1. What does innovation in connectivity look like today, and where do you think the industry has the greatest opportunity to push boundaries further?
Innovation in connectivity used to be fairly straightforward: more capacity, more speed and lower latency. That is still important, but it is no longer the whole story.
A lot of the interesting work is now happening inside the network. AI and automation are being used to identify problems earlier, optimise performance and, increasingly, fix issues before they have an impact on customers.
We've seen that shift ourselves. On our platform, AIOps has reduced mean time to repair by 38% and accelerated issue resolution by 74%. What I find significant about those numbers is that it is already changing how networks are operated on a day-to-day basis.
Specifically in the Enterprise space, I think the next step is bringing the different parts of the stack much closer together. SD-WAN, SASE, security, cloud and connectivity are already starting to converge. The next step is bringing all of this together. Instead of customers managing connectivity, security and application performance separately, Network-as-a-Service gives them a simpler way to manage it as one service.
There is still a lot of work to do. But the opportunity isn’t just about building more infrastructure. It’s about making what we already have work intelligently with a unified model.
2. Africa and the Middle East are becoming increasingly important to the global digital infrastructure landscape. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth and greater international connectivity across these markets?
Both Africa and the Middle East are seeing strong growth in cloud, data centres and enterprise digitisation. At the same time, the amount of traffic and business moving between Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia continues to grow.
That makes the need for more diverse international connectivity pretty clear. It is not just about having more bandwidth. Carriers and enterprises need alternative routes, better latency and, perhaps most importantly, resilience when something goes wrong on a major route.
We've been involved in this ourselves through the launch of Phase 1 of our EMEA-R digital corridor. The interest from carriers has reinforced something we were already seeing in the market: there is a real requirement for more diverse connectivity between these regions.
But I don't think the answer is simply another cable or another fibre route. The bigger opportunity is to connect subsea systems, terrestrial fibre, data centres and cloud on-ramps much more effectively, so that these markets become part of a genuinely interconnected network rather than a collection of individual routes.
There is also something quite interesting happening in the way we think about these regions. The UN recently adopted a resolution encouraging the use of world maps that better represent the relative size of continents, following a long-standing concern that conventional maps make Africa appear much smaller than it actually is.
It may seem like just a geographical correction, but I think there is a parallel with connectivity. Africa is no longer a peripheral market. It is a rapidly growing digital economy in its own right,, while its strategic location positions it along some of the world's most important economic and digital corridors. As a result, both its market significance and geographic advantage are increasingly shaping how global networks and digital infrastructure are designed and interconnected.
So I think the opportunity is bigger than simply connecting these markets to the rest of the world. It is about recognising that they are becoming an increasingly important part of the global digital network.
3. As the main sponsor of the Global Connectivity Awards 2026, why is it important for cmc by center3 to support and celebrate the companies and individuals driving progress across the connectivity industry?
Connectivity is one of those industries where nobody really operates in isolation. An international service can involve several networks, a subsea cable, data centres, technology providers and local partners before it reaches the end customer.
A lot of the work behind that is also largely invisible. People are building routes years before the demand fully materialises, keeping networks running around the clock and dealing with the regulatory and operational complexity that comes with operating across multiple markets.
The Global Connectivity Awards give the industry a chance to recognise some of that work. It is not only about the biggest companies or the most visible projects. There are a lot of people doing very important work that doesn't necessarily get much attention outside the industry.
For cmc by center3, there is an additional reason this year. We are going through our own rebrand, a change in approach and richer product offering, so there is naturally a lot happening around our business. But we didn't want the awards to become another opportunity simply to talk about ourselves.
We are part of a much bigger industry, and supporting a platform that recognises the people and companies moving it forward is a good way for us to contribute to that wider community.
4. Looking ahead, what development or opportunity within global connectivity are you personally most excited about, and why?
For me, it is the combination of AI and its impact on connectivity both in consumption of connectivity and the design of connectivity solution.
There is a lot of focus on how much connectivity and distributed computing AI will require, which is obviously going to be significant. But I find the other side of the equation more interesting: what happens when AI starts running the network itself.
We are already seeing networks become much more predictive. Instead of waiting for something to fail and then sending an engineer to fix it, systems can identify patterns, anticipate problems, optimise capacity and, in some cases, take action automatically.
Our own experience with AIOps has given us a fairly good indication of what that can mean operationally. I expect this to become much more common over the next few years.
The potential impact on Africa and the Middle East is particularly interesting. Historically, being further away from the main global connectivity hubs could mean higher costs, more limited route options and greater dependence on a relatively small number of international paths.
If more diverse international connectivity develops alongside networks that are increasingly intelligent and self-optimising, some of those disadvantages start to diminish. That is the part I am most interested in watching: not one particular technology, but how these developments come together to change the way regions connect to the rest of the world.