What was once a story of scale and coverage is now about intelligence, integration and monetisation, as AI, cloud and hyperscale infrastructure reshape traffic flows and business models across the region.
That was the clear message from The Next Frontier Keynote on the ITW & Datacloud Asia stage, where senior leaders from subsea, satellite, mobile and IP networks came together to debate how Asia’s digital infrastructure ecosystem is evolving, and what comes next.
Moderated by Virat Patel, managing director of Pioneer Consulting Asia-Pacific, the discussion brought into sharp focus a region that is no longer just catching up, but increasingly setting the pace for global connectivity.
Speakers
– Virat Patel, MD – Pioneer Consulting Asia-Pacific
– Michael Wheeler, executive VP, head of global internet network (GIN) – NTT
– Sarah Mills, head of global wholesale – Telstra
– Neha Idnani, regional VP for APAC – Eutelsat
– Binod Sriwastav, chief business officer, global business – Airtel
– Amajit Gupta, Group CEO & MD – LIGHTSTORM
Asia-Pacific at an inflection point
Patel opened by framing Asia-Pacific as one of the world’s most complex and demanding connectivity environments. The region spans vastly different regulatory regimes, geographies and stages of digital maturity, yet shares a common demand driver: explosive growth in cloud, AI and data centre infrastructure.
Speakers were unanimous that Asia-Pacific demand is now outpacing global averages, driven by hyperscalers, AI workloads, manufacturing digitisation and an early-adopter demographic. As Sarah Mills, head of global wholesale at Telstra, put it: Asia is leading the world in fibre penetration, and that is directly underpinning the surge in generative AI.
But the transformation goes beyond raw capacity. The panel explored how connectivity providers are being pushed, and pulled into becoming digital infrastructure and platform players.
From infrastructure to intelligence
Amajit Gupta, group CEO of Lightstorm, argued that traditional telco assumptions no longer hold. Enterprise traffic patterns have fundamentally flipped, he said: where networks once prioritised consumer and voice traffic, the overwhelming majority of demand is now flowing between enterprises, cloud platforms and AI systems.
Lightstorm, which operates across seven countries and connects more than 125 data centres, was built around this premise. “The mission of connectivity today is to connect the cloud, connect the AI and connect enterprises to both,” Gupta said, positioning the company as a cloud- and AI-first connectivity provider rather than a legacy telco adapting after the fact.
That shift was echoed across the panel. Telstra is embedding AI and machine learning natively into its network to enable intent-based networking, predictive analytics and self-healing capabilities. These intelligence layers, Mills said, allow network features such as latency, resilience and performance to be exposed via APIs, giving customers far greater control and flexibility.
Michael Wheeler, executive vice president and head of global internet network at NTT, highlighted the growing criticality of internet infrastructure itself. Recent outages at major cloud platforms have underscored how dependent economies and societies have become on resilient IP networks. For NTT, monetisation comes not from novelty, but from global consistency, quality and reliability at scale.
Monetisation beyond connectivity
While demand is surging, monetisation remains a central challenge, and opportunity. Binod Srivastav, chief business officer at Airtel, described a portfolio that spans nearly 600 million subscribers alongside rapidly growing B2B services.
Airtel is seeing strong returns from private 5G deployments for manufacturing, hyperscaler connectivity at gigawatt-scale data centres, and AI-driven spam and scam protection delivered at the network layer. Crucially, Srivastav stressed that sustainable pricing is essential. “If you want to build a quality network, the price has to be right,” he said, warning against value-destructive price competition.
Satellite is also carving out a clearer monetisation role. Neha Idnani, regional vice president for APAC at Eutelsat OneWeb, positioned multi-orbit satellite connectivity as a complement to terrestrial networks, particularly for enterprise and government use cases.
Rather than mass-market broadband, Eutelsat OneWeb is focused on low-latency, resilient connectivity for defence, disaster response, aviation, maritime and remote industries. A key differentiator, Idnani explained, is localisation, tailoring data flows, security and architecture to the specific requirements of each country.
Partnerships and capital: a new balance
A recurring theme was the reconfiguration of traditional roles between carriers, hyperscalers and new infrastructure players. Hyperscalers are now driving the majority of investment in subsea and data centre capacity, but panellists argued this does not diminish the role of telecom operators.
Mills noted that up to 75% of subsea cable investment over the next two years will come from hyperscalers, improving economics for the wider ecosystem and attracting new capital from private equity and governments. Telstra continues to see strong demand for both dark fibre IRUs from hyperscalers and high-capacity lit services from carriers and satellite operators.
Gupta took a more provocative stance, suggesting telcos must adopt hyperscaler economics and operating models themselves, translating those efficiencies back to enterprises rather than conceding value upstream. In his view, hyperscalers represent an opportunity, not an existential threat – but only if telcos evolve.
Regulation and geography: Asia’s hard realities
If growth is abundant, challenges are equally pronounced. Regulation emerged as perhaps the most significant constraint across Asia-Pacific. Unlike Europe or the US, speakers stressed, there is no regional standardisation. Every country has its own rules around spectrum, landing rights, data sovereignty and national security.
For satellite operators, this complexity is magnified. Idnani revealed that securing approvals for low Earth orbit services took seven to eight years in some markets, with regulators often applying legacy frameworks designed for geostationary systems. Working through local telco partners has been essential, but regulatory navigation remains resource-intensive.
Geography adds another layer of difficulty. Subsea cable operators face volatile terrain, seismic activity and extreme weather. “In Asia-Pacific, tectonic plates are a bigger challenge than sharks,” Mills remarked. Repair times for cable faults can stretch into months, far longer than terrestrial outages.
Wheeler added that regulatory approaches to content control in some markets are creating operational disruption for global IP networks, forcing carriers to contend with outdated and technically inefficient mandates.
Looking ahead: Asia’s chance to lead
Despite these hurdles, the mood on stage was notably optimistic. Asia-Pacific is not only the fastest-growing connectivity region; it is also becoming the largest user base for AI platforms globally. Gupta pointed out that AI adoption in markets such as India already exceeds that of the US, signalling vast latent demand if monetisation models can keep pace.
Satellite, terrestrial fibre, subsea cables, cloud and data centres are increasingly converging into a single, multi-layered infrastructure fabric. No single technology will dominate; resilience and reach will come from integration.
As the panel closed, one theme stood out: Asia’s connectivity future will be defined not just by how much infrastructure is built, but by how intelligently it is operated and monetised. For an industry long constrained by low growth and heavy capital demands, the AI era offers a rare opportunity to reset the equation – and Asia-Pacific may be where that reset happens first.
