Ekrem is VP Wholesale at Liberty Global. He is now responsible for the strategy and delivery of national and international data and connectivity wholesale services for Liberty Global’s operations in Austria, Switzerland (CHAT), Germany and the CEE region.
Liberty Global is the world’s largest international TV and broadband company, with operations in more than 30 countries across Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. It connects 25 million customers who subscribe to over 50 million television, broadband internet and telephony services. It is also a major player when it comes to enterprise services, with fibre connections to more than 250,000 business sites.
With such reach, the opportunity to capitalize on Liberty Global’s extensive footprint to become one of Europe’s largest pan-regional wholesaler is colossal.
Ekrem shared his vision of the wholesale world from the cableco perspective with me, and it is very exciting.
Interview by Isabelle Paradis President HOT TELECOM
What are the key trends currently impacting the cableco world?
As is the case in the telecom industry, we are seeing continued consolidation of the cableco ecosystem. From hundreds of cable companies in most European countries, we are seeing a consolidation in many of the key markets down to 3-4 major players.
Liberty Global has played a major role in this evolution through the acquisition of a number of cable companies across Europe over the last few years, our latest acquisition being Multimedia Polska in Poland, which – subject to regulatory approval – will significantly increase our scale in that country and have a positive impact on our wholesale footprint.
We are also seeing a growing number of cablecos moving into the content and multimedia side of the business. It is not sufficient any more to offer basic TV to be competitive. Cable companies are therefore now not only offering simple connectivity and TV signals into the households.
Customers are expecting much more and cable companies are therefore developing valuable content and advanced features such as 7-day TV replay and OTT-type applications.
Finally, as by definition one of the cablecos’ differentiators is their high quality, scalable connectivity into the household using (Hybrid Fiber Coax) HFC technology, the next step for our industry will be to interconnect our customers using Gbit/s services.
This will enable what we like to call at Liberty Global the GIGAWorld. GIGAWorld outlines our plan to bring Gigabit internet speeds to the 11 European countries in which it operates.
Around 50 million homes in Europe have access to Liberty Global’s fibre-based “GIGAReady” networks, and we expect that millions more will be connected over the coming years.
Read full interview here
