What now for BT’s Global Fabric?

• BT has invested a lot of time and effort into its new global data transport network, dubbed Global Fabric
• The next-generation network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform has been put through its paces and will start to provide commercial services from early next year
• But how does Global Fabric fit into the UK telco’s new back-to-basics, UK-focused strategy?
• The telco’s head of networks says BT is examining “all options”

Like its telco peers, the UK’s BT Group faces a number of business, operational and strategic conundrums that are taxing the grey matter of the company’s top table team. Being a facilities-based communications services provider requires a great deal of investment, but the returns on those investments are much poorer now than they used to be for many reasons (some of which are driving the telcos to ask for ‘fair share’ capex contributions from the big tech giants, but that’s another story…).  

Capex budgets are squeezed these days and operators such as BT need to make very careful decisions about where to focus their investments. Apart from fibre and 5G, one of the investment decisions the UK national operator took in recent years was to pump cash and considerable supporting resources into the development and deployment of a new, secure global network of data services nodes, or points of presence (PoPs), tailored to the modern needs of enterprise users (the ones that supposedly have the budgets that could feed new telco revenue streams). 

BT took that decision – that gamble, if you like – because existing international networks were not designed to meet the needs of today’s enterprise users, which want secure, flexible, on-demand, affordable services that can (importantly) help them connect to the cloud platforms and cloud-based applications that (critically) will help them meet their strategic needs. Demand in recent years for SD-WAN and SASE (secure access service edge) services has shown how enterprise requirements have moved on from the days of slowly provisioned, inflexible and expensive data service connections, but enterprises want more to help them to meet their multicloud, fast-changing and increasingly AI-influenced needs. 

It’s not just that a new type of service platform was needed – BT noted that many other network operators weren’t committing to significant investments in international communications services, so there was an opportunity to differentiate and become a market leader. Others also spotted this opportunity: Colt, for example, saw an opportunity from investing while others were pulling back from the international services sector but approached it in a different way by acquiring Lumen’s EMEA assets for $1.8bn. Colt CEO Keri Gilder told TelecomTV a year ago that she had seen incumbent operators “moving out of their global business and [focusing on] their country business. And we’re seeing that… not just in Europe, but around the world. We believe that makes Colt a great aggregator for global business” opportunities because enterprises still need international reach – see Lumen EMEA acquisition gives Colt an edge, says CEO.

BT shared its new approach to the international data services sector a year ago when it unveiled its Global Fabric, which it describes as a network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform. Global Fabric is “designed to be flexible, scalable and resilient both in the quality of connectivity and the convenience of pay-as-you-use. By combining the power of cloud and networks, customers can optimise application performance, user experience and cost,” BT noted last year, when AI got a few mentions in its announcement.

A new world and not just because of AI

The world has changed quite a bit since then. In announcing today that Global Fabric has been tested “extensively” during the past couple of months and will start to provide commercial services from early next year, BT mentions AI multiple times. It not only references that AI applications are used in the network’s management and operations but that Global Fabric, as it is designed to be instantly flexible, can help enterprises “manage unpredictable, AI-driven spikes in data traffic”. 

BT says it has already installed Global Fabric PoPs in more than 45 major datacentres around the world (Equinix is a partner, for example), “with the number increasing to 140,” it adds (which sounds some way off the “more than 700 datacentres” cited as part of the plan a year ago, so clearly there’s still plenty of PoP deployments to be sorted). That geographic spread “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 datacentres 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.” 

The telco adds: “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.”

So what makes it a next-gen service enablement platform that’s better than traditional systems or, indeed, the SD-WAN and SASE options also available to enterprises? 

Earlier this year, Colin Bannon, CTO at BT Business, explained to TelecomTV that Global Fabric, for which Cisco has been one of the most important technology supplier partners, is different to the telco’s existing international data network in terms of its underlying technology and the locations of its PoPs. 

“Today, our MPLS network calculates the [data traffic] path at each [PoP/node] and that node will then decide which one to go to next based on a fairly simple set of rules. With the new network, we’re using segment routing in the core that underpins all these services. And we’ve deployed an abstracted path controller [that is] really important because you can start to inject business intent into how we run our network. So up until this point, you’ve got your last mile, you’ve got SD-WAN, which often just chooses to flap between one flavour of **** internet to another” using path selection technology only for the first hop before hitting “a service provider core and then it’s a black box for the next set of hops before it spits out on the other end. We’ve started to make this core transparent so that customers can start to inject business intent in our new platform and use language that the core can now understand to control and deliver those business intents… before, once it gets to the core, we really don’t know anything about the customer. We’re just moving tagged packets around – it’s very dumb” in terms of the customer’s needs, explained Bannon.  

“With this path computation engine that’s centralised, you can start to do things” like specify routes or hops to avoid, added the BT man, something that’s increasingly important to companies as regulations change, companies adopt sovereign data strategies and conflicts cause issues. 

Fabric’s future?

BT is excited about Global Fabric’s capabilities and prospects, but not only has the world changed since work began on the new network a few years ago, so has BT. It has a new CEO, Allison Kirkby, who joined this February and announced a new strategy in May that is focused on the UK and on cutting costs. You can read about Kirkby’s broader vision for the telco in this article, but there’s one part of the big picture that is particularly relevant for BT Business and Global Fabric. 

Kirkby stated: “As we move into the next phase of BT Group’s transformation, we are sharpening our focus to be better for our customers and the country by accelerating the modernisation of our operations, and by exploring options to optimise our global business. This will create a simpler BT Group, fully focused on connecting the UK, and well positioned to generate significant growth for all our stakeholders.”

Optimising the global business doesn’t sound like a plan that fits in with the original vision for Global Fabric. So what does the future hold?

During a recent media briefing with BT Group’s chief security and networks officer, Howard Watson, I asked him what the plan was for Global Fabric. Will it be mothballed or closed down? Sold off completely or in part (telcos are currently keen on selling off partial stakes in certain assets or businesses)? Might it be folded into another organisation or merged with another international player?

According to Watson, “all of the above” are being considered right now, though TelecomTV has subsequently learned that shutting it down is not an option – the customer implications wouldn’t allow that course of action, but it’s clear that Global Fabric’s future path will not be running the course that was being considered a year ago. 

While BT figures out what to do with it, commercial services are being prepped, but any enterprise customer signing up to use the service and rely on BT’s sparkly new international services platform will be wanting assurances and will want to know what the future holds for the network running critical business traffic. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV