What’s up with… Comcast, Nordic DCI, Samsung

• Comcast boasts green gains from virtualisation and AI
• Lyse forms Nordic datacentre interconnect JV with HitecVision
• Samsung’s second-quarter profits slump

In today’s industry news roundup: Comcast’s network virtualisation and AI strategy has enabled it to power ahead with its network energy-efficiency efforts; Norway’s Lyse has teamed up with a private equity firm to tap into the booming datacentre interconnect (DCI) networking market; Samsung is lagging behind its rivals in the high bandwidth memory sector, notes analyst; and more

US cable network giant Comcast, the country’s biggest ISP with more than 30.5 million fixed broadband customers, has issued an upbeat update affirming that it is “on the cusp” of achieving its goal of doubling its network energy efficiency, five years ahead of its 2030 target. According to Comcast, which is based in Philadelphia (the ‘City of Brotherly Love’), during the period 2019 to 2024, its network energy consumption declined by 11% whilst its network traffic grew by 76%. It added that energy savings, when taken into account alongside such remarkable network growth, have resulted in a 49% reduction in electricity per consumed byte since 2019, whilst power consumption has fallen from 18.4 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per Tbyte in 2019 to 9.3 kWh/Tbyte last year. Comcast explained that the significant savings have been realised thanks to a policy of using end-to-end virtualised, cloud-based technologies “that deliver faster broadband speeds and greater reliability with less equipment, less space, and less energy per byte.” Furthermore, Comcast is embedding AI and machine learning throughout its network to improve diagnostics and make better network performance decisions more quickly. It is also speeding-up the decommissioning and removal of legacy infrastructure from its networks and is working to improve air flow and cooling at its datacentres. Elad Nafshi, Comcast’s chief network officer, commented: “We have known for a long time that the future of connectivity is more – more gaming, more streaming, more video conferencing and, in recent years, more AI. We’re delivering dramatically more data at faster speeds and greater reliability at the highest quality for our customers, all while conserving the amount of energy needed to power our network. Our network is being transformed to enable customers to seamlessly connect to the AI revolution and to leverage it in their day-to-day [operations]. At the same time, we are building in cutting-edge network AI to optimise how we deliver our services with sustainability in mind.” There have been two key network transformations at Comcast in the past year. In September 2024, Comcast, working with virtualised router specialist DriveNets and white box server specialist UfiSpace, unveiled an initiative, dubbed Janus (the Roman god of transitions), to use the latest cloud, virtualisation and AI technologies to deploy a new core platform that will “deliver next-generation internet experiences to customers today, and into the future.” Then, in December last year, Comcast signed an agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate its 5G core network from on-premises hardware to the hyperscaler’s public cloud. The plan is for Comcast to use it to provide mobile services via its own spectrum that covers about 80% of domestic premises passed by its fixed network and close to half of the entire population of the US. In case you were wondering about the ‘City of Brotherly Love’ tag, Philadelphia is a conflation of the two Ancient Greek words, philos (‘love’ or ‘beloved’) and adelphos  (‘brother’ or ‘brotherly’). Philadelphia was named in 1681 by its founder, the Quaker leader William Penn. Owing Penn a great deal of money and reluctant to pay his debt, King Charles II of Great Britain gave him a Royal Charter to establish a colony in North America. The rest, as they say, is history.

Lyse, a Norwegian energy and telecom group owned by 14 municipalities, is spinning out its long distance fibre network operator, Altibox Carrier, into a separate company, and selling 50% to Norwegian private equity firm HitecVision (for an undisclosed sum), with the aim of building ”the leading Nordic platform for high-speed fibre infrastructure serving the datacentre industry.” Altibox Carrier already owns and operates several fibre routes between Norway and Europe, including the subsea cables NO-UK and Skagenfiber, as well as terrestrial infrastructure from Oslo to Stavanger. Its customer base includes leading global players in datacentres and cloud services. Through the joint venture structure, the new independent company “will gain access to both capital and industrial expertise to realise an ambitious growth plan in the Nordic fibre infrastructure market,” noted Lyse in this announcement. Rosalie Poen, the incoming CEO at Lyse, stated: “Together, we will develop the company into a leading provider of high-capacity fibre networks for the global market. With HitecVision, we gain a partner with strong execution capabilities and proven experience within both energy and digital infrastructure.” The joint venture will invest in the further development of existing networks and construction of new strategic routes with pre-signed customers, and it will acquire small and medium-sized fibre operators in the Nordics. Erlend Basmo Ellingsen, CEO of HitecVision, added: “Altibox Carrier represents an opportunity to build a scalable platform at the intersection of digitalisation and the green transition. In partnership with Lyse, we aim to leverage our expertise in company building and digital infrastructure to position Altibox Carrier as a leading provider of high-speed fibre networks for the growing datacentre industry in Northern Europe.” The news comes only weeks after Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), announced “major” but unspecified “investments in its Scandinavian network to connect hyperscale datacentres and serve the region’s booming AI markets.” Both announcements are likely to be followed by similar investments by other European markets seeking to capitalise on the need for greater capacity, and more diversified routes connecting the region’s datacentres as AI fuels higher levels of traffic at existing datacentre facilities and leads to the construction of dedicated AI datacentres, or AI factories. These trends are analysed in TelecomTV’s latest DSP Leaders report, Trends in Telco AI Infrastructure, which can be downloaded for free here.  

Samsung’s operating profit slumped in the second quarter of this year, the South Korean tech firm has announced. While its revenues are expected to come in at 74tn Korean won ($53.9bn), pretty much in line with the second quarter of 2024, its operating profit is expected to be 4.6tn won ($3.35bn), down by 56% year on year. A number of factors led to the crash in profits and disappointing performance according to seasoned tech sector analyst Richard Windsor. He noted in his most recent Radio Free Mobile blog that the second quarter included an inventory write-down on chips that were designed for China but which can no longer be sold there due to the increasing restrictions on the export of advanced AI chips to China. Samsung’s profits also suffered due to the company’s “inability to produce capable high bandwidth memory (HBM) for Nvidia,” which “led to further erosion of market share in contrast to its rivals, SK Hynix and Micron, who have powered ahead,” noted Windsor. “HBM is the hottest segment of the market at the moment as it is an essential component of the AI datacentre and is sold alongside Nvidia’s and everyone else’s GPUs. Given the scale of demand for AI GPUs and the amount of money being spent on capex for AI currently, both Micron and SK Hynix are already sold out for 2025, while Samsung is floundering,” he noted. Check out Windsor’s blog for further analysis of the AI datacentre component technology trends. 

The first wave of AI automation-related job cuts at Australian national telco Telstra are expected to be announced this week, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, which cites multiple anonymous sources as saying that hundreds of jobs are set to be axed. The move is expected: In late May, Telstra CEO Vicki Brady unveiled a new five-year strategy, Connected Future 30, noting that AI will “be a significant unlock when it comes to enabling our workforce… we will embrace AI, as every business will need to, and we expect the pace of change over the next five years to be extraordinary… We can’t predict exactly what our business will look like in 2030 but we expect our workforce to be smaller than it is today.” The company ended 2024 with about 31,000 staff. 

– The staff, TelecomTV