technologyreseller.co.uk 23 With Diego Tedesco, Director of Wholesale Fixed at Virgin Media O2 Business more than half of revenue; high-capacity services, which underpin the network requirements of partners and blue chip customers requiring low latency, high capacity connectivity; and dark fibre for partners (e.g. MNOs) who want complete control over their fibre infrastructure. (“Dark fibre is basically fibre that isn’t lit,” explains Tedesco. “Typically, you would deploy a fibre infrastructure, then put optical equipment at each end to light up that fibre, defining the service you run on it. Dark fibre is when you sell the underlying fibre infrastructure without the optical equipment. This gives the buyer the ability to specify what equipment they want to put on the end and how quickly they want to ramp up the capacity of that equipment. It gives them much more flexibility around how they utilise the underlying fibre.”) Tedesco had barely been in his new role for a month when Technology Reseller met up with him at the beginning of December to find out about his plans for the coming year. We started by asking him about the trends shaping the fixed wholesale market. Technology Reseller (TR): You have not been in your new role for long, but based on your previous experience, in what areas is there room for improvement? Diego Tedesco (DT): During the pandemic, we did a lot of research and talked to our partners to help us understand where we need to be focusing as a business to better meet their needs. The thing that really came through from those conversations was the need for greater flexibility and the fact that in a fast paced, changing environment, and a more uncertain environment, what our partners need and what customers need is greater flexibility around the services that they buy – whether that’s not being tied into the long contract terms that have become a staple of the connectivity business; whether that’s more flexibility around ramping up or ramping down speeds on the connectivity they have; or whether that’s having more transparency around pricing. Ultimately, the reason they want more flexibility is to enable them to have a more balanced risk-sharing arrangement with us as a wholesale provider; to enable them to make bolder decisions; and to take a little bit more risk in an environment that probably requires it because there is so much more uncertainty. Demand for that flexibility has really shone through, and we’ve taken strides to address that. TR: Is that demand coming from your channel partners, from their customers, or from both? DT: Both. Our channel partners are asking us for that flexibility to give them the ability to better manage their estate with us and to help them sell services to their end customers. There are end customers out there who don’t necessarily want to buy a service that stays in the ground in its day one form for 5 or 10 years, because things are evolving too quickly – digital transformation is happening too quickly. They want an underlying solution and a contracting mechanism that gives them the ability to evolve and change things as time moves on. TR: Is this reflected in the products your reseller customers are demanding? DT: Ethernet is the biggest part of what resellers procure from us today, but we are seeing a trend for more sophisticated use cases for digital technology, like On November 1 Diego Tedesco took over the day to day running of wholesale operations at Virgin Media O2 Business as its newly promoted Director of Wholesale Fixed. Tedesco’s nine years’ experience as a member of the Wholesale Fixed leadership team, most recently as Wholesale Fixed Commercial Marketing Director, will hold him in good stead as he seeks to develop the company’s wholesale offering, strengthen the partner ecosystem and build on the potential of Virgin Media O2, the corporate brand of the 50:50 joint venture between Liberty Global and Telefónica SA. Launched on June 1 last year, Virgin Media O2 brings together the O2 mobile network and Virgin’s fixed broadband network. It has 47 million UK connections across broadband, mobile, TV and home phone, employs around 18,000 people and has more than 430 retail stores. Its business arm, Virgin Media O2 Business, provides a variety of managed connectivity services, 5G private networks and cloud solutions, as well as wholesale services to other operators and partners. It is this circa £350 million wholesale business that Tedesco now heads up. Wholesale Fixed leverages the company’s network to provide partners with fixed infrastructure that they use themselves or connectivity that they use in services they sell on to their customer base. Examples of the former include carriers (network aggregators and ISPs) that want to build out their own network capability and sell value-add services over the top; mobile network operators (MNOs) – O2 and competitors – that use the company’s network to meet their 5G backhaul needs; and broadcasters that need reliable connectivity for the huge volumes of data they transmit. Examples of the latter include system integrators that combine connectivity with their products in complete solutions or resellers that buy and sell-on connectivity to their customers. Product-wise, the Wholesale Fixed offering is split between Ethernet connectivity, which forms a big part of what is sold through the channel and makes up Q&A continued... Diego Tedesco
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