and what I've been asked to do today is give you a bit of a view about what do
we do about these networks and IT structures that we have and where do the
billions that we invest every year go so this is a familiar story, data
growth is continuing at a fast pace some metrics that I like and I know some
some of this data gets skewed very very quickly so in 2009 to 2019 the speed
has increased a hundred times if you go back in time and you think of your first
iPhone you know 3GS or something like that
and how fast that was and now you pull out your iPhone 11 and how fast that is
it's a hundred times faster more interestingly if I shift by a year if I
compare not 2009 to nineteen by 2008 to 2019, that number almost doubles and
doubles because at that time we deployed the different technology and
boom everything shifted so tremendous tremendous progress a hundred times
faster for device and the growth has also been tremendous in if you look at
the bottom there 2009 to 2019 63 times more data traffic on the fixed network
growing a 33 times so tremendous numbers and at the very top mobile traffic 30
percent year-over-year in our traffic and that trend interestingly enough is not
slowing down it's actually slightly accelerating and it's accelerating
because the device capabilities become more and more and you take what they can
do and now you start projecting your stuff on the TV so you don't need the
modem you know you have instead of Wi-Fi at home at least in my home everybody
uses the mobile connection to just do whatever so when we stream Netflix it's
really three streams over the mobile network which I shouldn't be saying out loud
and we have picked 10 areas where we focus our investment and as I go through
I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on all of them
but it's really to give you a bit of a flavor on what we think is important for
the next five to ten years we have this beautiful international network and any
does connect you know to all kinds of points I run around the globe and a lot
of questions: what do you do with this why is it good
well that gives us a fantastic ability to take traffic out of Australia to some
other point of presence in a very secure manageable way and I'm going to talk
about the secure and manageable in a couple more dots we spend a lot of money
transforming the optical network and why is this important is because more and
more of the traffic needs to automatically fail over to some other
fibre and that process used to be very very manual so the fibre would get cut
you know somebody had to run around and shift the traffic over to the next fibre
so that we can restore a lot of this process now is automated and we have
deployed this technology almost across the whole of Australia that program is
still running it's almost complete we try to reuse the network components more
and more and I think Jules talked a bit about automating the activation and
provisioning processes fancy words what what does it mean is that when you order
something and we're not fully there yet it's getting there when we're ordering
something I want a hundred Megs from this piece to that piece activate
what we're trying to do is really you press the button and it happens as long
as the connection is there as long as the capacity is there you should be able
to activate that extra capacity in minutes low single number minutes and
you should be able to deactivate the capacity in low single number minutes we
have activated this in some parts it's not global but that is the future that's
coming your way. nextgen OSS is the system that monitors
everything and we call it a next-gen and you know another couple of years would
be old-gen because that evolution is constant as well so what we're trying to
do with our OSS systems now is to go into predictive failure I'll give you an
example we're generating into the hundreds of millions of alarms a minute
and what we do is go filter them because I mean if there's no human that can
monitor all that stuff instead now what we're trying to do is pass all those
alarms through an AI engine that says what is the smallest alarm telling me
about what's going to happen a month from now two months from now three
months from now and accumulate the data and start predicting component failure
wouldn't that be exciting because ultimately we'll make Ian's job a lot
simpler and Ian is a much bigger guy than me
believe me I spoke a bit about their analytics Sdn and NFV what it stands for
is software-defined networking and network function virtualization fancy
words and once again what we're trying to do is the network used to depend a
lot on proprietary hardware so if I were to buy a Cisco router what it means is
Cisco hardware and Cisco operating system and Cisco software and you can
have any flavor you want as long as it's cisco cisco cisco well that's changing
now because what we're trying to do globally is break those layers apart and
commoditize them this drives an interesting behavior in the market where
now I can buy a Dell server and run a Cisco router software and next thing you
know that's a Cisco router and if I don't like the Cisco router software I
can buy the Nikos router software and that becomes a Nikos router so that
opens up the market and what it does is it makes the network look more like
software instead of hardware by moving into software layer actually
what we're doing is two things one is we're spreading the functionality
around because that enhances resiliency and it enhances security so when one
node goes down now you don't lose everything because functionality can be
more easily distributed and it doesn't have to run on a single box in a data
center and the only resilience you have is to have duplicates of the boxes so
now you can do it a lot better super super important and that's what enables
most of this network orchestration and network as a service because the more
software you have the easier it is to activate all these things easily press
the button something happens easier to configure easier to change. 5G I'm going
to talk a bit more about 5G Media optimized Network easy and of course
bringing infrastructure closer to the customer
that's an important point and I'm going to talk separately about that
the next few years great network great technology where is the differentiation
where is the why Telstra and how does this evolve so the three areas that we
see I mean one is security and you'll notice from your own networks that the
security incidents are not going down they're probably going up no matter what
kind of network you have and the resiliency of the network is becoming
more and more important because the way we use the network is changing if you go
back to 2009 I'm pretty sure you remember if the network goes down most
of you would not know we would know because the impact was miniscule to be
honest right to you you couldn't download some game ok who cares
but fast-forward 10 years and the moment the network goes down it's felt
everywhere because the taxi credit cards don't work the ATM stopped working yes
the games don't work but the security systems don't work either everything
gets impacted so even though we have reduced the amount of incidence the
amount of hours tremendously a quick metric from 2016 to 2019 we have taken
out 70% of our downtime hours those are the customer impact hours and yet the
impact of every incident is much bigger now
so resiliency has become a super super important item for us to address and
security and resiliency go very very well together
because a security incident when you're being attacked with a DDoS or something
like that guess what it impacts your resiliency and of course 5G an
underlying 5g I'm gonna talk a bit more about the 3G closure that we have
