JT: Building an Enviable 4G Network in the Channel Islands

Jersey Telecom (JT) has over 120 years’ experience in telecommunications and is dedicated to delivering world-class services. JT’s history goes back to 1895. It is a full-service global consumer and business enterprise provider, with services covering domestic fixed land line through to leading-edge data hosting for the e-gaming industry. Recently, ZTE Technologies interviewed Graeme Millar, CEO of JT. He shared with us the unique characteristics of the Channel Islands; JT’s achievements, challenges and opportunities; his thoughts on the MNR project; and plans for 2016. He also talked about his expectations for ZTE and network operation.

 

I think the greatest achievements have been business growth and preparing the business for further growth. We’ve done a lot of things over the past five years. In terms of the plan, we’ve put a lot of focus on systems. As well as focusing on improving the way we train people and looking at improving processes.
Perhaps our biggest focus has been on our enterprise managed services, things like cloud, machine to machine, subscriber intelligence products and, of course, ultrafast network connectivity, of which the 4G network that we’ve done with ZTE has been very important.

 

I think we are a kind of unique bridge between Europe and the rest of the world. Because the island has very few natural resources, we’ve had to be a nation of traders from the early days, and we’ve been very innovative. If we go back to the 1700s, we would take French cider, re-label it with a Jersey label, and ship it to England. In fact, at the height of that trade, you would have needed an island 50-fold bigger than Jersey to grow all the apples to make the cider. Then in the 1800s, we were a landing port for the cod fishing fleets in the North Atlantic that would catch cod, salt it, and bring it to Jersey, where it would be shipped to the UK. So we’ve been that kind of unique bridge between Europe and the rest of the world for many centuries.
These days, we’re a meeting point for a lot of technologies, financial services, intellectual property, and legal firms.

 

In many respects, it’s the same as all other countries that have a sophisticated and developed customer base. About two percent of all the wealth in the world passes through Jersey each year which is about two trillion dollars a year. Because of that, many of the world’s largest banks have a presence in Jersey. JT delivers services to 18 of the world’s top 20 banks. They demand great connectivity and, very importantly the reliability.
As well as that, we’ve supported many local small and medium-size businesses, particularly in the digital space. For example, one of our customers is a video production company that does a lot of work for Hollywood right here from Jersey. They have huge files that they need to be able to send, and our fibre network provides the speed and superfast connectivity to allow them to do so seamlessly.
Despite the island’s small size, our customers are very demanding. They don’t expect to get small service just because we’re in a small island.

 

The 4G rollout project was really important for us.
When we talk about the 4G rollout, we actually took out the entire 2G and 3G network and did an entire upgrade. The equipment that we had was ten or eleven years old and was getting to the end of its life. There were many service and upgrade issues.
Working with ZTE, we got some of the most advanced equipment, and that helped us do two things: Firstly, it massively improved the reliability of services we provided to our customers; secondly, it had a huge improvement on the quality of services.
Customers get much better coverage, and we have extra spectrum, including spectrum at 800 MHz, so both the coverage and speed has gotten much better. We have an advanced network. We’ve seen speeds of up to 200 Mbps, which is more than fourfold faster than the speed customers were experiencing on the old 3G network.

 

I think there are several issues. Of course a key challenge for any operator is to continue to satisfy customer demands for data, but also deliver that at an affordable price. I think this is maybe an area where JT, as a small operator, has some unique challenges. Because we have got a relatively small customer base, it can be difficult to get that return before we make further investment.
In addition, we face the same issues as everyone does in relation to delivering great services at a sensible cost for our customers, and we have an extra challenge of paying for the latest piece of technology we’ve bought, before it gets superceded by something new.

 

Our biggest challenge is that telecom is a scale game, and we’re relatively small. How do we succeed as a small player in a world where two things are happening: the capability of the equipment in terms of capacity is getting bigger all the time. Vendors keep building boxes that do more and more for more and more people. The rate of change is also increasing exponentially.
I remember analogue deployment—analogue Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) in America, Extended Total Access Communication System (ETACS), and Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT). I even remember NMT-450. Some of those NMT-450 networks lasted nearly twenty years before they were decommissioned, yet we might these days be changing or decommissioning the 4G network after potentially five or six years. You really see as each generation goes by the increasing speed of change. Because of our size, that is a great challenge. The secret for us, therefore, is to work with world-class partners such as ZTE, to provide equipment that is upgradable and to help us anticipate and build for the future.
Another challenge is our own business development outside the Channel Islands and finding customers for our services outside our home market to help provide the return on capital investment on our home shores.

 

We’re coming to the end of a big investment period. We’ve completely switched out our fixed network infrastructure, and we’re almost through rolling out fibre to the home for our customers. These investments will see Jersey ranked in the Top 5 for global connectivity in the air and in the ground. We’ve also swapped out the mobile infrastructure and alongside this have put in a new billing and customer operation systems.
Therefore for me, 2016 will be a year of consolidation; it’s a year of making everything we’ve put in place over the past three or four years work really well together to improve customer experience, and enable customers to access the capability of the systems we’ve bought. And we want to use that to continue our global growth.
In six years, we’ve gone from seven percent of our sales coming from outside the Channel Islands to about two thirds, and I want to see that build further during the year.

How do you view ZTE as a partner of JT? What are your expectations for the future cooperation?

When asked about ZTE, what I’ve said to other people is that in my six years as CEO of JT, choosing ZTE as our partner for the mobile network was the best vendor-selection decision I’ve made.
Why? Because we’ve formed a genuine strategic partnership, we work very closely together; we trust and understand each other; we respect each other’s businesses. Both of us are trying to make a positive business case for both parties. Finally, we enjoy working together, we have a bit of fun along the way as well.

 

Well, the changes have been so great. When I started out, fewer than one in a hundred people in the UK had a mobile phone. We were on analogue technology, and when people asked for your number, you would give your fixed-line number, not your mobile number.
What I’ve seen change enormously over the last twenty five years is the way that people have used our services. I don’t really look at the technological change; I look at what has happened with the way people use things. People have gone from very static voice-only service, where they were used to voices being delivered to a place, to a totally immersive interactive experience which is delivered to you when you want, wherever you are. Within that we’ve therefore seen a colossal move from voice to data.
We’ve seen the take-up from almost no customers, I mean from less than one in a hundred people in UK. I still remember that the original business case for Vodafone for the deployment of its analogue network in the UK. We now talk about penetration rate in terms of hundreds of percent and multiple devices, and we’ve had to build networks over the past twenty-five years that cope not just with voice but with data and increasing amounts of content, such as video.