What are your strategic priorities in Eurasia over the next 12 months?
Our investment in Asia Africa Europe 1 (AAE-1), a new submarine consortium cable connecting major Asian markets and selected African countries to Europe and the subsequent upgrades of our terrestrial, fully protected fibre backbone networks to multi-terabit capacity are our top priorities today, to further enhance our role in the Eurasia region and especially in the Europe to Asia transit route.
Internet traffic is exploding worldwide and big, emerging Asian markets as well as India and China have an important share in this growth. In the last few years Europe has also emerged as an important hub for internet traffic coming from the East.
AAE-1 is a 25,000km next generation cable that will link Asian, African, Middle Eastern and European regions via the lowest latency subsea route. Upon its completion in the second half of 2016, AAE-1 will connect Hong Kong, Vietnam (potential branch to Cambodia under evaluation), Thailand, with Malaysia and Singapore, then onward to Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece (Chania – Crete), Italy and France.
By investing in AAE1 OTEGLOBE is implementing its long term strategy to build a fast, diverse and reliable path connecting Asia to Western Europe by transiting Greece and South East Europe and emerging as a new Mediterranean hub.
What major telecoms trends have you seen in the Eurasian region this year?
In the international wholesale market we see the traffic flow from Asia to Europe, known as Europe to Asia transit route, increasing and becoming more important in the global Internet industry.
Transfer to cloud technologies (IaaS, SaaS, etc.) as well as an explosive growth of interest in mobility services, i.e. various mobile devices, tablets, smartphones, wearables etc. connected to the internet are two of the major trends behind the increased data consumption. A recent survey from Cisco shows that by 2019 the average traffic per mobile connected end user device will reach approximately 2.8Gb per month, up from 360Mb per month in 2014, an almost 10-time increase.
Not one but two big intercontinental cable projects, the AAE1 we mentioned earlier and SEA-ME-WE 5, supported by well renowned global telecoms carriers, are under implementation today to support this excessive growth and offer route diversity and resilience. Both these cable projects as well as new terrestrial routes crossing Middle East, will further improve Europe’s position as major internet hub for Eastern traffic.
What new services and technologies do you think will be important in wholesale telecoms over the next 12 months?
Data transfer will remain our industry’s focus and the driver in the development of products and solutions, with Ethernet technology gradually replacing the older legacy (SDH) platforms. Hubbing business is also prevailing in voice services with new technologies like IPX adding new potential in signalling and mobile sectors.
What do you hope to achieve by attending Capacity Eurasia 2015?
My main goal is to liaise with other people in our industry to exchange views and opinions in topics like the ones I mentioned above. I believe there will be a lot of interesting topics to discuss this year, so it will be a pleasure for me to share OTEGLOBE’s and my personal views and experience, especially in the wholesale telecoms sector.
