BT International will operate as a dedicated operation within BT Group and will offer its own products and platforms.
Bas Burger, CEO for Global Services at BT, said the new unit shifts from “fragmented legacy international networks to a platform designed with the reality of AI, cyber and cloud at its core”.
The revamped international offering comes as BT’s overseas operations have struggled. The firm’s most recent earnings report suggested that its Business segment saw revenue down 4%, which was hampered by declining legacy products and further contraction in overseas operations.
Reports of BT launching a standalone international business unit first floated in May, though there were suggestions that the telco giant had approached AT&T and Orange over a potential acquisition of the unit.
BT has now officially created a new International unit, which it said was designed to help customers navigate disruption across their markets driven by geopolitics, regulation and emerging technology.
“We believe international networks will gravitate towards fewer, larger, telco platforms able to manage the demand generated by increased cloud and AI services,” Burger said in a company blog post.
The new business unit will offer revamped Global Voice and Global Fabric products, designed to support multinational organisations with modernised communications and connectivity infrastructure.
BT’s updated Global Voice service is now built on a cloud-focused, SIP-powered platform, allowing voice traffic to be transmitted over data networks. The operator says the upgrade improves scalability and positions the platform for integration with AI-powered customer engagement tools.
The second core offering is BT’s new network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, which went live with customer traffic earlier this year. The cloud-native, AI-ready platform aims to provide near-instant, secure connectivity to leading cloud and SaaS providers.
BT said Global Fabric was built as a greenfield international platform to replace legacy infrastructure and reduce friction around deploying new applications, including AI workloads.
“We’ve channelled our investments into these cloud-centric global platforms and concentrated our expert teams where customers need them most,” Burger said of the revised products.
