EXA Infrastructure, previously the infrastructure unit of GTT Communications, was acquired by I Squared Capital in September 2021, bringing with it all of GTT’s Interroute terrestrial footprint in Europe, three Hibernia transatlantic cables, and its network in the northeast US and Canada. 
Now, less than one year on, large-scale investment is beginning to be poured into the business, with numerous projects underway in Europe and beyond.
“We’re seven months into EXA now and it’s been an exciting journey. We’ve achieved quite a lot in the past six months, with a lot more planned for the next few years,” explained Roberts.  Watch the full interview from the link above
Tapping new opportunities with TAP
Last week, EXA announced a new deal with Trans…

EXA Infrastructure, previously the infrastructure unit of GTT Communications, was acquired by I Squared Capital in September 2021, bringing with it all of GTT’s Interroute terrestrial footprint in Europe, three Hibernia transatlantic cables, and its network in the northeast US and Canada. 

Now, less than one year on, large-scale investment is beginning to be poured into the business, with numerous projects underway in Europe and beyond.

“We’re seven months into EXA now and it’s been an exciting journey. We’ve achieved quite a lot in the past six months, with a lot more planned for the next few years,” explained Roberts. 

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Watch the full interview from the link above

Tapping new opportunities with TAP

Last week, EXA announced a new deal with Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), creating new direct fibre route between France and Turkey by leveraging the newly built gas pipeline.

Utilities like pipelines can often present an overlooked opportunity for connectivity players, since they typically require connectivity to operate and are therefore built with some form of communications infrastructure installed in parallel for telemetry purposes. 

As a one of the newest commercial gas pipelines to be built, TAP is no exception. Constructed in 2016 and operational as of 2020, TAP is a new pipeline that runs through the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Greece, Albania, and then into southern Italy. TAP’s accompanying fibre infrastructure, which has been installed in two ducts in parallel to the pipeline itself, is of very high quality, comparable to networks being installed today. Furthermore, TAP’s own usage of the fibre’s capacity is relatively trivial, leaving plenty of capacity for use in commercial telecoms.

“Our joint venture relates to the portion of that pipeline that runs through Greece and Albania to Italy,” explained Roberts. “We will have the exclusive commercialisation and operational rights for the dark fibre that’s been installed along this pipeline.”

Capitalising on this existing infrastructure has many advantages, from additional security and resilience to a lower chance of being disturbed by surface vessels. But perhaps the biggest advantage is that the pipeline is so direct, providing the shortest possible route across the Mediterranean from Turkey. 

“The nature of it being a gas pipeline means it was built in the most direct path possible, which means it provides our customers with a very low latency, direct route,” said Roberts.

New investments underway 

Alongside the announcement of the TAP project, EXA also announced that it has received the first tranche of investment from I Squared Capital, to the tune of €190 million. 

“This €190 million from I Squared Capital is just the beginning,” explained Roberts. “Their business plan is based on the premise that EXA was underinvested previously.”

The new investment will be spread across around ten projects, entirely targeted at new strategic routes and expansion.

These investments include the IONIAN cable system, which is complimentary to TAP and runs from Greece to Southern Italy; installing a 350km fibre route from Cretone to Bari; linking Spain’s East and West coast subsea hubs, Bilbao and Barcelona, with a direct fibre route; and building a new route between Paris and Marseille due to increasing demand.

Roberts also alluded to a new route between London and Amsterdam that is currently being planned, offering a new crossing of the North Sea and eventually linking London to Frankfurt.

“That will be one of the latest cables on that route and, via further investments, we’ll extend that to Frankfurt via Brussels,” he said.

No slowing down for the subsea industry 

For EXA, these projects are just the start of what promises to be many years of major investments in the subsea and terrestrial network space, with Robert’s noting that the huge demand for infrastructure has no signs of decreasing in the years to come.

“By any of the analysts’ forecasts that you see, there appears to be no slow down over the next 10-years. There’s healthy CAGRs being predicted across the whole of Europe,” said Roberts.

He notes that these new investments will likely take two forms: cable operators looking to tap into emerging markets and domestic providers looking to upscale their operations to an international level.

“There is a lot of competition there and we might see some new market entrants, with companies expanding from being a regional or domestic provider to an international provider,” said Roberts. “We’ll see certain people making targeted investments in those more niche markets, like Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe.”

“We see no let up in the number of cables being built and being planned. There’s a big opportunity here in Europe, with cables coming from the Middle East, India, and the Far East coming to Europe, as well as the Transatlantic cables, where there’s still a lot to do.”

But this is not only a question of the number of cables being deployed, but also their quality. Fibre pair counts are increasing in modern subsea cables, with 24 rapidly becoming the standard for new builds – in fact, analysts suggest that cables with 50 fibre pairs are likely to begin deployment within three or four years. This will have big implications for the amount of backhaul connectivity required from these coastal locations back to data centre clusters, necessitating new terrestrial routes to support the subsea systems. 

“A handful of Transatlantic cables in a few years’ time could generate hundreds of fibre pairs of backhaul requirement, so there’s going to have to be major investment in overhauling and upgrading that infrastructure.” 

Want to learn more about EXA Infrastructure and the shifting subsea investment landscape? Come and meet them at Total Telecom’s live Submarine Networks EMEA event next week!

