The Infrastructure Advantage

In March, we announced the completion of the world’s first wholly-owned cable network ring around the world. It was a proud moment for the company and for me. Tata Communications has completed a 10 year journey, which we celebrated in February, and it was great to see the cable ring launched so closely afterwards.

With the Tata Global Network, we own and operate the world’s largest subsea cable network which touches countries representing 99.7% of the world’s GDP. Not bad for just over 10 years in the business. We invested in infrastructure when it was not always popular but we placed our bets and it has made us the company we are today.

All telecoms service providers get asked a lot of very big existential questions about investing in infrastructure. There will always be debate about how much of the network a telco must own and I do not think these questions will ever go away.

For Tata Communications, the economics makes sense. It is also a way for us to maintain control of service quality and provisioning speed, ensuring our customers get the services they want at the quality they demand, where they need it. That goes back to having the network in place and a wholly-owned infrastructure.

Trust is a word that gets thrown around a lot whenever there is talk about SLAs and quality assurance. Service providers around the world are going to hear it pop up even more as cloud comes to the forefront of their customers’ businesses as well as business video and mobile broadband. This new wave of services require critical levels of uptime and trusting your provider is essential.

The network is central to all of this and the foundation for new services to be created. That is why we believe infrastructure is a core component of future growth and delivering new services effectively. Capacity demands are growing globally and over the last 10 years we wanted to ensure that we were ready to deliver on this demand.

The foundation has been built. It is time to realise the future.