 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell, coming to you today from PTC 2022. Joining me is Louis Fialo, Vice President of China Telecom Americas. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, Barb, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be back at PTC. Yeah, it's actually really nice. It's been missed for a year. Yeah, I know. It feels like longer, but it's nice to see you. For those of our viewers who may not know, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about China Telecom's America? Yeah, so first of all, thank you once again for having me. So, you know, I've been a telecom executive for over 20 years. Started my career early on with cable and wireless, worked for Sprint, went to the internet startup and then teleglobe and then moved on to China Telecom Americas. So China Telecom Americas, I've been with a majority of my career and I was actually joined the company at the beginning of the company when it was actually very young company and we've been, last year, we celebrated 20 years. So a lot has happened and a lot of things are still promising towards the future. So we're pretty excited. Yeah, and China Telecom Americas, which we're going to call CTA, right? Okay, we can call it CTA. Less of a mouthful. So CTA is a leader in global communications. Tell us a little bit about your services and what you offer. Yeah, yeah. So obviously, China Telecom Americas, CTA, when we first started, we were focused on helping American companies go to China and take advantage of all the resources and all the capabilities our parent companies had. And then over time, we started helping Chinese companies come into the U.S. Okay. And it continued to evolve our business. Now we have operations. We have almost 300 employees. We have subsidiaries in Canada, Brazil, and Panama. We provide essentially communication services primarily focused on the Asia community. Obviously, China being one of the main countries, but we provide solutions to help companies so they don't have to go all the way to China to get the resources that they may need. And so tell us a little bit about the difference between your parent... You mentioned your parent company, China Telecom Corporation, and CTA China Telecom Americas. And what's the benefit for people? I mean, you alluded to a little bit, but tell us a little bit more about the benefit there. No, so we've always been the window to our parent company from the United States, okay? The second thing is that what we've done is we follow U.S. best practices. We hire a lot of U.S. telecom salespeople, marketing people. And what we've done is we've built a business that is an international telecommunications company operating in the United States that have the resources to be able to give you solutions that our parent company has built not only in China, but other parts of the world. So we give you U.S. contracts. We give you U.S. support and everything else. So, you know, it really is, you know, even the time differences and language issues, cultural issues, we solve a lot of those things that may hinder your ability to do business in China. So we've solved those problems. Yeah, that's great. And I know that there's been a lot happening over the last couple years. Tell us about, you know, some of the things that you've accomplished over the last... Yeah, no. So there's really a couple of things that have happened. One of them was that China Telecom America has really led the efforts of our parent company and us get to join MANERS. MANERS is a new way of routing that's supported by the Internet Society. And as opposed to just using BGP as the way of routing, and I'm not going to get too technical on this stuff, but it's just a more advanced way of routing. We were the first tier one operator to do so. It eliminates a lot of the natural things that may happen wrong when you're routing under net traffic. So we're really proud of that accomplishment. Secondly, you know, I don't know if it was really accelerated because of the pandemic, but we started something called CTA CARES. And it was our way to give back to our local community. And CTA CARES was really just more volunteer work that we put together for our staff to participate. But it's really blossoming to like really focusing on different parts of our society and helping in the U.S. market in particular and the countries we do serve to bring everything for like co-drives for the winter to helping the elderly volunteering during the summer. So we, you know, and this is really a testament to our staff. You know, they've done a great job. They've embraced this and they've actually supported it quite a bit. So those have been two really positive things that we've seen. And it has nothing to do with, you know, the selling or the buying of telecommunication services. So we're really proud of that. Yeah, CTA CARES, I love that. And what a great time to be doing that. I mean, as you said, the pandemic, but also just in the world, you know, it's, you know, to have that sort of initiative happening in your organization is fantastic and a testament to your team and your organization. What about looking forward now? So looking into 2022? Yeah, well, hopefully the pandemic slows down. I don't know what it's going to end. But in 2022 and 2023, it's really our focus is now to look at Latin America. It's really an underserved market for us. As I mentioned, we have a subsidiary in Brazil, which is an ISP wholesale provider. And it's actually one of the largest transit providers IP transfer providers in the market. And in Panama, we built a business that's really solving a lot of ICT solutions. But now we're looking at other countries, we've already announced that we want our intention is to go to countries like Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Chile, and we'll keep adding more countries. And our goal is to really serve, you know, the underserved markets. I think we're also in a very fortuitous position that our parent company has a lot of technical knowledge that we can share in those local economies. We've worked not only with the local companies there, but we also work with the governments in many ways. They've asked us to participate in helping on 5G initiatives, wireless initiatives, and so forth. So I think, you know, that's where we're going to see a lot of our future growth in the coming years. Well, we look forward to watching this, this, you know, unveil itself and progress. And I really appreciate you coming and sharing all of this with us and and getting a bit of time to see you in person at PTC. I'm really honored. Thank you so much for having me today. And you guys enjoy the rest of your trip here. Yeah, you as well. Thank you. Thank you, Lewis. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking.