Cloud7 is gathering opinions of the important names in cloud computing, web hosting, cybersecurity, data center, Linux, and other industries for 2022 in the Cloud7 Expert Series. Alongside their evaluations of 2022, they will share their expectations for the next year, 2023.
Neven Dilkov is the Chairman of the European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA). He is the owner and CEO of Neterra, a global telecommunications company with more than 27 years of history. Dilkov is also the founder and owner of the global Internet Exchange platform NetIX and other large-scale business projects such as Neterra.TV, Neterra.Cloud, NetFleet, Sofia Data Center.
Evaluation of the industry for 2022
The Global Communications Services Providers industry during 2022 has continued the childbirth-like struggle to provide the oh-so-obvious basic communication needs of their customers throughout the world.
In my long professional life, I have never missed being amazed and frankly amused by how difficult it is to get a clean end-to-end test across borders. Only the technology is different. It used to do SDH and satellite links before and it is Ethernet now. The ongoing M&A activity did not greatly help, one can see enough evidence on the contrary.
That means the enterprise customers, especially the ones operating in diverse geographies, continue to face the basic hurdle of finding reliable solutions everywhere they operate, and that perennial problem has not improved much in the past 30 years.
That is not to say that the communications service providers (CSPs) are not putting in the effort. In my opinion, they are, but in many cases, I witness inflexible decision-making, a lack of analytical process skills, and slow implementation of digitalization across organizations. One positive trend is the work of the TMForum and the wide, albeit only political at this point, support they are getting in the industry.
In practice, the implementation of their standards is so slow as to make it almost invisible. Incompetence in various levels of the organizations from senior level to middle management is the only reason to blame.
The obvious debacle, still catching the daily news in the whole world, the Russian war in Ukraine, has luckily provided little disturbance in the industry, and even our services in the war zones continue miraculously to work.
Evaluation of the company for 2022
For Neterra 2022 was a turbulent year, but I have to say most of our nearly 30 years have been turbulent, with lots of new services and projects. This year we continued the expansion of our geographical footprint. We now provide last mile and DIA services in 69 countries in the whole world. That makes us one of the largest telecoms in the world by the number of countries serviced.
We completed our brand new Sofia Data Center 2, a greenfield investment in the heart of the Sofia Business district, built according to the latest industry standards, in fact surpassing some of them.
The Sofia Metro Fiber Network was also completed. The network is >170km, with cables of up to 192 fibers in them, ready for PON services and dark fiber services as well. This is the first-ever fiber project of this kind in the capital.
The Thracia teleport welcomed its first satellite services customers this year too. Thracia teleport is a very special facility, built several years ago by Neterra. Its location was carefully chosen by evaluating 80 years’ worth of meteo data, in order to find the spot in Bulgaria that is both accessible and has the largest % of sunny days throughout the year.
Predictions for 2023
My expectations are that 2023 will be transformational for Neterra in many ways.
There will be changes in the way we present, sell, and deliver telecom services globally. We expect to be able to handle multiple times more services than we are currently doing. Our strength has always been customer care and we are strengthening our team with people from all corners of the world. We currently have people in Brazil, Bulgaria, the UK, Spain, India, and UAE. We will continue this expansion. Some of the projects I can’t really disclose right now, so please keep an eye on our marketing channels. We love bragging about our milestones.
In general, the telecom industry is a dying industry. It is not possible in the 21st century, in the age of amazon.com, for a customer to still need to go to a telecom provider’s office and sign a paper contract. Even in the rare case of full digitization of the CPQ process, the main revenue drivers since 50 years ago are still these 3 services – TV, telephone, and the Internet.
It will probably be the first time in human history that an industry with billions of customers will die, not because customers do not need their services, but because someone like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or the like, has come up with a bundled solution where all the traditional services are simply an add-on, a commodity, that no one even notices he’s been invoiced about. The real service will be the social network, the cloud computing resources, or whatever comes next…