Reflections on PTC ’18

Attending Pacific Telecom Conference 2018
The Pacific Telecommunication Council’s premier winter interconnection event is attended by nearly 7,500 industry experts and service provider executives every year. PTC is primarily focused on Asia-Pac connectivity, but with worldwide interconnection emphasis and attendance from global representatives.

This year’s conference included technical and panel discussions by industry experts and today’s key service provider challenges, advances and future direction were presented to conference attendees. Our motivation for attending was to focus on relationship building with business decision makers and learning about new capabilities.

From PTC ’18, we came away with key trends within the service provider industry that influence our forward-looking colocation and interconnection strategy.

Primary PTC takeaways

• One of the primary takeaways at PTC ’18 was the criticality of recognizing the need for strong interconnection capabilities and the ambition of today’s customers to find providers with connectivity-rich facilities and access to multiple carriers. Connectivity to hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud or Azure is also critical for data center providers.
   
• Companies need to connect between data centers where they may have multiple compute instances, disaster recovery sites, edge sites or internet access. These services are fundamental to most successful IT strategies and the need to provide the right solution is important to support our customers and their success.

  With Flexential’s 100G backbone capabilities and hyperscale cloud connectivity options, we are uniquely positioned to provide unparalleled connectivity solutions. We utilize our extensive, private and secure backbone to connect our 40 data centers and multiple POPs to deliver critical services to our customers.
   

• The network edge and delivery of services closer to the customer are a key initiative. Latency is a geography problem more so than a technology problem, and there aren’t many options outside of delivering services in regions where the consumers reside. Considering the drivers of increased content, IoT and greater demand for mobile and 5G speeds, there is a significant need to increase our ability as an industry to support the growth of the internet traffic to meet oncoming demands.

  With our footprint in many of the growing Tier 2 metro regions, and the ability to bring services to our HybridEdge data centers over our private network, we reliably and securely deliver services to the edge for our customers.
   

• Subsea cables are a big topic of interest, especially with the increased demand for more capacity between continents. The announcement of the Hawaiki cable landing in Flexential’s Hillsboro data center, which provides the largest connectivity to Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia, comes on the heels of the New Cross Pacific cable construction connecting companies to Asia. New advances in subsea cable technologies make this cable the largest capacity to Asia. Additional subsea cables are in the works and demand will continue to push more build in the future.

Looking ahead to future partnerships

Overall, for Flexential, the conference was our chance to announce our new brand to a large audience of telecommunication service provider executives while sharing our capabilities and joint company footprint, as well as colocation, network and cloud services. Plus, the opportunity to build relationships and socialize was tremendous. We focused our efforts on meeting key decision makers and developing relationships for future partnerships.

PTC ’18 is now in the books! It’s time for the real work to begin: expanding on conversations and partnership agreements, delivering on our commitments and building a better ecosystem as a leader in industry advancements.