work-4127939_1280

What You Need to Know About Network as a Service in 2025

By Jayne MillerJan 30, 2025

Share

Welcome back, TeleGeography Explains the Internet listeners. We took a nice long break for the holidays, and we've returned refreshed with another batch of telecom conversations for your feed.

Our first guest of 2025 is Fahim Sabir, Director of Digital Solutions at Colt.

Fahim joined us to clarify the often confusing world of Network as a Service (NaaS). As you know, our whole deal is explaining the internet, so we started by discussing Fahim's definition of NaaS and a breakdown of why it's important in the market right now. 

We also discuss the back end, examining what the carrier ecosystem still needs to accomplish to make customer-facing NaaS a full reality. 

Of course, we have to discuss the role AI plays in all of this, not just because it's 2025 and AI is the buzzword du jour, but because these topics are linked. (Stick with us, there's a connection.)

You can preview our chat and listen to our entire conversation below.

Greg Bryan: It's interesting that we can consume all of these other things digitally. Why can't we consume network?

There's a part of me that's like, of course, that's the model world we've been moving toward. There's another aspect of that, though: network is infrastructure, right? So there is no other infrastructure service in the world, really, that is delivered in the same way, necessarily, unless you count infrastructure as a service in the cloud sense.

But I think that's always been the sort of thing overhanging the industry. We want to push more toward this digital experience, but there is still this physical infrastructure factor to overcome. 

Fahim Sabir: Yeah, and this is this is kind of where we really differ from the cloud, right? I mean, the cloud is like this big amorphous amount of infrastructure in a highly sort of centralized location.

You know, you can put up 20,000, 30,000, 40—however many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of servers in a single location and everybody can basically use those.

Whereas, like you say, there is a highly physical element to network delivery.

There is nobody in the world that's putting fiber to every single location or will ever put fiber to every single location because there's nobody who's rich enough to be able to do that, mainly more than anything else.

There is nobody in the world that's putting fiber to every single location or will ever put fiber to every single location because there's nobody who's rich enough to be able to do that, mainly more than anything else.

Greg:  And it would be the biggest economic blunder in the history of the world if you chose to do that, too.

Fahim: Absolutely. Absolutely. But there was a big question mark. And briefly, if you looked at sort of the original sort of services that existed, they're all very data center centric, cloud-centric, in terms of connectivity, internet-centric as well, because, you know, you could basically deploy super dense infrastructure deployments in those locations.

Because they were pretty hot in terms of locations, then you know you could do that in an economic way by putting in tens, hundreds, possibly even thousands of ports because you knew they were going to be customers that actually land there.

I think there's now this little bit of a movement, although it's not really pervasive. I know it's kind of starting to connect other locations, which actually requires some sort of truck roll, some sort of dig, some sort of actual physical equipment installation.

But I mean, yeah, they certainly are elements of that, but when we started and I think the principle is still the same.

Ask yourself the question: how do you actually minimize the amount of infrastructure that you have to deploy such that you can still deliver a service that has some value-added components in such a way that I don't have to send out somebody to the customer site when the customer decides they now want a firewall? I don't have to send somebody out with a firewall box. Our approach was always: our presentation should simply be a layer two knit, and everything else should happen in the network.

Now, the reality is, things have changed somewhat. When and all of this stuff started, when all of the sort of main players in this space actually, you know, started doing their work, that was before COVID. And COVID completely changed the world. I don't know about you, but you know I had the option of working from home every, well, as often as I like.

Greg: I'm home right now, yep.

Fahim: I mean, Colt's pretty cool with their policy with regard to that. And well, the question I would ask is, What does NaaS do for me as somebody who's working at home? I get it for the enterprise building. I get it for the data center, the cloud, and all the other bits and pieces.

But what does it what does that actually do for me? What does it do for us remote workers?

Listen to the full episode below.


Subscribe to access all of our episodes:

Apple | Amazon | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | Podbean | RSS | YouTube

More NaaS Talk:

Greg Bryan

Greg Bryan

Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.

Connect with Greg