An international group of telcos – the US’ CenturyLink, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, India’s Reliance Jio Infocomm and Korea’s SK Telecom – have formed an alliance to provide international network services for businesses. They aim to capitalise on what they described as the US$50bn global network access and transport services market, which they said is growing by 3.5% annually.
An international group of telcos – the US’ CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL), Germany’s Deutsche Telekom (ETR:DTE), India’s Reliance Jio Infocomm and Korea’s SK Telecom (KSE:017670) – have formed an alliance to provide international network services for businesses.
Their Next Generation Enterprise Network Alliance (ngena) plans to launch international network services for business customers in the first half of 2017, the quartet announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today.
Ngena, which will be run as an independent company, is eventually expected to involve an additional 20 service providers, the companies said. The foundation of ngena, which will target multinational companies, is subject to merger control clearance.
The partners aim to capitalise on what they described as the US$50bn global network access and transport services market, adding that this is growing by 3.5% annually.
They said the alliance will provide “a global service catalogue” to its partners, enabling them to deliver high-performance network service to customers in terms of speed, flexibility, security and quality.
The alliance will see the telcos share network assets and employ “a disruptive business model”.
“Enabled by Cisco cloud and virtualisation technology the network assets of all alliance partners will create a global next generation network,” they said.
Timotheus Höttges (pictured), CEO of German incumbent Deutsche Telekom, said the alliance “aims to provide multinational enterprise customers with a secure, powerful, global network service faster than before”.
He prefaced this by saying “Complex individual contracts and ordering processes have no place in a digitised world. Services based alone on the public internet are not secure or reliable enough for real-time applications such as logistics, manufacturing and telemedicine. A network without sufficient service quality is a risk that customers do not want to take.”
Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, commented: “Ngena is a pioneering alliance among leading service providers to deliver globally consistent, cost-effective and flexible services, allowing them to deliver better experiences at a faster pace”.