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US operator giant Verizon has notified customers that it is closing down its drone software company, Skyward. 
 
Skyward, founded in 2012 and purchased by Verizon in 2017, specialised in drone management, providing a software platform, drone hardware, and training for customers interested in integrating drones within their own operations. At the time of purchase, Verizon hoped that Skyward’s platform would provide a focal point for all their drone…

US operator giant Verizon has notified customers that it is closing down its drone software company, Skyward. 

Skyward, founded in 2012 and purchased by Verizon in 2017, specialised in drone management, providing a software platform, drone hardware, and training for customers interested in integrating drones within their own operations. At the time of purchase, Verizon hoped that Skyward’s platform would provide a focal point for all their drone-related activities.

Since then, the company has continued to find success, notably coming to prominence by receiving a temporary operating licence by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2020 to help inspect Verizon’s infrastructure during the wildfires in Washington. 

Just last year, Verizon and Skyward were testing drones connected to the company’s 4G LTE network, aiming to bring the first out-of-the-box connected drone solution to the US. 

Thus, it seems somewhat surprising that Verizon has suddenly decided to axe the business, sending an email to customers this week to notify them that the business was closing down.

“We are announcing today that Skyward, A Verizon company, will be ending operations in the coming weeks,” said an email to customers. “This was not an easy decision.  The Verizon Robotics team will be focusing our efforts on ground robot management, connectivity services, and solution development.”

In a statement, Verizon said that the decision was based on “market agility” and “ensuring that Verizon continues to focus on areas that provide both near and mid-term growth opportunities,” perhaps suggesting that Skyward was not making commercial progress quite as fast as the operator had hoped.

Instead, it seems that the company will be focussing on its ground-based robots, particularly Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs).

“The Verizon Robotics Group enables enterprise customers to efficiently adopt and scale Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) to improve productivity, deliver faster time to insight, and reduce costs through automation and 5G,” said Verizon in a statement. 

This shift in focus is perhaps reflected in Verizon’s purchase of Austrian start-up incubedIT in February last year, a company that offers autonomous navigation and fleet management solutions for AMRs. This company was incorporated into Verizon’s Robotics Business Technology unit in July 2021, as was Skyward itself. 

What this will mean for Skyward’s employees is currently unclear, with reports suggest that some will be retained as part of the Verizon Robotics business, others within Verizon’s wider operations, and some will be forced to seek employment elsewhere.

This week, Deutsche Telekom (DT) and SKT have announced that they have struck a partnership aiming to bring South Korea’s burgeoning metaverse platform, Ifland, to German customers. 
The deal will see the pair carry out a live trial of the metaverse platform before the end of the year, with the ultimate goal of co-creating virtual content for the European market. The test will reportedly include the creation of a virtual space within Ifland modelled on a specific German city…

This week, Deutsche Telekom (DT) and SKT have announced that they have struck a partnership aiming to bring South Korea’s burgeoning metaverse platform, Ifland, to German customers. 

The deal will see the pair carry out a live trial of the metaverse platform before the end of the year, with the ultimate goal of co-creating virtual content for the European market. The test will reportedly include the creation of a virtual space within Ifland modelled on a specific German city. 

This could be just the first step of the two companies’ metaverse partnership. If initial tests prove successful, reports suggest that DT and SKT will consider setting up a metaverse JV to further expand the platform’s reach throughout Europe.

« The two companies have been discussing the European launch of Ifland since March,” SKT said in a statement. “Deutsche Telekom concluded that SK Telecom’s service has the potential to bring out positive reactions from the European market. »

This would not be the first JV the two partners have struck in recent years, having created Techmaker, a 50:50 JV focussed on creating 5G indoor technology, just last year. The relationship between the two companies extends back numerous years, but until now has focussed primarily on R&D in areas like roaming, IoT, and 5G.

As part of this latest deal, DT says it will also work with SKT’s sister company, SK Square, to develop cybersecurity and mobile app marketplace solutions, via the latter’s investments in cybersecurity specialist SK Shieldus and app marketplace operator One Store.

SKT has been developing Ifland since at least the summer of 2021, showcasing it at this year’s Mobile World Congress in February with the intention of taking it international as soon as possible. In recent months, the company has made various investments into metaverse adjacent companies aiming to bolster the platform’s capabilities, including in Morph Interactive, a 3D-motion graphics specialist, and game creator Haegin.

As the concept of a metaverse has become more mainstream in recent years, the question of how telcos can best benefit from this development has become a major challenge. 

Telcos have long complained about so-called over-the-top (OTT) players, like Netflix and Facebook (Meta), reaping the rewards of their expensive infrastructure investments – in fact, just last week the European operators were once again calling for these big tech companies to help pay for their infrastructure investments. There is a major fear from the operators that this cycle could repeat itself with the metaverse, with the operators left footing the bill while content companies reap the rewards. 

This is largely why SKT, coming from one of the most youthful, tech-friendly markets in the world, is trying to take a more direct leading role in metaverse development, seeking to become a content creator in its own right with its Ifland platform. If the platform finds success, SKT could become an attractive partner for other telcos looking for support to enter the metaverse market.

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