Telstra International has just unveiled its revamped domestic network in the UK, the result of the 2004 acquisition of PSINet UK with technology upgrades from Siemens, Foundry and Juniper. We now cover from London to Edinburgh and Glasgow in the North, Bristol in the West and Southampton to the South, said Simon Vye, CEO of Telstra Europe, who joined from AT&T in January. The PSINet buy also brought Telstra hosting centers in London’s Docklands and Cambridge, with the later having undergone significant investment too as part of the revamp.

As such, the Australian carrier is now going after corporate business it might not previously have targeted, but Vye said the intention is not to compete as an alternative carrier to the incumbent BT, against the likes of Thus or NTL/Telewest. Our perfect customer is the company with 20 sites around the UK, a number in APAC and some in Europe and North America, where we fulfil through partners, he went on.

A good example of this type of customer is Eurostar, the operator of the train link between London, Paris and Brussels through the Channel Tunnel, where Telstra is providing connectivity between 17 offices in three countries, linking up ticketing machines and providing remote monitoring through its Service Tools package.

Telstra presently serves 50 global accounts that include the likes of Hilton Hotels, Cisco and Standard Chartered Bank, the majority of them not headquartered in Australia, claimed Vye. A comparatively small amount of our [global account] business comes from Australian multinationals, said the exec.

Beyond the UK network, Vye foresaw a need to grow the company’s presence in continental Europe. Today it serves corporate customers in Western Europe through partnerships with Colt Telecom, Global Crossing and Telefonica, and he acknowledged that, at least in the short term, additional relationships of this sort are his most likely move. However, he is not ruling out the acquisition of assets too, meaning points of presence and network.

Vye was also bullish on business opportunities in Eastern and Central Europe, though any expansion there will be more in the long term. A lot of our business in APAC is to support outsourcing operations in India and China, he began. Now some of that activity is moving into Eastern European countries like Poland and Bulgaria, and we want to complete the Telstra picture.

Our View

Telstra’s global accounts program is only six months old, so the fact that Vye says Australian MNCs are not its main raison d’etre is significant. Global wide area network providers tend to fall into two packs: the Big Four (AT&T, Verizon, BT Global Services and Orange Business Services) and the rest, with a lot of the latter being not much more than regional players such as Deutsche Telekom inn Europe or Telefonica in Europe and Latin America.

Over the last year and half, we have seen a number of the larger Asian players like Telstra, NTTCom, Singtel, VSNL and Reliance/Flag stretch their wings and announce ambitions in Europe and North America, though of course, they tend to enter these geographies on the back of contracts with multinationals from their own home countries. That Telstra International is already making most of its money from non-Australian customers, if that is really the case, suggests it is further along the path of becoming an international player than the rest of these second-tier players. And that it is considering buying more assets in Europe points to still greater ambitions in the Old Continent.