What we learned at ITW Asia 2024

With the scene set by recent high-profile submarine cable outages, resilience of communications networks took up a lot of stage time at ITW Asia 2024.

A session dedicated to creating disaster-resilient networks generated some interesting insights on this topic.  A common theme that it is better to engineer resilience into network planning in general rather than chasing cable breaks around the ocean as and when they occur – a strategy complicated by the continued shortage of cable ships.

It makes more sense, delegates heard, to make sure any outages that do occur, whether these cuts happen at sea or on land, can have their slack picked up by other options. This can be done by creating mesh-type networks with redundant routes between points that span a range of countries and connectivity options, and also by encouraging customers themselves to broaden their supplier base and therefore ensure resilience on the end user network design side too.

One thing this will take, however, is funding – Kacific Broadband Satellites Group CEO Brandon Seir called for 10% of telco budgets to be spent on disaster preparedness.

Building on a theme discussed at Capacity Asia in 2023 and various other industry events, the trend of companies trading off latency for access to power (ideally sustainable power) when it comes to data centre construction and colocation is continuing. To take an example, Telstra CEO Roary Stasko specifically highlighted this area as a trend to watch in 2025, particularly for workloads related to training and developing AI models.

On a similar note, the rise of communications platforms as a service (CPaaS) also had its own dedicated panel at ITW Asia. Several interesting issues were raised here. One was the important of seamless markets across Asia as a whole, with substantial differences in regulations, business models and price sensitivity making continent-wide operation more difficult than it needs to.

That said, according to the panelists there is a gap in the market for pure-play CPaaS operators. Telcos have struggled to adapt to the CPaaS landscape and moving to omnichannel solutions in general, according to one panelist, primarily due to a lack of internal restructuring and a desire to not cannibalise other revenues.

This has opened the door to specialists, who now enjoy an advantage in the market. However, telcos are now finally looking to create in-house solutions, leveraging their owned network infrastructure and wider geographical footprint to get a slice of future CPaaS-based growth in Asia.

With Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google all announcing plans within a month of each other to harness nuclear power for data centres, this power source is promoted as a clean, limitless solution to the industry’s power and sustainability woes.

But it’s not that simple, as the ITW audience heard. The biggest hyperscalers have the financial heft to make it happen, but the problem is often timescales. Nuclear power stations have a lead time of at least 15 years – and that is before financial or regulatory issues come into play, as the British experience highlights – while SMRs are not scalable enough to fully meet future AI demand. Nuclear power can often suffer form a public perception issue in Asia, particularly in post-Fukushima disaster Japan, which is the only country currently with the nuclear power capacity to meet its data centre demand.