Like the rest of Europe, the Balkans region in the south-east of the continent is undergoing rapid growth in connectivity demand. As an entry point between East and West, the region holds an important geographical position for capturing traffic, while hyperscaler data centres, submarine cables and regional connectivity have advanced there in the past five years.
However, the region still has challenges in maximising its potential to fulfil this demand due to outdated infrastructure, high wholesale costs and security risks through reliance on third-country equipment.
For that reason, breakthrough initiatives are still key to opening up the sector over the coming years. This is a factor that has been recognised by connectivity provider Vestitel, which is based in Bulgarian capital Sofia, and provides services in Greece and other countries in the Balkans.
That is why it is leading the development of a new modernised cross-border telecoms network known as the Balkans Digital Gateway (BDG) over the next three years to prepare the region for the low-latency and resilience demands of businesses in the future.
Capital connection
With an investment of €24 million, the initiative is aimed at creating a high-speed, secure and reliable network connecting the four capital cities of Sofia in Bulgaria, Athens in Greece, Skopje in North Macedonia and Bucharest in Romania. Construction of the BDG is set to start later this year and is due for completion by late 2028.
The project will include 600km of new infrastructure linking between the Black Sea and Aegean Sea, the upgrade of 400km of existing infrastructure between Sofia and Thessaloniki on Greece’s northern coast, and the installation of an advanced DWDM system spanning 5,600km. It is being deployed on an equal open-access basis to improve availability of wholesale services for ISPs, other businesses and public entities.
“The Balkans Digital Gateway is partly about the future of interconnection between infrastructure, including edge computing, edge data centres, smart devices and IoT applications,” says Valentin Velichkov, CEO of Vestitel. “We’re exploring the full stack of technologies to plan how we’ll deploy them in this environment.”
He adds that it will improve the EU’s digital sovereignty, with the BDG being led by a fully European controlled company under Vestitel’s ownership by Overgas, Bulgaria’s largest private gas company. Furthermore, it could provide a future, more robust gateway to markets like North Macedonia, Albania and Ukraine, while helping foster economic development in the Balkans.
Better prices and diversity
Apart from boosting connectivity, backbone and cloud access, resilience and data security in the Balkans, the rollout is expected to ultimately result in lower prices by increasing service supply and competition. It will also aid Vestitel’s own service diversity as hyperscalers deploy their own competing infrastructure.
“Hyperscalers are constructing their own networks and trying to lock traffic within those, impacting the business of telecoms operators,” says Velichkov. “We therefore want to ensure diversity rather than depending only on data traffic.”
For Vestitel, one advantage of the BDG when it comes to diversity of services is that it will strengthen and widen the appeal of the services it offers based on low-power wide-area network (LoRaWAN) technology, which harness the potential of IoT and currently cover more than 30 cities across Bulgaria and Greece.
The LoRaWAN offering focuses on smart utility services such as remote metering, stemming from Vestitel’s ownership by Overgas. As part of this, the company has its own in-house-developed IoT meter management and data-acquisition platform called VIOT. The new BDG network is set to help improve the capabilities of such services and help integrate the concepts developed under Vestitel’s LoRaWAN offerings more into the wider establishment of future smart cities.
Widening scope
“We hope to extend to and gain success with more use cases and verticals in future beyond the likes of smart gas,” says Velichkov. “This includes other smart city applications, while we’ll also look into more public-private cooperation in this area with research centres and universities.”
Velichkov adds further that the BDG will help Vestitel create security products for gas infrastructure, while the company is looking into the area of quantum security to ensure security on future networks.
Meanwhile, the BDG will boost and complement the company’s existing backbone network measuring over 3,000km and fully protected 100Gbps transmission capacity. To support cloud services, the company also plans to interconnect data centres and expand its points of presence in facilities.
For Velichkov, who is coming up to a decade leading Vestitel, having taken charge as CEO at the start of 2017, the company is in the ideal position to serve the digital future of the Balkans and the BDG fits in with its forward-looking vision. “We want to have new routes, new options and new products for customers,” he says. “Our team is very flexible in delivering solutions.”
