Telia Carrier CEO: Pushing for global expansion

After 25 years together, Telia Carrier and its 530 employees divested from its parent company earlier this month. Plans for the split were first announced last October; Telia Carrier is now a subsidiary of Polhem Infra at an enterprise value of about SEK 9.50 billion (1.1 billion USD).

Telia Carrier CEO Staffan Göjeryd said his company has historically been the "odd bird" of Telia Group, which focuses more on retail, business to consumer and business to business markets in the Nordic and Baltic regions.

"Now we're getting an owner that is going to have a singular focus on what we're doing, and our business," Göjeryd said on the Light Reading podcast. "And that, of course, is giving us a great opportunity to actually look at our business in a slightly different context than what we've done before and how we can actually serve clients even better than what we've done before."

Telia Carrier has set its sights on providing connectivity and enterprise services in a number of geographies; the operator claims to be the first non-US service provider to deliver 100G services in both the US and Europe, and the first to exceed terabit connectivity in a live optical network. Telia Carrier also recently expanded its network in Mexico, adding two points of presence (PoPs) in the city of Monterrey and an additional PoP in Querétaro last fall.

During the podcast, Göjeryd gave an update on how Telia Carrier is addressing its customer's data center connectivity needs, and why the service provider partnered with Ciena and Aqua Comms on a recent 400G trans-Atlantic connectivity trial between data centers in New York, London and Frankfurt.

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— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading