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.

BT today announced it has switched on Global Fabric, its new, transformative, network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform and has been carrying out extensive live testing over the past two months. The first Global Fabric services will launch in early 2025.

Global Fabric will make it easier and quicker for businesses to securely connect employees, customers and devices to apps and digital services — including artificial intelligence (AI) — that are hosted across multiple clouds.

Customers will benefit from scalable, secure, high-capacity and resilient connectivity, ready to meet the growing and complex demands of breakthrough AI technologies. Global Fabric’s flexibility will be unprecedented. With legacy networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity services can take weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant, helping businesses manage unpredictable, AI-driven spikes in data traffic.

BT has already installed Global Fabric ‘points of presence’ (PoPs) in over 45 of the world’s major cloud data centres with the number increasing to 140. This offers customers a choice of locations from which to access Global Fabric services to suit their operational, market and regulatory needs. 

Customers that do not have network connections into the cloud data centres hosting Global Fabric PoPs will be able to order new links from BT, ensuring they are ready for the launch of live services in early 2025. 

BT is also rolling out a demo of Global Fabric’s digital management portal. By November, this will allow customers’ IT teams to learn how to set up and optimise their multi-cloud network configurations and experiment with application programmable interfaces (APIs). APIs will help customers integrate Global Fabric connectivity into other digital business platforms and apps to boost innovation and growth.  

“BT’s Global Fabric will help customers hit the cloud running,” said Colin Bannon, chief technology officer, BT Business. “It will give them a choice of the world’s best cloud locations to interconnect with their customers, partners and suppliers, making them easier to do business with not just today but tomorrow too. With the achievement of our latest Global Fabric delivery milestones, we take another step closer to a new age of AI-ready, digital interconnectivity.”

ENDS

Connecting to Global Fabric PoPs

Global Fabric’s core network hardware is installed in the world’s major carrier neutral facilities (CNFs) — large datacentres where cloud providers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and network operators provide access to their services.

Global Fabric hardware locations are known as ‘points of presence’ (PoPs). BT makes it easy for customers to connect their sites to their business partners, and to their applications and workloads hosted in the multi-cloud, using our PoPs as global connectivity gateways.

So to do this, the next logical questions for companies are: ‘Are we secure?’ and ‘Are we AI-ready?’ The answer to these questions is one of the reasons we are confident about the future of modern, global networks and the opportunity for industry collaboration to deliver performance benefits to customers around the globe.

I’d like to offer a perspective on this by talking about factories and fabric.

First, factories. Industry uses AI to accelerate research, development and distribution. Leveraging AI offers unprecedented opportunities to improve efficiency, reduce costs and accelerate time-to-market for new products. Most companies face sizeable hurdles, including high R&D costs, globally dispersed people and operations, long development cycles and stringent regulatory requirements.

It is no surprise that they want to explore how AI can deliver faster data-driven decision-making, predictive analytics and automation. This requires the integration of AI into existing workflows and that in itself requires seamless international collaboration, secure data sharing and compliance with global standards. Naturally, there is very little point of doing this if those workflows travel over networks that are simply not AI-ready themselves.

This is where we come in. Or rather Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), which is where we see the greatest opportunity in a very fragmented market. NaaS is like having a virtual toolbox which allows companies to adapt the network to suit their needs in an instant, whereas with previous technologies it could take weeks.  It enables them to modernise traditional networks into highly scalable, cloud-centric solutions that adapt quickly to different data needs.

In short, a NaaS should connect companies to everything they need, wherever they are, in the most intelligent, secure and sustainable way. That makes sense. It also ties into our ambition at BT which is to be the most trusted connector of people, devices and machines.

And so to fabric.

The world of networks has been through several seismic moments as new technologies have emerged and transformed the landscape. In the 1970s and 1980s a technology called X.25 revolutionised the way in which companies accessed their remote mainframe terminals. In the 1990s Frame Relay allowed you to connect to a cloud making it more efficient to run corporate networks and a lot cheaper too. The next big breakthrough came with the introduction of multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) in the mid-2000s, which allowed carriers to converge voice, video and data on the same network. Each of these network solutions was right for its time. We are now at another pivot point in the history of networking, driven by the demand for higher bandwidth, seamless connectivity to and between cloud services and dispersed workforces and operations, flexible economics and pervasive scalability.

Our response to this is Global Fabric, which revolutionises connectivity as organisations adapt to modern network demands and ask the question: ‘Are we AI ready?’ We think companies like BT, who have global connectivity solutions, serving multinationals around the world, can lead the rollout of a single, integrated agnostic platform that delivers value to customers, cloud service providers, technology companies and other global telcos.

Back in May, we talked about exploring options for our global operations in the context of BT Group needing to double down on its core UK businesses. This leaves the field clear for opportunities to engage in much deeper international partnerships to leverage the investment we have made in rolling out Global Fabric.

We know there is a common desire among companies to optimise cloud and network costs, to reduce cybersecurity risks and to enhance sustainability across their IT estate, especially in the light of the surge in demand from AI-driven applications. Network operators face the challenge of upgrading their network infrastructure as the current technology reaches the end of its lifecycle. We know that AI has intensified the challenges of data distribution, due to the surge in data produced by AI systems. And we know that AI’s electricity demands will present huge challenges to companies striving to achieve their Net Zero carbon emissions goals. 

As organisations adopt AI strategies and shift their apps to the cloud or edge to bring them closer to their business operations, network demands will grow in scale and complexity. At the same a modern network will help reduce the concentration of risk in single points of failure and make it easier to address major IT outages, as experienced globally on 19 July 2024.

At BT, we believe strongly in the future benefits of AI and we’re ready to help companies answer the question: ‘Are we AI ready?’ At the same time, we believe this is a pivotal moment in networking technology and recognise that international partnership and collaboration is the best way of realising the considerable benefits of this new era on the global stage. BT stands ready to make this real.

According to Gartner, the independent report can be used to “to evaluate and select optimal global network service partners”. It is the 20^th consecutive year* that BT has been named “a Leader” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant^TM for Global WAN Services based on its “Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision”.

According to Gartner, “providers in the Leaders quadrant are performing well and maintaining a stable organisation, with a clear vision of market direction. They deliver comprehensive portfolios of quality network services across the broadest geographies. They address the global networking needs of a broad range of enterprises in terms of size, geographic distribution and vertical industry. Leaders shape the direction of the market by extending their coverage, developing new class-leading capabilities and commercial models, and deploying them at scale”.

The 2024 report can be accessed from the BT website here.

Bas Burger, CEO, Business, BT, said: “Customers tell me they want predictable performance for their apps, AI and IoT as well as future compliance on data sovereignty and sustainability. Our response is Global Fabric, our visionary new network-as-a-service. I thank our customers and partners for sharing their technology roadmaps, which has helped us develop this transformational new platform to meet their needs.”

ENDS

*Magic Quadrant for Global WAN Services was previously named Magic Quadrant for Network Services, Global (2015 – 2023)

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Global WAN Services, Danellie Young, Gaspar Valdivia, Karen Brown and Lisa Pierce, 15th April 2024.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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