Dayong Zhang,
Chief Technical Officer, China Telecom (Africa and Middle East)
speaks with Teletimes International in an exclusive interview
Gulraiz Khalid: Can you please give us a quick overview of China Telecom (Africa & Middle East) and its relation to China Telecom?
Dayong Zhang: China Telecom Global is headquartered in Hong Kong and covering business around the globe. Under the CTG umbrella, we are the division covering business in Africa and Middle East and are officially called China Telecom (Africa and Middle East) Limited.
GK: Which countries in Middle-East and Africa are you currently covering?
DZ: China Telecom (Africa and Middle East) Limited is registered in Mauritius and serves as a holding company. Regarding the business, we have established representative offices at Johannesburg, Nairobi, Dubai and through these, we are covering our business service in South Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. Our business, however, is not limited to only the countries where we have offices but all across the region.
GK: What kind of products/services make up your core offerings?
DZ: We are traditionally a telecom carrier so we cover all of the traditional telecom products including bandwidth connectivity, Cloud services, SDWAN services and other DICT services. We are providing internet access to both enterprise customers and household carriers in the region. Besides that, we provide data center service in China as well and within the Africa & Middle East region we work together with our partners to provide this service.
GK: Can you elaborate a little bit on your model for data centers?
DZ: In the region, we work together with different partners to provide the service as we don’t own our own data centers at the moment. We work together with our partners in UAE, Kenya and South Africa.
GK: Can you give us some details about your telecom offerings and your strengths in comparison to competition?
DZ: China Telecom has a huge customer base in China and outside China as well. With that experience, we have built a huge network with large capacity and good resilience to provide stability in high performance services to our customers. We started our business from here in 2008 and step by step, we have built our operations with different networks including transmission, internet and some platforms including cloud services. Our first major strength is the high capacity we have in our operations in UAE, Kenya and South Africa amongst others. We have PoPs throughout the region and we have bandwidth connectivity to connect all of the networks together. The second thing is our partner base – when we select a partner, we always look for the best possible partner and that helps us with our overall offering.
Besides this, our additional strengths include high resilience with multiple routes and comprehensive interconnection with the other operators and IXPs including NAPAfrica, JINX, TESPOK, UAE-IX and IXPN.
GK: Can you tell us about your partnership with Syniverse?
DZ: Syniverse is one of the biggest roaming companies in the world and we have recently launched the partnership corporation with them. They are one of the most connected companies in the world and can cover up to 150 countries through 750 networks in the world.
A crucial part of implementing 4G in developing markets, such as in the Middle East and Africa, involves the deployment of an IPX network, the network backbone that makes 4G roaming possible, and Diameter, the industry-standard signaling protocol for messages from mobile devices. The Syniverse IPX Network decreases network complexity and ensures high-quality, end-to-end mobile services through a secure connection to more than 750 operators in over 150 countries. In parallel, the Syniverse Diameter Signaling Service provides a powerful tool for managing, simplifying, and translating data across networks, that enables 4G data to be passed between operators and devices securely. Leveraging this reach and capacity, China Telecom will be able to customize a cost-efficient connectivity solution for each operator while still providing the same high performance and security.
China Telecom has continued to strengthen its collaboration with leading African mobile operators by dramatically strengthening its network build-out and providing world-class connectivity across the continent and the world. The partnership with Syniverse is designed to provide a high-speed mobile network as well as a continued investment in the infrastructure for the Middle East and Africa, an investment that China Telecom began in 2008 and includes point of presences (PoPs) and data centers that reduce latency and enhance end-user experience.
GK: You have also recently had a partnership with EADC, can you tell us a little bit about that?
DZ: We are engaged in a very long term partnership with EADC and have located our network PoPs in some of their facilities. We will put our equipment in their facilities to provide internet and connectivity service and are looking at a joint service with EADC.
GK: Let’s talk about the market in general. What kind of challenges do you see in the market (especially for China Telecom)?
DZ: Recently, we saw huge opportunities and potential in the MEA market with a series of operations in the region but we also found some challenges in the region. The first notable challenge for us was about the basic infrastructure. We see that in some of the countries, the basic service required for telecom operations like the power supply, the stability of fiber and the stability of those kind of resources still needs to be improved. For example, in one of the countries where we started our business some time back, we experienced 40% reliable availability and we had to look at work-arounds for the issue. The situation however is changing across all countries of Africa and Middle East as the economies are growing.
We have a very good reputation from our business around the world and our customers have similar expectations which become a challenge when sometimes we have problems with unstable fiber and networks in the local areas in some countries.
Apart from the above technical challenges, we have also found the foreign investment policies in some countries to be a bit challenging with similar issues in arranging travel for our global workforce. However, similar to the technical challenges, these too have been becoming much and much easier overtime.
GK: What are your plans for 2020?
DZ: We have big plans for 2020 as the year will be very important for us. We initially started with small bandwidth only for a few locations in the region and then within the last couple of years, we have been leaping from one state to another by increasing the bandwidth, rates and the standard in general. In 2020, we will upgrade our network within the region to a 100-gig based network in the major routes and we will also extend our background network to some cities where we haven’t operated before. This will be coupled with our extension into some new business routes as well.
We also plan to extend our service coverage to new regions. This will be done through business partners by utilizing both parties interconnected network.
Another area of focus for us is the development of marine cables in the region as it very strategical from a geographical point of view. We will be focusing on the junction from Asia Pacific to Europe and the cities in between as well. We will be actively working in this space as this will be very important to our business in the future.
