TELUS Communications: TELUS Global Trading & Partner Solutions
Leading the way for TELUS Global Trading & Partner Solutions is JOE GRECH: "It is really exciting to be leading the Global Trading & Partner Solutions team in this time of massive change within the Canadian market and within TELUS itself. With the demise of Stentor, the emergence of high bandwidth and access solution demands and the opening up of the international marketplace, TELUS is in a very attractive position to drive its own destiny. We are creating a distinct business-focused team to serve entrepreneurial service providers and carriers - customers who will be a major source of growth, scale and innovation for TELUS."
TELUS Global Trading & Partner Solutions team members in our Vancouver office From left to right: Marcia Pilon, John McDonald and Carol Mah

TELUS Global Trading & Partner Solutions provides innovative and integrated solutions to national and global service providers looking for IP, data, bandwidth and voice services into and within Canada. Accounting for revenues in the range of $700 million, we serve a variety of customers including telecommunications carriers, resellers, ISPs, ASPs, and local access, wireless and cable-TV providers.

With an international and highly competitive marketplace, and the worldwide focus on data, IP, and Internet services, it is increasingly difficult to characterize our customer base in traditional voice service terms. Our "carrier" customers have ISP needs and traditional ISPs are developing "carrier" capabilities. Our customers are offering services to their end-users worldwide and are seeking cost-effective, integrated, leading-edge solutions that effectively combine data, Internet, bandwidth and voice services.

We're developing and marketing wholesale capabilities on a national basis, and expanding our international profile to attract incremental global business. We intend to be the benchmark within the Canadian wholesale market in terms of our dynamic team culture, responsiveness, growth, scope and service.

> Developing Capability to Support our Strategy

To support TELUS' overall strategy and offer integrated solutions, we're developing both product and international expansion capabilities. One key initiative is our national fibre backbone network, which we will light at the end of March as we launch a suite of high-speed bandwidth services called Optical Networking Solutions. These services will provide connections for customers, from city to city and within large metropolitan cities, and enable international carriers to connect their networks to Canada.

Having this high-speed national fibre optic network in place will allow us to sell flexible, high-bandwidth services as well as fulfill all of TELUS' trans-Canada and cross-border facility requirements. It will also give us a leadership position in the delivery of Internet and IP-based services.

> Striking Beneficial Partnerships

Our national backbone will be complemented with extensions into the United States and we are working with our global suppliers to extend our services around the world. In partnership with Verizon and Genuity, we are driving North American bandwidth and Internet backbone capability and improving our U.S. connectivity. We've begun to provide the network and manage all VoIP traffic within Canada originating from Genuity's network in the United States.

In December, we established an Internet "peering" agreement with Microsoft Corporation. We now carry Microsoft's Internet traffic bound for TELUS customers and Microsoft carries TELUS' customer traffic bound for its network. Throughout 2000, we developed strong relationships with an array of international carriers to reduce the costs of our international traffic. Through these global trading relationships, we established overseas interconnection agreements and built network connections to support them. The result was a 30 per cent reduction in the cost of delivering international calls, an annual savings in 2000 of $31 million.

> Building a High-Growth, Performance-Driven Team

To better serve our customers, we've created four sales sectors - global carriers, strategic accounts, emerging operators and ISPs. We're building a passionate and focused team that is working hard to effectively serve the wholesale market by being agile, responsive, aggressive and efficient. The varied needs of our customers are helping to shape our team and define our standards.