Colt Embarks on Asia Network Upgrades in Global Expansion Push

While it faces competition in the software-defined networking (SDN) space from other telecommunications providers, such as global telecom operator Telstra and Singapore’s Singtel, Colt sees demand for end-to-end high-bandwidth services increasing in Asia’s key metro networks—Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore—driven by continuous growth of datacenter and cloud computing usage, and mobile data traffic, says chief commercial officer Tom Regent, citing a Cisco study that predicts cloud datacenter traffic will rise from 3.9 zettabytes (3.9 billion terabytes) in 2015 to 14.1 ZB by 2020, accounting for 92 percent of all datacenter traffic.

The first investment will expand connectivity in metro areas in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. Then, Colt will implement significant upgrades of its Colt IQ Network—a 100 Gigabit per second (Gbps) network connecting 24,500 buildings and 700 datacenters globally, optimized with SDN capabilities—in response to increasing demand for high-bandwidth data. 

The third move will be to add the SDN capability, which allows companies to turn connectivity up and down on demand, giving control of the flow of bandwidth data to firms as and when it is needed, enabling Colt to be more flexible in serving customers. 

Colt was the first in Japan to launch its 100 Gbps service in April 2014, and there were only a select number of cloud service providers interested in the service. Today, things have changed: many cloud service providers, carriers and enterprises are adopting high-bandwidth services, Regent adds. 

However, says Anthony Ho, director of Colt’s product management division, the key issue for financial clients is being able to quickly leverage that higher bandwidth. “They can’t live with the fact that if you want to upgrade a circuit it takes three months. It doesn’t make sense for financial institutions to roll out new applications and then have to wait for it to be deployed,” he says.

Natural Progression

The company has already significantly upgraded its fiber-optic network in Japan, which now allows high-bandwidth speeds ranging from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps on mass scale. It has also begun phase one of its investment to expand its fiber capability in Singapore, and will now start work on expanding both fiber-optic and Ethernet architecture in Hong Kong. This will provide connectivity to about 80 percent of Hong Kong’s commercial buildings on Hong Kong Island and in Kowloon.

“High bandwidth is a natural progression of the market. I think the telecommunications market for Hong Kong for high bandwidth is going to grow 10 percent, and that just meets the demand of the customer. The SDN or NFV (network functions virtualization) in itself will then give them the flexibility. Do they always need high bandwidth? Probably not: they probably need it for a month or maybe two months,” says Paul Stanley, regional director for Asia-Pacific at Colt. After that period, this flexibility allows clients to dial the bandwidth—and their costs—back down. 

Colt’s SDN capability is already up and running across its metro networks in Europe, and once its metro networks in Asia are up to speed, it will be able to link them together directly. By focusing particularly on metro-area networks, Colt can quickly implement the latest SDN-enabled network infrastructure in cities across Europe and Asia. 

“Today there isn’t a provider who can connect an enterprise customer from an enterprise building end-to-end to Japan from Hong Kong, for example. Within datacenters there are providers that can do that, but the key is the end customer, or the ownership of that enterprise building,” Stanley says.

“Asia is a fast-growing market. [Its] telecommunications market is now the second after the US. Our legacy has been in Europe with 24,500 buildings on our network. A lot of them are financial service customers. Other metro networks we are in include Frankfurt, Milan, Paris, and London. So the obvious choice in Asia is Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore,” Regent says. 

For now, Colt is focusing on rolling out the SDN-enabled network in these market centers as they are less restricted in terms of existing infrastructure compared with other countries in the region. “This point will definitely feature when we decide our next investment plan for the region, including in China,” he adds.