Four key insights from Capacity Europe 2023

W ith the dust now settled after Capacity Europe 2023, we caught up with two people who were on the ground at the event: John Chester, our Director of Wholesale-Fixed at Virgin Media O₂ Business, and Will Rhodes, Carrier Managed Service (CMS) Consultant at network systems partner Ciena.

We wanted to see what themes came up that will influence businesses in 2024 and beyond.

Here’s what they told us.

As a frequently explored topic during the conference, a diverse and resilient network infrastructure is essential for ensuring business continuity in any situation.

For most, this involves creating geographically diverse and resilient routes to meet the ever-increasing demand for data.

But growth starts with existing infrastructure. Having a strong network underlay providing the right bandwidth, availability, scalability and security is key to meeting emerging technology needs.

With networks becoming more complex and traffic levels rising, we’re investing significantly to reduce lead times for our 10Gbps and 100Gbps services from the point of quotation to installation.

We’re doing this by upgrading our network architecture, with the support from Ciena, and introducing new tools to speed-up planning and optimise routing across our network.

This is all to accommodate the sector’s growing demand for ubiquitous high bandwidth architecture that can be deployed in a fast and agile way to keep up with the applications being run on top.

The industry is evolving towards a world of interrelated ecosystems, where partnerships are more critical than ever. The traditional linear route to market no longer exists.

Today, a multitude of influential personas across the channel, including telecom and cloud providers, business partners, hyperscalers, resellers and end customers are shaping buying decisions. It's essential that we use these influences to create mutual value and drive collective success.

Collaboration is at the very core of our own business strategy. When we support each other, we can play to our individual strengths, ultimately benefiting everyone involved.

From some of the conversations I’ve had with peers at the conference, it’s become clear that as our relationships strengthen we can unlock more ways to collaborate. That could be through stronger product offerings or finding joint ways to solve industry problems.

The conference reaffirmed for me just how incredibly fragmented the European telecoms market has become. The need to demonstrate the value of a network and its services has become paramount.

High-capacity services (HCS) are a critical part of this as the demand for bandwidth continues to grow, with the next wave of drivers coming from AI and the multi-cloud environments needed to support these latest applications.

Virgin Media Business Wholesale’s robust infrastructure and high-bandwidth access services position it well to meet these growing demands. And partnerships with nexfibre and Atlas Edge will extend their network reach and provide customers with options at the edge.

Flexible mesh networks are poised to revolutionise how we manage east-west and north-south traffic within metro environments – this was a topic explored in multiple sessions at this year’s event.

With the rise of applications like generative AI and the low latency demands of edge computing, elastic based High Capacity Services will play a pivotal role in quickly and securely shifting workloads between networks.

Virgin Media Business Wholesale’s own National High Capacity Services (NHCS) core network will continue to be instrumental in delivering high performance fixed communication services to providers and wholesale customers across the UK at a variety of locations.

Visit our backhaul page to find out more about our core network services.

Or get in touch with us at wholesalebd@virginmedia.co.uk if you’d like to talk through any of our options in more detail.