Accelerating the Internet’s Backbone Capacity, What’s Next Post Pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic forced populations to make an immediate shift to working and schooling from home full-time, driving all of us to connect via the Internet. At Telia Carrier, we saw a 56% year-on-year traffic growth which remains high. The pandemic highlighted the Internet’s essential role. By providing the critical foundation of the Internet and enabling the core services that facilitate ubiquitous conferencing and e-learning, backbone networks have enabled us to stay in touch.

Our reliance on the Internet also exposed the lack of reliable broadband, especially in rural areas of America. According to the FCC, it is estimated that at least 6.3 million households in electric co-op service areas lack reliable, high-speed internet access, which can lead to a loss of $68 billion over 20 years. Electric cooperatives in the US are addressing this deficit by building broadband communications to bridge the digital divide between urban and rural populations. Service providers connecting to these rural consumers need more diversity in routes between major markets. Telia Carrier is continually expanding across the US to build a more scalable network.

From a technology perspective building and operating a multi-layer architecture requires a transition to more open optical and packet networking allowing the use of technologies like 400ZR pluggables, lowering the cost of entry, creating a more cost-effective solution for service providers and leading to greater network expansion. Telia Carrier was the first to test 400ZR coherent connections between Cisco’s NCS 5700 and Cisco 8000 platforms over a third-party open line system and plans to rollout these solutions in the coming months.

Telia Carrier is also trailblazing a path in the 4G subsea market by evolving its networks to support the explosive traffic growth and high-bandwidth services driven by the cloud and video streaming. Telia Carrier and Aqua Comms recently completed a successful trial of a 400 Gigabit Ethernet service the two plan to offer between New York and Frankfurt, Germany.

In June, Telia Carrier officially became a standalone company with a new owner, Polhem Infra – which is focused on long-term infrastructure investment – allowing Telia Carrier to accelerate the network growth. This podcast will share fresh perspective from Telia Carrier’s CEO about the future of the company, the role of empowerment in building a culture of excellence, thoughts on the Digital Divide, and this unique time we are living in to reimagine and rearchitect the Internet backbone.

Topics of focus:

• The impact of COVID-19 on our business and on the network
• How we are rearchitecting the Internet backbone
• Our recent 400G trans-Atlantic trial
• Telia Carrier’s network expansion in the Americas
• Staffan’s vision for the next five years