Telecom Asia: Tell us about your network sharing and expansion agreement with BSNL.
Evans: We're in the process of building out our new multi-service platform or MSP in India. We've already built out the platform in the UK, where it went live in April. We're in the process of building out the NGN network internationally, with just under 50% of the nodes already completed. We have three nodes in India set up and plan to build another five nodes over the coming months.
India is a strategic growth market for us and we could never hope to get the depth of connectivity that some of the local market participants have. BSNL is one of the most significant participants in the market and is also taking significant steps internationally. But for BSNL access to our network - and facilities and services - is very helpful because it means it can extend its global reach quickly without having to build its own network and facilities, develop its own skills and get its own licenses.
How important are partnerships in the current environment‾
About ten years ago the telecoms industry went through a phase where a number of large telcos wanted to become super telcos, with a model of trying to assure end-to-end services by owning large potions of the network.
We think the key part is that enterprises want consistent service levels worldwide, and they want a single enterprise to manage those service levels. But economically it's not possible for anybody to deliver that over a 100%-owned network, because the world is simply too big to do that. We think partnerships are a very important way of achieving that end-to-end connectivity.
That's why we're rolling out the MSP nodes in-country and using partners to help us with domestic inter-connectivity.
How significant is MSP for you‾
People have been talking for 25 years about the vision of a single converged network platform that can truly delivery multiple services, and do a really good and economically efficient job with each of them. Yet, up until now, it hasn't been technically possible.
The MSP network can carry voice, data and video traffic, all with equal quality appropriate to the application. This means the vision of everything going IP is becoming a reality. Because of that it allows significant efficiency gains for companies that are using these separate services today, and it also enables new classes of applications.
You also have extended your partnership with VDC in Vietnam. What drove that‾
The Vietnam points of presence we built and the partnership we did was in fact on the back of a major deal with a global technology company, which was to fulfill all of their connectivity needs outside the US market. Vietnam was one point of presence that was important to them as part of their operations and that was what drove our desire to invest in our own points of presence there.
This demonstrates our strategy of being a customer-defined telco and allowing customer demand to drive where and how we build the depth of our network.
How do you go about planning your future bandwidth requirements given the explosive growth in video‾