Dennis Kyle
Senior Vice President – Fiber Solutions, Mountain Region Zayo
With options to locate anywhere around the globe, what brought Zayo to setup a shop in Gastown?
One of our main facilities is now located at 175 West Cordova. We have renewed a 10-year lease and are planning to undertake a major renovation to the interior of the building. There will be a sizable investment of several million dollars into the facility and our vision is to share the gargantuan space with other enterprises and business, allowing for a multi leveled co-working space in a fantastic location. The opportunities are many in Gastown, with major tech, design, and CGI firms at home in this creative hub of Vancouver.
Zayo is a Tier One ISP. Is that like being in the big leagues of ISP’s?
We brand ourselves as a communications infrastructure provider – and our tagline states that: ‘our fibre fuels global innovation’. We are the guys behind those other entities that enable the bandwidth that drives things like Facebook, Google, Amazon, as well as wireless entities here like Rogers and Freedom, and future networks that enable technologies like autonomous vehicles. Fibre is at the core of our business, layered with other telecommunication services such as internet access services.
On your website it states: ‘Zayo provides mission-critical bandwidth to the world’s most impactful companies, fueling the innovations that are transforming our society’. Can you elaborate on this?
Whether it be social media platforms or communications platforms like wireless technologies, online shopping etc, all of this communication goes across our fibre. Even wireless networks communicate across a lot of wires, or fibre, connecting the user locally, to Asia, Europe, the USA, and beyond. All of this underlying infrastructure powers the above and therefore delivers societal impact.
In the future we expect to see the emergence of smart cities. What sort of heightened demands and increased dependence on data will arise as a result of changing technology?
What we are currently working on with municipalities and cities like Vancouver is deploying, or enabling the deployment of technology in the right way. In addition to the fibre, we provide each pole through which the fibre terminates into an antenna to deliver the radio waves that create connectivity. One of the things new 5G networks will bring is a much higher density, called small cells that are smaller versions of cell sites, and creating a far greater number of these cells to handle the increase in data transmission. It really takes a tight working relationship with cities and municipalities to deploy a whole bunch of new poles along the streets to allow this frequency to propagate, and to deliver the high bandwidth required to enable smart cities. For example, when all this gets cooking, an autonomous vehicle will be the equivalent, in terms of external data sending and receiving, as 500 iPhones. Indeed a ton of data that will be required to allow the autonomous vehicle to operate safely. At the same time the city itself will also need the infrastructure to control smart traffic lights to adapt to changing traffic flows, rush hour, guiding traffic down the right streets down different times of the days, emergency vehicle access, water management, and so on. Many cities are trying to get their heads around how they can enable, support, and frankly drive that kind of adoption.
On your company blog, theres a post titled: The Biggest Box Office Hit Ever Underscores Our Evolving Consumption of Content referring to Marvel’s The Avengers: Endgame.
Zayo states: We’re already an integral part of the creative industry ecosystem, helping many content producers move large, HD video files around globally as part of the production, post-production and editing process. Further, we’re helping many content owners by building their own content distribution networks and streaming platforms, ensuring quality and ownership of the customer experience. We don’t make great movies, but we can help you deliver a viewing experience fit for a superhero.
How does this happen?
The studios themselves are shooting in one location and rendering in another location. A lot of that work is adding CGi to film that has just been shot. How that works is you shoot for that day, send it off, add the CGI, then bring it back the next day so the director has something to look at to determine what needs to happen in the next shoot day, and this process continues throughout the shoot. The other use of the bandwidth is when the movie is released, and you’re on public transportation or sitting on a park bench with your wireless device and you want to watch the movie. The graphics and resolution associated with that movie is high, and it’s being distributed across a wireless network to your device, which means more wires, or in our case fibre. Being at both ends; production and delivery of the video, is an area where Zayo gets to participate as the solution set that enables the innovation and societal impact behind the scenes. Zayo is all about deployinga as much bandwidth as possible to deliver and enable the highest resolution video possible.
Will Zayo be part of the great age of Artificial Intelligence?
We won’t be the guys creating the AI, but the AI will need to communicate with each other, just as we as intelligent beings communicate, and that’s where Zayo comes in. Autonomous vehicles will definitely have a certain level of AI built within their mainframe, and there are different levels of autonomy to AI – level 1-5, where for example, level 5 is car that can drive itself in all conditions, has no steering wheel, no throttle, and no brake. You are entirely reliant on that vehicle for your transportation. It has to independently solve traffic problems, congestion, pedestrians, weather conditions, and everything else that we have to deal with on the road. You can’t give it a set of instructions to handle all possible or potential situations. It has to be able to analyze and make safe decisions at a fraction of a second, and it’s nice to know that Zayo will be a big part of that future.
