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Liquid Telecom's Eurin Eyes Metro SuccessFuture visions TT: Can you provide more details of those? Are we talking IoT-type services? DE: No, something that people can relate to very easily like education services. We are looking at business continuity, which is a back-up service. We are slowly pushing those services to really serve the immediate needs of households in Africa. Education is extremely important in Africa because it doesn’t always cope with the population. TT: Does the fiber build depend on the competitive environment? Are you looking to be the first into the home? DE: Most of the time we are the first because there is almost no FTTH in Africa. We are definitely the first in sub-Saharan Africa to do something on the scale we have done. A lot of players are now getting on the bandwagon because we've shown FTTH can work if you're patient. We tend to be the first. A lot of players then say they can't leave us alone to do the whole market. Most of the time we would wish they don't deploy fiber exactly on the side of our own trench but we can't control exactly what they do. TT: What are you doing in South Africa? DE: Mobile operators there find it quite difficult to cooperate because of different needs and ways of working. We've approached mobile operators and asked what we can do for them to make it easier to have access to fiber. We've had a few successes. In the north we've been expanding the main route, which goes from Johannesburg to the Zimbabwe border, and building a route towards the east. That is a direct consequence of mobile operators asking us to build that route and saying we'll come to the party. That model can work. No doubt, South Africa has a lot of fiber already. The government has two companies deploying fiber and there are also a number of private initiatives deploying long-haul and metro. There are still a few things to do but the bulk has been served. TT: What's the medium and long-term vision? You are involved in so many different areas, so is the plan to be an enterprise-focused network service provider, a carrier-focused wholesale provider or something else? DE: I think Liquid as a vision will remain really focused on being a wholesale provider. But we also consider the multinational market and the large enterprise market to be almost wholesale. We find, however, that in some markets we've got to go further because the network we built is not used sufficiently for us to recover our investment, so it's worth pushing into the value chain a bit further so the ecosystem starts growing. We've done FTTH in some areas and then the next player comes and says we can invest as well. But the focus of Liquid will remain to build the largest fiber network as fast as possible to serve the MNOs, the ISPs and the enterprise market. This is where we operate the best because we've become quite good at rolling out networks that are not too expensive to build or maintain. We use ducts as a matter of fact -- we don't do dark buried fiber -- and we put in the right quality of fiber. We've invested a lot in assets and people to make what we deploy very long term and not fall into a trap where in three or four years we have questions about the asset. Is it in good shape? Can I do something else with it? That is a trap we are trying to avoid. We have invested a lot behind the counter to make sure we are here to stay. — 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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