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Liquid Telecom's Eurin Targets Africa's Enterprise SectorWholesale and submarine opportunities TT: When it comes to wholesale capacity, what kind of price erosion are you seeing? What is the topline growth? DE: There is topline growth but nothing related to the 80% to 100% per year of data growth that we see in our own market and have to provision on our own networks. I would say 15% to 20% in the wholesale market is quite achievable where we are. There is price erosion -- much faster than we would like -- but there is topline growth in there. The big purchasers of this capacity, which are the leading mobile operators, recognize they have to pay more to get more. They are themselves making more money from data, which really drives this amount of connectivity they need, so the discussions are quite productive. TT: Is there a structural imbalance in that the big Tier 1s tend to self-provision? DE: It really depends. What we see is that where we've already made our mark in the market in growing fiber -- and I would say Kenya is the exception to that rule -- the mobile operators are actually not keen at all to invest in fiber. They do but it's often quite limited. The discussions we have with them are that mobile operators don't want to own the fiber but need it, and so what can we do together to provision this fiber to them without them feeling they are stuck. There is give and take each time but that actually works. In Kenya the situation is that you have a large Tier 1 player that was a customer of an asset we bought and quite unhappy with it. They were in a corner where they had an unfulfilled need and had to invest, which is for us a worst-case scenario because this is the part of the market where we think we're good. Even in that situation, with our modernization the discussion is much more about our model, where the extension of the network is likely to be done through us rather than against us. The infrastructure-sharing model works quite well. In South Africa, you have another situation where mobile operators have tried to do things together and created consortiums. That has not exactly been a success, because they all have different needs and different ways of working and find it quite hard to converge to something that works without feeling other operators won the argument. They are now moving away from the consortium and approaching players like us to say can you be the independent party that will build or buy or own the asset and offer it as a common service to all of us. TT: Why are you deploying a new submarine cable off the east African coast, which wouldn't seem to have a fiber supply gap? Is this about the need for a long-term on-net solution? DE: Definitely there is a flavor of on-net there. Every year we find we invest more in networks we don't actually own and are actually funding somebody's else's assets. There is a need to be on net and actually control the asset so the capacity we need is available when we need it. There is an opportunity to create more competition and capacity in the long term. The cable system we are putting together will have way more capacity than the cables in there today. The technology we are putting in the ground is the latest and the cost base will be much more attractive. And the architecture -- if all goes well -- will allow us to avoid a lot of the outages we see today. Those occur at the landing station or nearby where anchors rip of the cable and so forth. We are trying to get an architecture that means if something happens there it avoids taking the entire cable out. It is not done like this on the east coast of Africa right now, or off the west coast, for that matter. TT: The announcement mentioned 20 to 30 Tbit/s of capacity. What about the latency to London or the US relative to other cables? DE: I don't think the latency will be vastly different because we are covering the same ground. The capacity will be more and I think those numbers are the minimum of what we'll put in. The key thing is to have an asset that's always up. You see this week again that a number of cables had problems. If the entire African continent is in the black for a few hours, for us that is not acceptable and not something we see in the US or Europe. We want to take the continent away from those problems. Having another cable that doesn't follow exactly the same route is a big plus. And having capacity at a cheaper price is what we are doing. — Iain Morris, , News Editor, Light Reading, Editor-in-Chief, Telco Transformation < Previous Page 2 / 2 |
In part two of this Q&A, the carrier's group head of network virtualization, SDN and NFV calls on vendors to move faster and lead the cloudification charge.
It's time to focus on cloudification instead, Fran Heeran, the group head of Network Virtualization, SDN and NFV at Vodafone, says.
5G must coexist with LTE, 3G and a host of technologies that will ride on top of it, says Arnaud Vamparys, Orange Network Labs' senior vice president for radio networks.
The OpenStack Foundation's Ildiko Vancsa suggests that 5G readiness means never abandoning telco applications and infrastructures once they're 'cloudy enough.'
IDC's John Delaney talks about how telecom CIOs are addressing the relationship between 5G, automation and virtualization, while cautioning that they might be forgetting the basics.
On-the-Air Thursdays Digital Audio
ARCHIVED | December 7, 2017, 12pm EST
Orange has been one of the leading proponents of SDN and NFV. In this Telco Transformation radio show, Orange's John Isch provides some perspective on his company's NFV/SDN journey.
Special Huawei Video
Huawei Network Transformation Seminar The adoption of virtualization technology and cloud architectures by telecom network operators is now well underway but there is still a long way to go before the transition to an era of Network Functions Cloudification (NFC) is complete. |
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