Innovative infrastructures: Brandon Lee, NTT Com Asia
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Innovative infrastructures: Brandon Lee, NTT Com Asia

Brandon Lee has been with NTT Com Asia, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT Communications, since 2005 and became its CTO in March of this year.

 

Here he discusses the company’s infrastructure plans and its migration to IPv6. We believe Asia is poised for a business boom especially in e-commerce and internet-related businesses. My job is to promote NTT Communications into this area by investing in infrastructure, which includes the network, submarine cables, data centres and cloud computing structures.

NTT Communications, for instance, is investing in a submarine cable that aims to avoid earthquake sensitive zones, as well as building one of the largest data centres in Hong Kong. We also have plans for data centres in Singapore and potentially China which we hope to open just in time to capture the rise of LTE. My role has been newly created to adapt to the changing nature of our business, which increasingly revolves around developing submarine cables and fibre optics or delivering faster and wider spectrums of communication.

In this new era, we have had to look at how to merge the IT into telecoms and discover the best ways to leverage new technologies. My responsibility is to enhance and drive forward the communications between these platforms and overcome the challenge of seamlessly integrating significant IT and telecoms technologies together, whilst taking into account their different business models and cultures. The most prominent trend at the moment is the growth of mobile communications across Asia, particularly in

China. The growth of the country’s middle class has fiercely driven demand following a similar past trend to the US market.

The company is also looking at how to monetise cloud services. The industry is still trying to define the ‘cloud’ but for us as a network provider, we believe the cloud is based on infrastructure and we are looking at ways to add intelligence to that which will help set us apart from competitors. NTT Communications spent the last few years heavily promoting IPv6 and incorporating the necessary IPv6 structure into our existing framework.

The challenges raised by IPv6 are similar to those that happen in any migration; the industry needs to prove that the technology works, which is something we have successfully demonstrated in Japan. The introduction of IPv6 should create more opportunities because more IP addresses will be readily available for mobile phones and smart devices. With our infrastructure in place I think the only limitation in the transference to IPv6 will be where people’s imaginations can take them.”

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