Telstra International

(upbeat music)

[Text on screen] Telstra. Resillient service. Above, below and beyond.

[Text on screen] Everything you need to know about intent-based networking. All information accurate as at January 2026.

[Text on screen] Gaya Byrne, Head of Customer Success, and Wayne Lotter, Head of International Networks.

[Gaya] Hello and welcome, listeners.

I'm Gaya Byrne, Head of Customer Success with Telstra International.

And today, I am speaking from Singapore, having a virtual fireside chat with Wayne Lotter, our Head of International Networks.

Before we get started, being an Australian company, we like to acknowledge the Country of First Nations People of Australia.

While we aren't joining you from Australian soil, we do still acknowledge the importance of our Australian roots

and therefore I would like to begin in the spirit of reconciliation by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia

and their continuing connections to land, sea, and community.

We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and 

and extend that respect to all Aboriginal

and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening in.

We recognise their continuing connection to Country

and celebrate the diversity of cultures

and knowledges of Australia's First Peoples.

Wayne, it's wonderful to be having

this conversation with you today.

I've had the privilege of working with you

for about a year now,

and I'm pleased to be able

to share Telstra International's vision

of a connected future with our listeners today.

First up, I'll let you introduce yourself.

[Wayne] Yeah, thanks, Gaya,

and thank you also for hosting the conversation.

As you mentioned, I'm the Head of International Networks

and have the privilege of being

a member of Telstra International

and also our global networks

and technology group at Telstra,

particularly within our fixed engineering area.

And you know, I've had some amazing experiences at Telstra

over my many decades of being with the organisation

and really enjoyed all of those

and seeing the business grow and evolve in amazing ways.

And you know, here I am now in Asia working with you

and the rest of the international team

and really looking forward to today's discussion.

[Gaya] Thanks, Wayne.

Maybe a few decades in the business,

but probably not quite enough

to have been here when we laid our first subsea cables,

but I think you know quite a lot about this space.

So, can you tell us a little bit about

Telstra International's subsea network?

A bit about the history and the scale,

because I think it's really impressive.

[Wayne] Yeah, our DNA in networking, Gaya,

certainly goes back many generations

to some of those very early cable landings

in Australia on Bondi Beach.

And there's some amazing stories there from,

you know, over those generations Telstra International

and Telstra's overall network certainly has grown.

And within Telstra International we're present

across the key routes within intra-Asia,

connecting Asia to transpacific,

and also to Oceania and Europe.

Within intra-Asia, we would represent

somewhere around 30% of the internet traffic

and sort of, for example, through to transpacific

probably around 10% of that traffic.

So, a really critical player

and a leader in the APAC connectivity

and digital infrastructure industry

and supporting our customers in their growth as well.

And certainly, our level of growth that we have seen

has grown significantly the last sort of

three, four, five years.

We've certainly seen quite compounding growth, you know,

double digits in terms of the amount of capacity

that we've been delivering to our customers.

We've recently announced an additional 200 Tb

of capacity being added to the network,

taking us to somewhere around 800 Tb

of cumulative capacity in our network,

serving our customers across those routes that I mentioned.

[Gaya] Amazing scale and I feel so proud

to be working here.

Awesome, Wayne.

And you know, I've only been here a year,

but there's been so many exciting announcements

that we've made in the network space

and I know that you've been a huge part of instigating those

and your impact has been really immense.

So, I really want to get stuck into this, you know,

what is the big deal about the network?

Why now, why are we announcing this now

and why is it so important?

[Wayne] I guess, you know, networks have really been

a big part of our life for many generations

and they've been important in terms of, you know,

making our lives better

and also delivering growth in the economy.

And certainly, you know,

we are in a generational change right now

where we are seeing a material shift in the way

that networks are being used and the dependency on networks

and the digital infrastructure

that sits underneath those networks that, you know,

Telstra and Telstra International, particularly in APAC,

is one of the leading providers

of both connectivity and digital infrastructure.

And those demands have really come from

two kind of major shifts.

One is the shift overall to cloud services

and that's evolved.

Certainly, many of the listeners to this would be familiar,

that's evolved tremendously over the last decade or so,

but particularly, over the last five years

we've really seen that shift of workloads to the cloud.

And more recently, although it has been evolving,

is the use of AI and the demands that AI put on the network,

and particularly how that AI is also

being delivered from the cloud.

So, we've just seen this tremendous growth

with the convergence of cloud and AI

and then the use of those services

both in business and in consumer,

which has driven a need for infrastructure

to be available to kind of support that demand

and for that infrastructure to be available

fast, efficient, secure, and resilient.