announced and I know Jules mentioned it as well. So security there are two major
themes around security one is the humans as we are the biggest threat to the
security of the network and our IT structure unfortunately I can't do
anything about that so as long as you follow your processes
procedures you know anything from identity cards to USB keys to all these
things you can say that that part is almost managed but it's also a major
technology one and what we're finding out as we work with a variety of
customers is that traditionally we treat security as two black boxes coming
together but if you take a step back and you think how things work there's one
element that connects all your fragile infrastructure together that's called
the network and who's providing the network in this case Telstra so if you
think about your data centers or anything else and how they connect the
connecting network provided by Telstra is the link that combines all of them
together so if you treat things as black boxes your data center is
a black box and then network as a black box we came to realize that we're
missing opportunities to make things better and the moment we open up the
doors a bit and we share more information it's amazing what we find
I'll give you an example with a major bank that we worked closer together
recently black box black box we all thought everything was secure and very
resilient next thing you know we start sharing what exactly is hiding in their
data centers and what exactly is hiding in our network and we found at least 10
areas where by fixing them both the resiliency and the security got improved
for them and the reason is because in the absence of knowing that information
you don't know how I have configured your services and you don't know how I'm
delivering the connectivity to you it's amazing what you can do and what I'm
trying to say with that point is please talk to to the wholesale team about how
we can do this better together because it's an important step in the evolution
of how these things work and resilience of course I spoke a bit about the
predictive analytics I spoke a bit about the optical network duplicate fibers the
next piece of the of work that we're doing is with changing a lot of the
platforms so they have scalable architectures and it's at this point
where I would like to introduce you to a concept which is called edge computing
the edge computing concept is simple and yet complicated to execute so what you
do is you break the network and the IT infrastructure into smaller pieces and
you distribute them around the country so today instead of running them like
today in a couple of data centers typically in Sydney and Melbourne
occasionally in Adelaide or whatever you really break it up and you
distribute it across the country and in that smaller smaller much smaller data
center you get a bit of network functionality
a bit of IT functionality from Telstra and a bit of your functionality and what
it does it enables you to consume locally what you need so you don't have
to transport your data back and forth between some central location and what
is consumed why is this interesting so if you take a bank an interesting use case
for them would be to eliminate all wiring in a branch for example so
instead of having Wi-Fi and wires and applications running in Sydney but the
bank branches in Darwin and having to traverse all that distance for every
transaction that they're doing they're running everything locally so imagine a
mini cloud with a mini network sitting somewhere in Darwin and serving
Darwin and surrounding areas eliminating easily 70-80 % of the
transactions having to go back and forth and that may be interesting for a
financial transaction but think about it for a minute as a resiliency what if the
connection to Darwin is down what if the Sydney data center for the bank is down
what I'm describing means that everything in Darwin continues to work
they don't feel the impact of what's happening somewhere else in the country
super important now take it a step further and think about an airport let's
say you want to run face recognition as a security measure for every building that
you have in this case it's an airport the way today this works is because
it's so computationally intensive you take the face picture and you send it
somewhere in Sydney where you have the big computers you analyze the face you
recognize it or not and then you send back the answer won't it be a lot faster
and more efficient if you actually did it at the airport the answer is yes so
every every industry you can think of can come up with a use case where this
is useful and we're working from consumer markets around gaming to
agriculture transportation food safety logistics almost every industry will
have an impact from this capability and in anticipation of your most important
question is please tell me enough with all that stuff tell me about why we are
closing 3G the reason is simple 3G occupies some of our most precious
spectrum which is a low band at the 850 megahertz the number is not so important
but what is important is that that spectrum allows for excellent
penetration through the walls of the building so the spectrum we have today
on 5G is great the spectrum that's going to be auctioned off in early 21 is
fantastic because it's going to be a lot of it but none of this enables this
penetration through the walls so if you want to have good coverage of 5g
without deploying thousands and thousands of extra sites
what you need is low band spectrum and we have two types 700 which we use for 4G
and 850 that we currently use for 3G so by announcing that we are going to close the
3G network down in 2024 what it allows us to do is that it allows us to start
using a bit of it today or not exactly today but in a few months to start
using a bit of that spectrum for 5g and given the traffic that
goes on it we don't expect any impact and the traffic is declining super super
fast so as you can see about six percent of the traffic today is 3G traffic that
is declining but still most of the traffic is what I call steered traffic
and what we do is at the edge of some capability if the 3G network is still
there we actually force the traffic from 4G on
to 3G and this is because we don't want anybody to drop their call all the data
session I live in Melbourne I take the train and if you go through the tunnel
from Richmond to Parliament that's where you always see a shift to 3G and the
reason why we do it is because a we still don't have permission from the
relevant authorities to put 4G in those tunnels we would love to we just don't
have it so we shift you over to 3G so you don't
drop the call and the next question you're going to ask me for sure is but
you don't you have areas where it's 3G only absolutely and we're upgrading all
of them to 4G and the coverage because it's the same spectrum we expect it to
be almost identical in reality we expect it to be slightly better in most places
because the 4G sensitivity the way the devices work is actually better than 3G
so we expect it to be a bit better not everywhere but in the vast majority of
places and the way we're gonna do it is without creating extra infrastructure if
you go to a site a base station one of those towers or a rooftop what we're
going to do is remove one of the 3G radios and we put a very fancy 5G radio that
can do two things it can run 3G and 5G at the same time with a single radio so
with the same amount infrastructure we're going to run both technologies and at
the beginning we're going to use as I said a bit of spectrum for 5G and in 2024
somebody's going to push this big button and three T's going to go poof gone
and all of the spectrum will move over to 5G.