Telstra International CEO Roary Stasko believes AI isn’t anyone’s exclusive island, and capacity in the automation era shouldn’t be claimed solely by the hyperscalers and tech giants.

“AI is not for one person, one customer, nor one company. It's actually an ecosystem,” Stasko told SDxCentral this month.

The CEO visited London shortly after Telstra International (TI) upgraded part of its Asia-Pacific (APAC) subsea cable and backhaul network, adding a reported 200 Tb/s capacity with optical technology. That was achieved using Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) coherent optics solution, which comprises digital signal processors (DSP) and high bandwidth electro-optics.

The Telstra-Ciena relationship also extends to software, with TI utilizing Blue Planet, the intelligent automation platform from Ciena’s subdivision designed for handling multivendor and multidomain networks.

Internally dubbed Veritas, Blue Planet serves as “the single source of truth of what the network is," Stasko explained.

It also underpins TI’s ambitions on autonomous networks, building on its newly-minted capacity in APAC, circling around islands in the region and beyond, and readying the entire Telstra infrastructure for the demands of AI.

International capacity

First, a primer on TI. The firm is the global arm of Australian operator Telstra, providing digital infrastructure and connectivity to enterprise and wholesale customers beyond Australasia. Its network spans more than 400,000 kilometers with access to 38 cable landing stations, connecting APAC, the Americas, and Europe. It also operates 58 international data centers, and provides access to more than 600 data centers worldwide.

Based in San Francisco, Stasko has headed up the business since mid-2023, following Australia-based CFO and CSO roles at the domestic Telstra business.

In those two years, Telstra has acquired Digicel Pacific, a leading mobile operator across several South Pacific nations.

TI, meanwhile, has extended its Latin American operations, launched security services in the Philippines, and divested its wholesale voice, mobile, and messaging business to U.S. provider IBasis.

At the start of the year the company announced its plans for a major network overhaul, including the subsea backbone renewal, while aiming to plant its flag in autonomous networks.

As Stasko explained, this autonomous vision anticipated AI demand for the rest of the decade and beyond, with the tech very much changing “network topology and topography.”

For the CEO, TI is known as connecting Asia to the world and vice versa, and is well-regarded for its expertise in network architecture. This leads to the company’s expanding focus on capacity now and going forward.

“For the last 10 years or so, carriers have probably pulled back a little bit from investing. That's changed who's investing and the consortium model has moved on in a way," Stasko said. "A lot of the hyperscalers are investing heavily into the market as they're looking at how they build the topology of their AI network. … We have to connect tech companies, hyperscalers, carriers, enterprises, so how do we be that trusted partner?”

“I look at how much of the network are we utilizing today, and how are we optimizing getting you this capacity,” Stasko continued. “We want to bring our skills and capabilities across the places that we operate, to the places where they're deploying long term capital. And then how are we using capacity on their systems to serve the rest of the market? Because if all of that capacity is contained just for the Googles and the Amazons and the Metas of this world, then we have a whole bunch of the market which is being underserved.”

Building the neo-network

Beyond network capacity, TI is also developing an API network fabric for customers.

For the domestic Telstra business this involves mobile API work with Ericsson, with whom it cofounded API platform Aduna. That venture aims to spur new business models for communication service providers (CSPs) to monetize features of their 5G networks through application software.

In a separate venture, the domestic Telstra recently announced a venture with Ericsson exploring AI data models and autonomous networks.

This is more in line with TI’s API work. The firm mainly works with Nokia subsidiary Infinera and Blue Planet on network layer APIs, which are designed to expose network capabilities to its customer base.

“The backbone network infrastructure and the APIs around that tend to be more with Ciena and with Nokia [Infinera],” Stasko said.

The ultimate goal of TI's API strategy is to reduce human intervention in network operations. By creating robust, standardized APIs, the company aims to enable touchless service activation, automated provisioning, and real-time network management.

In other words, TI is exploring autonomous networks, with APIs as the obvious underpinning. But such neo-networks can be hard to define, with equally nebulous measures of success. How much automation proves a network is truly autonomous and how is that achieved: with digital twins? Generative AI? A plethora of AI agents?

Stasko explained in his view the end goal is “the equivalent of digital twin modeling.”

“You'd be able to do a deployment scenario in real time using a digital twin to understand how a deployment of a new link or new route impacts the overall performance of a network solution that we might be providing for a customer," Stasko said. "Right now, that’s a very manual process.”

Going back to APIs, Stasko extends the vision further by linking networks from various sources together, with no network its own island, and with exposed APIs interfacing with partner networks.

“I think that Telstra [International] … is at the leading edge of this," Stasko boasted. "We are in the frontier wave, if you will, of operators that are modernizing their networks in this way and adopting this autonomous future mindset.”