And that is really what's driving our focus

and our strategy as we've announced

our Connected Future 30 strategy.

And in international we've particularly focused

in those pillars of a highly autonomous, secure network.

[Gaya] That's an incredible responsibility

that we have in that contribution.

And you know, I'm really always awed

by the way I hear you, Wayne,

and some of the other leaders in our business

talk about that digital infrastructure

that Telstra is responsible for

and that connectivity technology

that spans these immense subsea systems

and terrestrial fibre networks

across more than 30 countries.

In fact, Wayne, you're responsible

for a lot of that, so no pressure,

but I can't imagine having all of that on your shoulders.

You know, I think through doing that work,

you must have incredible insight

into how telecommunications providers need to evolve

to meet that proliferation in capacity demands

and what some of the other players

in the industry are doing.

That security, resilience, and performance piece

is just so important to our customers and what they need.

Tell us a little bit more about that.

[Wayne] Yeah, thanks, Gaya.

That's right, the scale that

we're talking about here is immense.

And, you know, as mentioned earlier,

Telstra International and Telstra

is a key provider of connectivity infrastructure services

and one of the leaders in APAC

into transpacific into Europe into Oceania, of course,

and intra-Asia itself with a footprint

that is over 400,000 km of subsea cable worldwide

that we either own or operate

as being one of those key metrics.

And certainly, we are present in over 30 key hubs

in providing that network.

Now, of course, the industry has gone

through great evolution

and service providers and operators and telecoms

have built those networks over time.

And we've reached a point now in the industry

that there's strong recognition of the need

to really simplify both the topology of the network -

so the way that the network is architected

in terms of its routes and destinations -

and also the platforms that support the delivery

of those services through that topology.

And particularly, there's a really strong focus

on topology simplification and platform simplification

as the basis and the foundation for a secure, resilient,

and the pathway to a highly autonomous network.

And the reasons for that is that simplifying,

removing variants, standardising,

first of all, removes the complexity of the network,

makes it easier to automate

and make that network ultimately autonomous.

And also removing variants and

standardising reduces the risk of impact

and increases the resilience of the network.

So, those are all really pathways to AI and cloud services,

which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit more shortly.

[Gaya] Thanks, Wayne,

because when I think about some of those networks

and they were built, you know, almost 40 years ago,

and so, really the complexity

with which we would've had to build those

so different to the type of technology that we have today.

And so, it might seem simple to say, you know,

well, we'll just make things simpler,

but in my experience,

certainly when you're dealing with older technology

and really trying to take it into the future,

that's anything but simple.

And it's massive physical infrastructure,

critical industry customers.

We can't afford to take any of them offline.

Their businesses are going to continue to need to grow

and move at a really fast pace.

There's all this integrated technology

that's all codependent

and then there's this huge layer of regulatory compliance

spanning multiple different countries.

You know, when you and your team think about

how do we start this program, where do you begin?

[Wayne] And that's really the art to it

is having that right structure around that

sort of set of priorities and programs.

So, you know, our journey has definitely started with

strong sort of alignment with the business strategy

and the business priorities that have taken us really

to a program of work that is further transforming

and modernising our network.

By the nature of what we do in serving those cloud services

and those AI services for both our wholesale customers

and our enterprise customers,

we really started the foundation

at the infrastructure layer,

which is typically been a very physical layer

that is less flexible to customer demand.

And we've started our journey there

in what we refer to as cloudifying

that infrastructure layer,

which is working with our key technology partners,

both Ciena and Nokia, to decouple the software

from the infrastructure hardware layer,

which really enables us to make something

that is very physical behave like a cloud-like service.

So that way it gives us greater levels of flexibility

and enables us to adjust those services

and the amount of capacity that's available

to customers in particular locations

in a more flexible and efficient way.

Of course, that's kind of the infrastructure layer

and as importantly, we've been, as I mentioned earlier,

simplifying the layers that sit on top of that

by minimising the amount of variance of technology

that we need that interact with that infrastructure layer.

So that platform layer is becoming simplified

and is also being driven in a much richer way by software.

And you know, as part of that

we are modernising our total tool chain

that controls the network, making those more API available

so that we can make those services more easily available

to our customers and also internally

in the way that we manage and run the network.

The one point that was really interesting that you made

was around the kind of regulatory

and the supply chain around all of that.

