 10 years’ time the money spent on eSports will outstrip that spent on traditional sports, a sign of its growing prominence.
And in Robert Jones' view, only 5G can create the networks needed to support this.
“These AAA games coming to the networks, the only way from a performance, latency, bandwidth/capacity point of view of it becoming a mass market reality, is with the new networks we’re building with 5G.”
Middle East
Moving over to Middle East panel Carl Roberts, partner at Hadaara Consulting and head judge of this year’s Global Carrier Awards was at the helm.
Joining him was Sohail Qadir, VP of wholesale at Omantel; Hany Aly, EVP of enterprise business at du; Ali Amiri, group chief carrier & wholesale officer at Etisalat; Saad Odeh, chief wholesale officer at STC Bahrain; and Ahmed Al Sharif, general manager of network at STC Kuwait.
It was a similar story with panellists sharing their own stories of having to adapt to ‘new normal’. Interestingly Al Sharif shared that due to the high data demands in region a new business model has also been on the rise.
“During Covid-19 we’ve seen high growth in data, particularly in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] areas,” he said. “We’ve been able to accommodate the high demand in the data through a type of smart capex investment.”
“We’ve seen the rise of a new investment model focusing more on the smart capex where you can increase your capacity and maintaining resiliency in these verticals as a priority.”
The key takeaway of the session came from du’s Aly Hany who shared the new must-have for telcos in this new Coronavirus environment.
“Adaptability is the new competitive advantage,” said Hany. “It revolves around three things, technology is one; having the right mindset; and three is really understanding your customers’ needs and being able to respond to them quickly.”
Europe
For the Europe session, a staggering seven industry panellists joined Sam Evans, head of Asia at Delta Partners for the conversation.
Names included Geir Holmer, CEO of SkagenFiber; Harald Summa, CEO of DE-CIX; Caroline Puygrenier, director strategy and business development - connectivity segment at Interxion; Franz Bader, director wholesale, A1 Telekom Austria; Rolf Nafziger, senior vice president at Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier; Andrew Edison, VP of strategic alliances at Colt Technology Services; and Ruth Redding, vice president of UK, Ireland and South Africa at Infinera.
The most transformational trends over the last year across the continent, from the view of Nafziger, are 5G as well as the rollout of fibre. But over the last few months he says it’s about "the internal digitisation.” Specifically, automation, interoperability and, due to the effects of Covid-19, “the role of us as carriers has changed and our image in society also improved."
Redding chimed in with the diversity piece when answering a question on what businesses should be investing in and what capabilities we will need in the near future - an often-overlooked part of the conversation.
“From an organisational point of view, we’re seeing a shift in the profile of people that we need and we really need to think about that in the next generation,” she said.
“A lot of us in the industry have very similar profiles and very similar backgrounds, I think we need to look at expanding that particularly in the age of automation throughout networks. And think part of that is getting more diversity into the industry.”
Africa
Dobek Pater, telecoms analyst at Africa Analysis ushered in the next session on connectivity in Africa.
His panellists consisted of Nic Rudnick, group CEO at Liquid Telecom; Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco; Funke Opeke, CEO of MainOne; Charles Kouame, VP of African Connectivity at Orange International Carrier; and Lixiang Baumann, country head at China Mobile International.
Unsurprisingly, bridging the digital divide and meeting the continent’s vast and varied infrastructure needs was top of the conversation.
“In Africa before the Covid-19 pandemic, connectivity to universal accessibility was already a huge challenge,” explained Baumann.
“The data is so expensive here – in some African countries that data costs $5 per gigabyte. We see the opportunity to connect Africa to Asia and Europe so the data demands prove lower pricing, lower latency and therefore investing in the infrastructure.”
MainOne’s Opeke, echoed those sentiments saying “expand the base”.
“Deploy a lot more robust infrastructure, we’re seeing the demand in the population that’s already connected and the utilisation go up. What we need are smarter ways to densify the networks to expand last mile capacity to end users. Its all about smarter infrastructure strategies.”
LATAM
Over in Latam for the last session of the day, Capacity’s own deputy editor Melanie Mingas, spoke to Carmine Sorrentinom, VP of Sales Americas at Sparkle; Gloria Palavicini, deputy sales director at Neutral Networks; Andy Bax, COO at Seaborn Networks; and Gabriel Holgado, VP of global account division and wholesale services at CenturyLink.
According to CenturyLink’s Holgado the pandemic has led to the realisation of the importance of the network as shown by the surge in activity.
“The network is the new trend,” explained Holgado. “All of sudden you have people talking about it and they are concerned about the enablement of the network and the continuity of their business.”
“Backhaul traffic has grown by around 30%, while CDN traffic growing over 70% something we had to cope with very quickly.”
Overall, the feeling was that content companies are slowly waking up to the opportunities of the region and Seaborn’s Bax says operator need to be prepared to deliver.
“I think what we’re seeing now is a new wave, a new wave of CDN providers that are finally realising that Latin America is huge market for them south of the US of high value, high usage customer base,” said Bax.
“The challenge for us is making sure our networks – the architecture, the design and the performance of the network as a whole - not only continues to serve all of our domestic customers in all of those markets, but is also tuned towards those CDN/content/streaming services to deliver efficiently across the collective network we operate in Latin America.”
