Rethinking Network Strategy & Building Resilience Through PNIs, Peering and Smart Geographical Expansion#

Wouter Van Renterghem - RETN GmbH

• Why: A carrier candidly decomposing how real incidents — the 2024/2025 Red Sea subsea cuts, Taiwan's 2025 cable cuts, and the Ukraine invasion — reshaped its network design. The failure stories are genuinely transferable; the technical detail is thinner.
• What: RETN (self-described 11^th-largest IP network) frames a "resilience-first philosophy" through incident case studies: Red Sea 2024 — ~70% EU–Asia subsea capacity loss, RETN moved 60–70% of traffic to the TRANSKZ terrestrial route within the 70-day repair window and held 99.9% uptime while Tier 1s degraded for weeks; Taiwan 2025 — repairs stalled for weeks-to-months; Ukraine — a capacity-swap deal within a week of the invasion, 72-hour deployable autonomous PoPs with pre-positioned spares, and a new southern Kyiv bypass route. Distilled rules: build for risk (geographic/supplier/infrastructure diversity, automated reroute, MTTR < 6 hours), design smart not big (unique routes, lean team), optimize efficiency (400GbE rollout, watts/Gbps benchmarking) — plus procurement-side rules (stop buying visibly under-engineered services, demand transparency, educate customers on their Plan B).
• How: Architectural and organizational principles — diversity, in-house engineering, controlled supply chain, multi-vendor strategy — rather than specific protocols.
• Where applicable: Long-haul international carriers and anyone buying WAN transport with resilience SLAs. RETN-specific scale and topology; take it as design posture and procurement checklist, not as a technique you can deploy. The slide deck is strategy-heavy (titled "6 stages of network de-sh*tification") and light on engineering specifics.