You would be forgiven for thinking a telecoms company was mainly based around a traditional triple structure of phones, broadband and mobile, but today’s communication environment now encompasses myriad disciplines requiring a small army of people to deliver them. Of course, Gibtelecom provides those phones, broadband and mobile services, but it also features a portfolio of business elements embracing cloud solutions, data storage, Office 365 backup and managed security among countless other options.
Gibtelecom is split into three commercial verticals: carrier, consumer and marketing, as well as the business unit; the latter function falling under the remit of Director Enterprise, Danny Hook.
“Gibtelecom has effectively become an IT company with a telecommunications background – one which numbers Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Cloudflare among its competitors – to demonstrate that for a relatively small operation, it punches above its weight.”
— Gibraltar Business Magazine (Summer – Autumn 2025)
“I run the business unit within Gibtelecom which is responsible for everything related to businesses—whether it’s the largest multinational we serve or the smallest high street shop, including charities and so forth,” he said. “Within my vertical, I also manage two subdivisions: one led by Shaun Zammitt, Head of Business Development, who oversees anything new—be it local, international, new products, or new territories—and the other led by Lianne Garcia, Head of Enterprise Services.”
Personal account manager & global enterprise rollouts
Personal and human interaction still form a key pillar of its business approach, as Lianne Garcia explained: “Any business taking a significant amount of services will have one person that they contact. That structure allows business customers to have a Gibtelecom point of contact 24/7, 365 days a year.”
“Now we’re looking at how we can use mobile technology to solve problems for customers,” added Ms Garcia. “For example, we had a customer at the Port who needed to scan secure passport documents where there was no fixed internet connection, so we came up with a fixed IP SIM card solution with a VPN on their tablet to encrypt that data. Similarly, we worked with utility providers to provide NB-IoT SIM cards for smart telemetry metering.”
“On a bigger scale, we work for gaming companies who have multi-jurisdiction operations and we’ve managed infrastructure rollouts for them across the globe. We’ve moved them into Curaçao, Brazil, Dublin, Malta, end to end. We’ve sourced the IT kit for them, procured it, financed it, shipped it over to the location, set up the data centre in that country, racked and stacked it, configured their cloud environments and literally handed the clients the keys, ready for them to use.”
Tech-hungry companies in Gibraltar
Keeping the technological lights on in Gibraltar is crucial as tech-hungry companies, such as crypto and gaming, need this reliability. And it’s not just the big players either; many shops on Main Street are digitalised. “Even the small shop on Main Street is now a digital business,” noted Ms Garcia. “A takeaway, for example: many of their orders are coming in on phone apps and they cannot run this on a residential grade connection anymore; they need that 24/7 support.”
As a power-critical business – and given there is the occasional power cut in Gibraltar – Gibtelecom took the decision to become autonomous by fitting generators to its sites. “Every single site has enough battery power to last two hours on its own and then it has an additional generator as well, so it takes over before the batteries run out,” said Hook.
Europe India Gateway (EIG)
Gibtelecom also owns and manages a private network infrastructure allowing its customers in leading business centres to scale into new markets. Its core network is based around the US$700m Europe India Gateway (EIG) submarine cable system linking Europe, Africa, the Middle East and India. Gibtelecom is a founding consortium member of the 15,000km EIG fibre optic submarine cable alongside AT&T, BT, Verizon and Vodafone.
“The EIG goes from Bude, Cornwall through Portugal, Gibraltar, all the way through the Mediterranean, down the Suez Canal, through Egypt,” said Ms Garcia. “It was very complex to set up and very complex to manage, and for a number of years we were chairing that entire consortium.”
Cyber risk & British call centre for ex-pats
For every leap forward in technology, there are also bad actors intent on circumventing systems. Gibtelecom holds ISO 27001 certification and recently entered into an exclusive agreement with Thomas Murray as cybersecurity partners to deliver managed vulnerability scanning and defence services to Gibraltar businesses.
Using Gibtelecom’s existing technology infrastructure, the company also operates its wholly-owned mobile operator in Spain – Lobster – to cater to English-speaking communities. “The offices are based in Madrid and customer services are in English, supported by the same technical teams in Gibraltar,” said Hook. “We are ingrained into the fabric of Gibraltar — Gibtelecom has its roots back to the 1800s.”