 Hello everybody, welcome back to JSA TV and JSA podcast where we are covering the latest stories trends and innovations in the global digital infrastructure and connectivity markets. We're very excited today to join you from capacity Europe live from London here to chat with Dylan Carver. So you're working strategic sales with Africa's telecom. Yes. And so we chatted with you back at ITW, I believe. And so we're going to get an update about the latest with Africa's telecom now. So welcome to JSA TV. Thank you very much, I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, I'm really happy that you had the time to join us today. So let's jump right into it. So of course, fiber optic expansion in Africa is a really crucial initiative. So if you could just start off by telling us your kind of ongoing plans to work with operators to set them up with less mile access. Sure, Kines. Yeah, West Africa. It comes back to the 2010 years when ACE came into actually West Africa, a World Bank initiative that had a purpose to allow the private ISP ecosystem in each of those landings to basically have access to the World Wide Web without going through the incumbents cables. And it gave us a launchpad to basically get introduced ourselves to the ecosystem and develop the data economy. Excellent. Awesome. And so you talked a little bit about ACE already, submarine cable. So is there anything else you want to add there? Yeah, Kines. So the ACE system is a very complex system. It's starting from Europe, namely France and Portugal. And then it trickles down all the way to Cape Town in four segments. One segment, segment number one, Europe all the way to Dakar, segment three all the way to Abidjan, segment four, France Automated to Cape Town. What happens is that we realize that by playing the partners that had capacity access on that system, it allowed us to integrate a network with the network through the ACE as a backbone. And that gives us a legitimate credible purpose to introduce ourselves to the tier ones. Tell them, hang on guys, we can actually terminate solutions for your corporate national, international sites and tenors. And we can do it in all West Africa thanks to ACE. And then the externalities built on the relationship with those ACE folks. And now we are going into Southern Africa, Eastern Africa, Northern Africa. And we're doing a Pan-African one-stop shop. Thanks to ACE, it allowed us to create a one service provider for a unique SLA standard wherever in Africa. Excellent. It seems really fast growing. You've got a lot on the move right now with Africa Telecom. Yeah. So we came into the market with ACE and the ecosystem. Today, we went from that partnership business model that is very least orientated, buy and sell orientated to actually harnessing local footprint, ISP ownership. And right now we operate out of ten markets, namely all the landlocked West African places such as Niger, Mali, Bokina Faso, but also Cameroon, DRC, South Africa and now Kenya. So you can see that our trajectory is very, very scaling up itself based on how we see the market and echoing it with an equally dynamic, let's say, growth. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that with us. That's a great, really excellent update. Things are moving so quickly that even since ITW, there's been a lot of development. And so speaking of, if we could kind of, you know, look at the crystal ball a little bit over the next five to 10 years, where do you kind of see the evolution of last mile access in Africa? So one friend of mine told me the data is king, content is king con. That means looking at this analogy that is very, meaning anything and nothing at the same time is that the growth of the infrastructure ecosystem driven by the CDN is going to revamp and reshape the way operators interact to each other. We as Africa have built a business unit based on infra and data center, and we're trying to converge this under the Africa's brand. So we've got Medusa in North Africa. We've got the Barcelona landing station as a neutral open access data center, eliminating the backhoe fees in order to streamline content back and forth from a CLS terrestrial and wet submarine segment. What we see is that we need to be responding to the growth of capacity under the water with new cable such as a channel and to Africa and be able to respond adequately to our customer base that is current by following the price trend. That is more and more, let's say in the reducing line, but also scale ourselves closer to the end customer because we need to have more operations that can sustain the easiness of getting accesses on those sub segments. So yeah, following the content, that's Africa's motto today. All right, following the content. You heard it here first. Okay, so I think we could definitely chat about this many, many more hours probably. And I'm happy to do that if you want to. Hopefully this got you excited about what Africa Telecom is doing and you can go check out their website and reach out to Dylan if you have any questions. Dylan, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure. And thank you to have me for a second round. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And thank you to our viewers as well unless round of thank yous for joining us here on JFA TV. As always, happy networking. Bye bye.