And that is certainly part of that,

that art or that magic that's required to get that right

and proudly, you know,

we've really focused on responsible business

and how we work across all of our hubs and locations

with the regulatory groups there to ensure

that we're aligned with those requirements

and supporting that level of compliance

that's necessary to be flexible in the marketplace.

Our supply chain, you know,

really mentioned our two technology partners,

but it really goes beyond that.

It's sort of the entire stack of our network

and an integrated supply chain

and how we, again, manage that very carefully

and ensure that, that really delivers to us

that level of resilience and security

we commit to our customers.

[Gaya] Thanks, Wayne.

And so, as I hear you talk,

I'm thinking about three really critical outcomes

that you and your team think about

when you define network excellence,

and that's I think resilience, reliability,

really robust security and then that flexibility

to meet evolving connectivity needs.

And I think in the way that you're doing that,

what I'm hearing you saying is

we're really architecting an autonomous network basically,

for it to be flexible enough to meet customers' needs

and for us to have less and less intervention

in our network's ability to do that.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

[Wayne] There's really two principles

that we have in mind.

The first one is that we are using the AI

and machine learning and other autonomous capabilities

within the network, within the architecture of the network,

to make the network, as you mentioned, resilient, secure,

and also to be able to deliver capacity

to our customers when and where they need it

through that cloudification that I mentioned earlier on.

The other aspect of that though is that our customers

want to have access to those rich characteristics

that are available in the network

to integrate those with their own capabilities

and deliver AI services in their own business.

So, we are also, as mentioned earlier,

enriching the way that our customers will be able

to get access to the characteristics of our network

and the capabilities in our network.

So, it's really AI in the network,

machine learning in the network within the architecture,

and then also making that available effectively

so customers can run AI on the network

together with other sort of services

that they might use in the cloud.

So, integrating that together is really

what is going to make a difference to our customers

and meet those objectives that you mentioned.

[Gaya] This conversation is actually called

"Everything you need to know about intent-based networking".

So, tell me a little bit about intent-based networking.

What is intent-based networking

and how is Telstra International leveraging it

to transform network ops?

[Wayne] Yeah, now this is definitely an area

that there are many perspectives and views on,

so I will share mine

and certainly, Telstra as part of

its Telstra autonomous network strategy

has been putting a lot of thought into this

and our architecture groups within global network

and technology has certainly been leading

in terms of the contribution in the industry

around this level of thinking.

So, as a perspective,

intent-based is really looking at

what is the intent that the customer is looking for?

What outcome is the customer looking for?

So, in the simplest form that intent,

maybe I want a service that connects

my regional data centre to my global data centre

and I want that service to perform

and operate in a certain way.

Now, you might want to expand on those intents and say,

at a particular point in time,

I want additional resilience, I want additional bandwidth,

I want a different cost structure.

There may be many intents that may surround

that simple intent of, hey, I need a network,

I need a network connecting two points.

Now, traditionally, to get to that outcome,

you'll go through a kind of sequential value chain

with many handoffs, with order forms and sort of designs

and it would be manually configured in the network.

When we shift to something that's intent based,

we move to more of a natural language way

of interacting with the network

and that natural language can define

what the network needs to do

and the network works out for itself

how to provide those services and provide that outcome

and possibly roll back that outcome,

possibly change how that outcome is achieved

with the same outcome.

So, that intent is a natural outcome that's prescribed

and the network takes care of the logic

in how that is delivered based on the policies

that have been defined by the engineering teams

and the kind of business requirements.

So, it's a really exciting shift for the industry

and for really for the outcomes in the economy

to get to this level of networking sort of outcomes.

So, really excited about this

and we see clear pathways to this approach to networking.

[Gaya] Incredible, and I think a little more

as this becomes such an important part

of really mission-critical applications

for all of our customers, you know,

particularly ones that are running the way

lots of communities around the world live and work

and interact with each other.

That resilience piece becomes so important,

especially if we're going to think about

intent-based networking as the way we serve our customers.

Tell us a little bit more about

how we're thinking about resilience

and how we deliver that for our customers.

[Wayne] We're really thinking of a key kind of use cases

that are really important to

what our customers expect from a network

that's highly secure and resilient.

And the first sort of use case is,

again, sort of being able to predict and avoid incidents

by ensuring customers have capacity available that to them

that can adapt to particular network situations

that may be as simple as a fibre cut,

may be as simple as unanticipated congestion in the network.

The network can adapt and that incident

is avoided for those customers and effectively

an intent that is set within the network to do that.

