Joe Scattareggia spent thirteen years at Windstream, latterly operating deep inside the US hyperscaler ecosystem, before joining Colt. That background shapes how he reads the European market and why he thinks carriers here have a narrower window than many realise. 

“The US is probably two years ahead of where Europe might be,” he says. “A lot of that centres around access to power and land, and some of the legalities around expansion, but we’re starting to see an uptick in activity in Europe, which is great, because Colt has deep assets in metro and long haul.” 

Two businesses, one focus 

Scattareggia’s remit was created when Colt split its wholesale and enterprise operations. He leads the wholesale side, which itself divides into two distinct lines. The Global Content Networks business is focused on hyperscalers and what he calls the neoscalers: Nvidia, CoreWeave, Anthropic and similar companies representing the next phase of AI infrastructure demand. The Strategic Alliance business covers the traditional wholesale customer base, with a strong emphasis on automating the end-to-end commercial process from quote to cash. 

“What this gives us is a lot of focus that we didn’t have historically,” he says. “We can dig down into the details of what we’re doing on the infrastructure side, which is really supporting the whole AI expansion.” 

On the neoscaler side, Scattareggia argues that Colt is a natural fit. The company operates the largest connected IP network in Europe, and the Lumen EMEA acquisition added significant long-haul fibre capacity. He also flags a forthcoming product relaunch, Colt’s managed optical fibre network (MOFN), which he describes as a managed capacity service allowing neoscalers to consume large chunks of network capacity and scale it flexibly, without having to buy dark fibre and manage their own infrastructure. 

The transatlantic squeeze 

One of the more pointed observations in the conversation concerns transatlantic subsea capacity. Colt manages five subsea cables, and several of them, including Yellow and AC-1 are approaching end of life. The economics of maintenance are running ahead of the revenue those systems generate, and retirement is coming. 

“Right now, we’re seeing demand for transatlantic and limited supply,” Scattareggia says. “But that supply over the next 24 months will start to dry up.” New cables are in planning or being installed, but build timelines are long, and in the interim, there will be a period of genuine scarcity, likely sitting somewhere in the two-to-three-year window from now. 

The AI dimension compounds it. As training and inference workloads scale in the United States, the need to move data across the Atlantic will grow significantly. “As those AI factories and the machine learning and development start to happen in the US, they’re going to need to pull that data out of the US and across the Atlantic,” he says. Colt is actively looking at opportunities in that space. 

Building for the next twenty years 

On the infrastructure side, the Frankfurt and Berlin metro builds are the current flagship projects, large fibre duct and conduit deployments won in partnership with hyperscaler anchor customers. Scattareggia is straightforward about the scale of what is required. 

“The networks that were built twenty years ago don’t support what these hyperscalers need for the next twenty years,” he says. “It has to be built.” Where operators once provided a customer with a handful of fibre pairs, hyperscalers now want hundreds. No one has that in inventory. “You’ve got to build it, and that makes it exciting for carriers.” 

The model Colt is using is success-based, working closely with anchor customers to establish demand before committing capital, then leveraging existing conduit and assets where possible to improve the economics. “Where we have customer demand and where we have assets, that is where we’re really targeting right now.” 

Going after the 400G market 

Scattareggia is also direct about a gap he identified when he arrived. In his first thirty to sixty days, his assessment was that Colt was not winning its share of the 400G wavelength market in Europe, a market in which its network, by his reckoning, is larger than those of its three main competitors combined. 

“We looked at our model, we were being a little too conservative, and decided that we wanted to win back share.” He has taken that case to Colt CEO Keri Gilder and the board, and the company has already recorded a run of wins in the last few months. The wavelength market in Europe is, he acknowledges, among the most competitive in the world.  

But Colt’s position, largest fibre footprint, most data centres connected, and an existing customer base that wants to do more, gives it the raw material to compete. The question, as he frames it, is one of execution: competitive pricing, improved delivery intervals, and consistent engagement with customers who are already there. 

“The customers we have all want to do more with us,” he says. “It’s a matter of just engaging with them.” 

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