ITW 2018 of AI, Blockchain & Robots

Part 1

International Telecoms Week (ITW) 2018 ended last week, after starting off with a keynote by Sophia the Social robot from Hanson robotics setting a stage for an event that’s sees the market and business transforming.  

ITW has been a must-go event for telco wholesale teams, datacenter operators, CDNs, vendors who cater to this market and consultancy firms. The whole ecosystem that supports the backbones and back office operations of telecom operations attend this mega jamboree. 

The productivity of this event has been traditionally immensely high as you get to meet all your partners in one location albeit at times the intense number of meetings don’t get translated to equivalent action points and remain scribbled in meeting notes. 

Some key highlights seen at the event were on the industry forum coming together for using Blockchain for settlements, hardware to software virtualisation, fraud prevention, using AI in datacenters and new subsea cables. The headlines were AI, Blockchain and robots but the underbelly churned with busy bilateral tables buzzing with voice minutes, data traffic, roaming, colocation and IP transit deals etc.

We had a presentation on SEA ME WE 5 intelligence forum at ITW which was packed to full house an indication that there was lots of interest in Subsea cables and some great questions asked about the rapid utlisation of SMW5 and capacity demand drivers. 

A good question that was asked was about new cables coming in and is current capacity enough for the 5G driven growth? What I saw was that there at ITW are a plethora of new cable projects being discussed.. North to South America, Americas to Europe , Europe to Asia with new routes, Asia to Australia, Asia to US etc.. the global demand for capacity seems to be insatiable and parties and consortiums being formed to cater to it. 

In a changing telecom landscape Subsea cable business models need to change dramatically. Everyone quotes skyrocketing 5G requirements as the basis for new investments. However the very architecture of Internet is changing. Content is getting decentralized and closer to the customer. Not all that glitters is gold they say. 

There are initiatives coming from the space in the form of Space-X, OneWeb and Blue Origin etc which would bring lots more of bandwidth to customers from Low earth orbit Satellites. Over 5000 satellites in the sky buzzing with bandwidth. How countries will treat these Massively Over the top (MOTT) space telcos remains to be seen ? All of them moot usage in Africa and underdeveloped countries. That’s where it will start but will soon spread globally. 

In this context I guess we need to be circumspect about subsea cable investments. More on that in and new business models for Subsea cables in my next post. 

To be Continued – New Subsea cable business models.