Of course, the second sort of primary thought is

that in some cases that may not be avoidable

due to a physical situation that may require us

to offer the customer alternatives

and be able to, again, offer that in a intent-based way

where a customer can very quickly choose their alternatives

and be able to minimise the impact to their business.

So, you know, traditionally these types

of restoration procedures could take hours, could take days,

and you know, we hear this concept

of self-healing networks and self-healing capabilities

and certainly, that's the direction we're taking

with our customers to ensure that, you know,

those mission critical apps and the ability of scale

that they need and capacity

is really there when they need it, where they need it.

So, that evolution is certainly,

the outcome we want to get to, Gaya

and that's, you know, what the expectations are

that we set that level of maturity to get there

and invest to get there.

[Gaya] Absolutely, Wayne,

that challenge of speed and scale

and making sure that as much of it

is as autonomous as it possibly can be

so that the logic is working

for the customer in real time really critical, isn't it?

So, Wayne, you know, I think until a couple of years ago

everyone was talking about digital twins.

I know we've kind of moved onto agentic AI,

but digital twins are a really interesting

and useful part of the way we're going

to roll out our autonomous network

and I really wanted to understand

a little bit more about that.

[Wayne] In the context of a resilient and secure network,

a digital twin is really imperative.

So, if we think about, you know,

the intent-based approach that we mentioned

and you know, the network being able to execute that intent

through policies that have been defined

and the logic is flowing in the network

and the network can even work out

when to roll back things and change things.

Now, that's fine if you're talking about one service

and nothing else changing,

but of course, you know,

there's thousands and thousands of services

that are operating in the network at the same time.

So, the digital twin has a real blueprint, a simulation,

a detailed, fine-grained simulation of the network,

allows us to run those changes

real-time into the digital twin,

see what the consequence of those changes are,

and then they can be played back into production

and calibrated through the digital twin and production.

And therefore the confidence in the execution

of those intent-based requests,

that are logic run by the network based on human policy,

that confidence puts us in a place that

where we can meet those commitments

to that level of resilience and security that we spoke about

and that, hey, the changes we're making

don't create vulnerabilities,

because the digital twin has told us that they don't.

Hey, they're not going to collide with other changes,

because the digital twin has given us

that environment to test that in.

So, you know, there's been a lot of talk about digital twins

and kind of analytics,

but this is the real-world sort of interest in that

and we're certainly been progressing.

We've mentioned previously in some of our communications

that we are framing that around inventory.

We're working, we're using the Blue Planet platform

as the foundation for that, that will enable us

to shift that digital twin

alongside the whole autonomous production network.

So, yeah, definitely a key pillar of what we're doing

and what the industry is looking at

is the benefits of digital twins.

It goes further than that.

It can give you the level of depth

into your facilities, into your fibres,

but that's probably one relevant example

around resilience and security.

Really exciting space, a whole space for itself.

A whole new podcast certainly on that one, Gaya.

[Gaya] Can't wait to record that one with you, Wayne.

I'm just kind of picturing engineers in your team

running around a sort of sim city type simulation

of our network, and that's really cool,

but such an important thing for us to be doing, you know,

really testing what could happen in the real world

without the risk of really impacting customers

and impacting their operations and being really clear about

what we're doing before we actually do it.

So, what an incredible piece of technology

for us to be using and really great to see it

come to life in the telco sector as well.

We've been hearing about it

in so many other sectors for so long.

So, what I'm piecing together there

from all of the stuff that you're saying is that

we're making a really fundamental shift

from being really hardware-centric

to being really software-defined

in the way we're managing the network

and really cloudifying that environment.

And in the process we're really simplifying our operations

throughout the infrastructure.

I've heard you say we're re-imagining

our network architecture with AI

and machine learning at the core

and enabling really autonomous operations,

that predictive maintenance, real-time optimisation.

And then you said we're moving to intent-based networking,

allowing customers to really specify desired outcomes

and almost design the network

that's going to work best for their business

and what they need to achieve with their business.

That's a lot of change.

How do we measure that progress

and how do we know we're really hitting the mark?

[Wayne] Gaya, that's a great question

and certainly, in terms of the journey

that we're taking in cloudifying the network,

simplifying the platforms and topology,

and modernising that tool chain,

we certainly have really strong disciplines

around those milestones, those investments

in how we're doing that.

But ultimately, you know, mentioned earlier,

Telstra as part of its strategy,

Connected Future 30 strategy,

has set a target using the TeleManagement Forum

Autonomous Network Maturity Model,

getting to the right level of maturity

and progressing towards that.

