Driving business advantage in global economy

REDWOOD CITY: Picture this: According to research by industry analyst firm TeleGeography, London and New York are in the top five global metros for peak international Internet traffic and the London to New York route is the second largest international Internet traffic route globally with multiple terabits of peak traffic.

The progress is largely fuelled by explosive growth in mobile, content delivery, video streaming, tele-presence, social media, and cloud-based data traffic.

These prospects offer tremendous revenue opportunities for high-margin corporate and retail services such as Ethernet and MPLS. To remain competitive, network operators are also expanding their infrastructures; they are turning to co-location data centers that not only offer network-to-network connectivity of a telehouse, but also act as aggregation points for concentrations of customers in network-centric industries.

Keeping these demands in mind, Equinix, the global interconnection and data center company, is working with AquaComms, a provider of scalable, subsea capacity-based network solutions, on the deployment of its new transatlantic fiber optic system, America Europe Connect (AEConnect).

Scheduled to be ready for service before the end of 2015, AEConnect, spanning more than 5,400 km across the Atlantic will provide high capacity connectivity from New York to London and beyond to greater Europe.

Greg Varisco, Chief Operating Officer, AquaComms, said, "Responding to the demand, we made a strategic decision to deploy with Equinix. Their data centers in New York and London act as major international hubs for network traffic, offering our customers the ability to extend existing networks or expand into new markets."

Tim Stronge, Vice President, Research, TeleGeography, said, "The international bandwidth market is undergoing a transformation. The traditional dynamic by which carriers link broadband users to global networks is still a core part of the market, but on the largest routes, content companies have overtaken carriers as the biggest bandwidth consumers. The largest content providers have become major customers of long-haul capacity as they expand their own internal networks. Increasingly, these entities have capacity requirements that exceed those of the largest carriers."

Jim Poole, Vice President, Global Service Providers, Equinix, said, "Equinix has the largest concentration of NSP/CSP's, financial, media and entertainment, gaming, e-commerce customers in our business ecosystems. This new bilateral submarine connectivity gives Equinix and AquaComms' customers yet another choice for driving business advantage in today's global economy."