What Are The Biggest Drivers of Global Networking Demand in APAC?
episode
The Fast Mode Podcasts: Breaking News, Analysis and Updates From Telecoms Industry
9 min
2 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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What is the overall focus of the episode and who are the hosts?
Welcome to the Fast Mode Podcast Series. I'm Tara Neal, and with me today is Sam Badnol, head of product solutions development at Telstra Digital Infrastructure. The company's market-leading network covers points of presence close to 200 countries and territories. The company is responsible for a significant amount of Asia's internet traffic, providing the region with one of the largest and most reliable. Undersea cable networks in the world. Sam joins us post Asia Tech Times Singapore 2026 to discuss some of the main themes and insights from the show. Welcome Sam. Great to have you on today's episode.
Thanks, Sarah. Great to be here.
Awesome. All right, okay. So, um, as the head of um product solution development, uh in your new role, how do you see the way global networks are being redesigned in the advent of AI and new computing demands?
Oh, very good question, Tara. So I I guess when it comes to network design, there's a general understanding that distributed architectures are are now going to be default and and workloads can run anywhere from a hyperscalar region to an edge data center, to even far edge locations like factory floors. So when we consider the design of networks, we primarily break it down into three components. Uh first of all, it's the global backbone, so high capacity point to point services connecting regions together. Um the Edge Network WAN underlay, so branched to data center networking services. Uh and thirdly, uh the cloud interconnection, so aggregation points for our customers to connect to cloud providers and other ecosystem partners.
Um so double clicking on that a little bit. So starting with the the core network backbone, and we're seeing unprecedented AI scale capacity demand where customers are now treating terabit capacity uh requests as as routine. Um as you move closer to the edge, uh latency and determinism are becoming critical design factors, uh particularly when supporting AI inference workloads uh such as a genetic AI uh workflows. Uh and then thirdly on the cloud interconnection. Um, these are providing critical uh services for hybrid cloud and hybrid AI uh architectures. And ensuring there's a network presence uh as close to these integration points as possible is is key. I guess then looking at the network management uh side of things and networks are becoming more autonomous and self optimizing with AI embedded into the core operations to support
intent-driven orchestration, predictive maintenance, and even self-hel heal self-healing uh capabilities. Um and then finally, networks are becoming more programmable, um, where elements are being exposed via APIs for customers and partners to integrate with for a variety of use cases across quote to order, provisioning and observability.
Mm-hmm. Wow, amazing, isn't it? How, you know, in the last I guess five years we have seen so much change in the way networks are operating, you know. Um and like you rightly pointed out, there's there's uh demand for capacity, then people want latency, you know, and determinism, like you said, and we need to support cloud workloads. Well, you know, I guess, you know, like in your role you would see demands uh coming from different industries, right? And each Each of them will have a different mix of SLAs and stuff. So I guess it's gonna be like quite a challenging task moving ahead to meet all this demand. And and and you know, talking of talking about that, uh, you know, um, how do you see a growing number of um, you know, priorities that we have just talked about taking shape?
And what is the number one priority? And you know, l like we've talked about capacity and then the flexibility, performance, but what are you seeing as the biggest priority?
Look, um priorities are converging. Uh, but I guess right now it would have to be performance as the defining metric. Um, but maybe I can expand on that a little bit because performance is contextual. Um and it really will depend. The expectations differ depending on what the network is being used for at the time.
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Chapters
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