In October Telstra International “boosted the performance and flexibility of its Asia Pacific subsea cable and backhaul network,” according to their press release. Understandably they made some noise about it as they are claiming an additional 200Tbps, a 30% increase in total network capacity across key Asia Pacific routes. TelcoForge spoke with Roary Stasko, Telstra International’s CEO, to get a better idea of what’s going on and the direction of travel for the sector.
Rather than adding more cabling, Telstra International has been hailing the use of Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) and Nokia’s Infinite Capacity Engine 7 (ICE7) as part of its cloudification strategy.
“This year, we’re on track to fully cloudify our subsea and backhaul network,” Stasko said.
The point of this is to change the traditional approach to capacity management, which in almost every other environment is to drastically over-provision with additional fibre in order to meet customer SLAs no matter what. However, especially when the cost of building out international cables is a touch more than for putting up a new cell site’s backhaul, it’s no wonder that using a different approach to supporting those SLAs is being used.
“Telstra International has adopted a more dynamic approach to managing network capacity demand,” Stasko observed.
“Our strategy involves cloudifying our transport infrastructure, which enables us to dynamically deploy capacity where and when it is needed. This efficient and effective method is a cornerstone of our progress toward creating a highly autonomous network. By leveraging this strategy, we can meet capacity demands and minimize unpredictability across various routes.”
“We’ve made strong progress in cloudifying the transport infrastructure layer, allowing us to provision services rapidly and scale high bandwidth to demand where and when our customers need it.”
The challenge, of course, lies in predicting demand. Depending on who you ask and the assumptions being made about the impact of issues such as national data sovereignty, you may end up with radically different predictions about the amount of capacity growth needed. We put this to Stasko and asked about his expectations for the capacity needed, who gave us a… diplomatic… response.
“Telstra International provides connectivity services that enable customers to link their data centres across the world and access critical business applications and data. Capacity upgrades are guided by our capacity analytics intelligence, customer requirements and market evolution that support our multi-year network capacity planning,” he said.
While undoubtedly accurate, it’s not a useful answer for forecasting. However, it also highlights the role of companies such as Telstra International in supporting the datacentre boom. There has been a considerable amount of debate recently about how long this can last, how much it’s a bubble, and what the fallout may be if any hypothetical bubble bursts. It’s understandable that a significant player doesn’t want to put anything on record that might, in itself, sway the market; and a journalistic titan like TelcoForge might be just the catalyst to bring down the AI market.
Building business plus capacity?
Especially in the subsea network, people tend to view service as a wholesale commodity play. However, we’re seeing telcos exploring new approaches to grow revenues, such as through exposing APIs. Does Roary see the opportunity for new business models from a more automated, cloudified subsea network or this is purely a cost discipline measure?
“We do see a significant opportunity for new business models emerging from a more automated, cloudified subsea network,” Stasko conceded.
“Our strategy is centred on evolving towards a highly autonomous network, which underpins our Network as a Product (NAAP) approach. By enabling APIs, we help our customers derive greater value and control from the network to meet their specific business and market needs.”
Those business and market needs particularly align with risk mitigation or management, questions which become huge when working with datacentre customers. As a result, Stasko called out dynamic traffic management, incident avoidance and enhanced network security as some of the areas where Telstra International is looking to create value and, therefore, reap value in a very different model from simply feeds and speeds.
A matter of semantics
Bubble or no, the global datacentre market is growing fast and shows no signs of stopping soon. With investments backed by organisations such as sovereign wealth funds and national governments, in particular we can expect AI datacentres to proliferate. All of which sounds like a gold rush for the likes of Telstra International.
However, increasing capacity isn’t the only way to solve the problem of shifting data; solutions like data compression or, in future, semantic communications might enable greater information exchange with radically fewer bits involved to do so (Indeed, we saw some striking work towards semantic communications this April at our 6G Forge event). We asked Stasko whether he was thinking about these as ways to drive even more business through the same fibres as demand grows.
“There is no broad industry consensus on whether data compression or re-encoding before transmission is best undertaken by the data owner, or by transmission network operators within the transmission equipment,” Stasko responded.
In other words – future unclear, ask again later.
Image courtesy of tpholland on Flickr