And fundamentally, there isn't a finish line,

but you know, as mentioned we've got those

really clear measures on the roadmap

of the level of maturity that we expect

to achieve on certain use cases

based on our program working on investment plan.

So, really moving from manual to some of those use cases being automated

to some of them becoming more highly autonomous

and then really getting to that point

that I mentioned earlier on around that intent-based

and kind of the production,

the digital twin working together

to an outcome that is based on policy.

That's where we're mapping ourselves out on.

We're targeting to reach level four as our milestone,

but you know, the finish line's going to keep moving,

because the industry requirements, our customers' needs

and just the economy and the growth that we're seeing,

you know, the tremendous growth that we're seeing

in the use of AI and cloud.

And we've really just started,

like we haven't seen the full potential yet

of what AI's going to deliver and the level of response

that we're going to need from the network.

So, really excited about that

and certainly, you know, that step-by-step journey

is really something that we're collaborating

really tightly with across the industry.

And mentioned earlier the global networks and technology

within Telstra's architecture and engineering groups

have been really at the forefront

of that whole movement towards a fully autonomous network.

[Gaya] Wonderful, and I think my understanding of those stages is, you know, with our target of level four,

level four is a really significant milestone.

When we're at level four, the network's going to be largely self-optimising.

It can handle most operations autonomously, but there's still room for a bit of human intervention

and I think it's really nice for us to be able to have very clear measurable objectives that align to each of those stages.

Like, you know, I think what it means for our customers as well and the language that we use with them

that there'll be reduced network faults, they'll have an improved customer experience,

and the way in which we're using automation and AI to achieve those goals is really fascinating

for our customers, but also for our teams.

I know our teams get really excited about hearing some of this stuff.

And so, the question, Wayne, is what's next?

So, once we've hit level four, what happens then?

[Wayne] First of all, I got to say I'm super excited about those measures that you're setting

and you know, as a sort of executive of customer success, it's a thrill to hear that we're setting those measures

in terms of the lens of the customer and the needs of our customer and it's great

how we're really collaborating together on those outcomes and your sponsorship of that has been amazing.

So, look, I'm super excited, as I know everybody is, about where to next.

And you know, the really exciting thing about this is the coworking relationship between us as humans and technology.

You know, this is really the exciting piece about it is how do we as humans get the most out of AI

and how does AI become a coworker to us and are basically, a side-by-side coworker to make us more efficient

and ultimately, to make our lives better.

So, I'm really excited about this kind of human-centric approach to technology and how,

based on policy, AI can empower us to be even better and serve the industry, serve our customers, and together Tele grow the economy.

And, you know, for somebody who's spent their life in operations and service and technology,

that the benefits that this is going to bring to the accuracy leads to resilience leads to security leads to meeting customers' targets.

So, you know, the next 12 to 18 months we'll continue to advance our capabilities in this area.

You know, we're really focused on what's changing for our customers in terms of their data centre blueprints

and their architectures of their data centres changing and just sort of regional-to-regional data centres,

edge-to-regional-to-global centres, how we're continuing to evolve our network and our response to that for

both our enterprise customers who have particular needs and our wholesale customers where we support them in the delivery of that backbone and other services.

And again, our commitment to level four maturity is certainly an important commitment, but our commitment to getting to those outcomes of a network

that meets our customers' needs in terms of security, resilience, and of operating sort of in an experience that gives them capacity when and where they need it.

So, super excited, Gaya, about Telstra's commitment to this as well and our strategy taking us in this direction.

So this evolution will drive that operational efficiency that we spoke about.

It's going to enable our customers to deliver those digital services to their customers and really just positions that level of innovation

in the industry that we need and continues to support the evolving needs of our enterprise and wholesale customers.

[Gaya] Amazing. Thank you, Wayne.

I really like how we're thinking about how it works for our customers, but also their end users as well.

You know, really thinking about someone making a trade on a financial services website

or maybe even, Wayne, one of your daughters watching their TikToks at home and really how we're enabling that incredible consumption

of data all around the world.

So, Wayne, thanks for these great insights.

I feel really inspired and excited, like I think we're in this moment.

It's a once in a generation moment to really transform the way our network works 

and the way it supports communities and businesses around the world.

And I for one feel really excited and really privileged to be able to contribute to that in some way.

And I know you do as well, Wayne, so what an exciting time and thank you for all the insight that you shared today.

[Wayne] Thanks, Gaya. Thanks so much.

(gentle techno music)