Paula Cogan excels in business transformation and building high-performing teams with strong commercial awareness and the ability to build fruitful relationships at all levels. She has been involved in the telecommunications industry for over thirty years and previously held senior leadership positions for Colt Technology Services, Verizon Business, and BT.
Cogan’s achievements in leadership and organizational transformation are underpinned by her effective communication and strong relationships with customers and partners. She is also committed to promoting and driving inclusion and diversity within telecoms.
Cogan holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from King’s College London.
You have a long history in the digital infrastructure industry, from BT and Verizon Business to Colt and now euNetworks. What are the most significant changes you have seen over your career?
With more than 30 years in the industry, I’ve had the privilege of having a career that has spanned transformative changes in technology. One example is the widespread adoption of the mobile phone, which was something I was involved in at the very start of my career. This phenomenon revolutionized demand on telecommunications infrastructure, with networks evolving from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G to enable faster data transfer, improved voice quality, and enhanced connectivity.
The second major transformative technology, of course, was the Internet, followed by the demand for more and increasingly fast broadband connections into people’s homes. More recently, the pandemic really enabled us to adapt to what was a rapidly changing business environment—plus, of course, continual growth in gaming, media streaming, and e-commerce.
Even more recently, we’ve seen the advance of cloud computing (and its demand for high bandwidth services) as well as technologies like AI and machine learning (that may change the demand for our services altogether).
It’s been a real pleasure to be involved in such a rapidly transforming technological landscape, and indeed in an industry that is the foundation of some of those technological advances—because behind every mobile phone and every Internet connection, of course, is fiber, which is what we do at euNetworks.
