It comes as our customers face unprecedented disruption across their markets driven by geopolitics, regulation and technology — with AI catalysing change faster than ever. We have designed BT International specifically to help our customers meet these challenges head on and anticipate future opportunities to thrive.

The way we do this centres on two highly scalable telco platforms designed for the age of multi-cloud and AI: Global Voice and Global Fabric, with security built in by design. We’ve channelled our investments into these cloud-centric global platforms and concentrated our expert teams where customers need them most.

From asset-light to platform-rich

We have evolved our ‘asset-light’ strategy for several years, designing our platforms to reflect the trends we see in customer traffic crossing our networks — from data flows to and between the big cloud providers to the emergence of hybrid cloud as a preferred model for many businesses. We see that AI has unpredictable impacts on our customers’ networks — from the lumpy, bulky training workloads of large language models (LLMs) powering GenAI to the low latency demands of conversational AI and augmented reality. These trends are set against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving cyber security threat landscape and a fast-moving regulatory environment.

Telecoms gets its voice back

Our Global Voice platform enables businesses, governments and the people they engage with to communicate with each other effortlessly. We’re already world leading in the global voice services market, managing over 16 billion calls to customer call centres in over 70 countries every year. We’ve migrated these services onto a new SIP-powered, cloud focussed platform enabling voice to be carried across data networks. SIP has been around for a while but the fact that Global Managed Voice is both SIP-powered and cloud-focused means that it’s perfectly poised to unlock the full potential of integrating voice with AI.  

Indeed, Gartner predicts that 30 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will offer customer service through only a single, AI-enabled channel by 2028. I believe our Global Voice platform is strongly positioned to enable this, backed by our experts who have delivered over 5,000 contact centres to over 2,000 customers around the world.

Wrapping the world in Global Fabric

Next, we have Global Fabric, our brand-new, AI-ready, cloud-centric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform. This offers customers instant, secure and resilient connectivity to practically every app or digital service they want, including the world’s top cloud and software-as-a-service  (SaaS) providers. It launched to live customer traffic earlier this year and it is the platform that will help us achieve our goal to be the world’s number one provider of secure multi-cloud connectivity.

Global Fabric could have hardly arrived at a better time. We were one of the first telcos off the starting blocks with a truly greenfield international platform to eliminate the drag that the previous generation of networks had on customer innovation. With traditional networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity for a new or existing app, including AI, could take days or weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant.

Now think of the increasingly complex international regulatory environment. Technology and data have become geopolitical pawns. That means customers must double down on sovereignty, ensuring the right data stays within the right jurisdiction while enabling them to unlock its value to the business. With Global Fabric, customers can choose both the cloud destinations their data goes to and the route it takes along the way. This means regulated data never leaves the designated national borders and helps customers stay compliant.

Sharing a platform for success

Looking to the future of our industry, we believe international networks will gravitate towards fewer, larger, telco platforms able to manage the demand generated by increased cloud and AI services. We invite other service providers to work with BT International, as we build out our ecosystem of partners, including our recently announced partnership with Google Cloud, and scale fast so we can, as an industry, offer the best value to customers across the globe. 

We’re at a pivotal moment as an industry. It is an opportunity to move away from fragmented legacy international networks to a platform designed with the reality of AI, cyber and cloud at its core, reflecting customers’ expectations of speed, security, sustainability, sovereignty and naturally the skills to support future growth and prosperity.

When I talk to BT’s multinational customers, they say it’s the end of the road for legacy networks. Like motorists 100 years ago, they realise that slow is the new down.

The invention of the automobile was transformational. Mass-produced, affordable cars expanded people’s horizons and created new opportunities for business. As Carl Benz’s “Motorwagen” evolved into modern-day cars, performance outstripped the ability of roads to carry them. For the car to reach its full potential, new infrastructure was needed. Autobahns, interstate highways and motorways became the transportation backbone of the modern world.

A similar story is being written today, but instead of physical items like you and me, it’s about transporting AI workloads in the digital world — from locations such as Google Cloud data-centres all the way to users and devices, wherever they may be.

A rear-view mirror

Most businesses still use networks built for a previous generation of IT, where users sat in offices and accessed apps and data stored in their own data-centre. Traffic was predictable and connectivity specified at the start of a fixed-term contract. Few changes were needed, and those that were took days or weeks to make.

AI is changing that. AI traffic is unpredictable. For example, training large language models (LLMs) can cause surges in bandwidth demand, congesting inflexible networks. This impacts not just AI performance, but that of other apps too. Moreover, AI workloads can be split between many users in different places. The app itself may be hosted across multiple clouds.

AI-ready performance

At BT, we pride ourselves on delivering rock-solid foundations for our customers’ digital business. We understand AI demands and are building a brand-new network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform designed specifically to meet its needs.

Called Global Fabric, it offers multinational customers connectivity on demand to a full choice of third-party cloud, AI and SaaS providers. They can choose routes, types of connectivity (eg Internet, Ethernet, IP-VPN), scale, locations and services to connect to, all in an instant with the flexibility to make changes at any time. With Global Fabric, we want AI to run best on BT wherever customers are, wherever the data is. That’s a huge ambition and demands extraordinary scale. No single network provider can do this on their own.

That’s why we’re deepening our partnership with Google Cloud. We’re combining the power of Global Fabric with Cloud WAN, Google Cloud’s fully managed, reliable and secure enterprise WAN backbone that leverages the planet-scale Google network to optimise AI performance and cost.

Together, Global Fabric and Google’s Cloud WAN deliver:

• An extensive network
• A network engineered for speed
• One of the most resilient networks
• And the best outcomes for our customers.

To do this, we’re pre-integrating Cloud WAN’s low-latency subsea optical links into Global Fabric. Customers will have a wide selection of high-speed, reliable routes for their digital workloads, all available at the click of a button on Global Fabric’s web portal. They’ll be able to create fully modern, high-performance, secure and resilient flexible networks for their business — meaning they can put their foot to the floor with their AI plans.

Our partnership will also see BT offering customers Google Cloud Partner Interconnect via Global Fabric in 50 of the world’s top cloud locations, growing to 70 by 2026. This will give customers instant connectivity into Google Cloud, with a 99.99 per cent reliability service level agreement (SLA) backed by BT and Google Cloud.

BT will continue to deepen its collaboration with Google Cloud to ensure reliable, direct, and the fastest low-latency access to Google and Google Cloud services across BT’s network.

For customers on their AI journey, our partnership with Google Cloud offers a high-speed route to success. Traffic restrictions are being lifted. A brand new hyperscale highway awaits.