Equinix, Eastern Light collaborate on Nordic subsea cable
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Equinix, Eastern Light collaborate on Nordic subsea cable

Equinix is working with private Stockholm-based Eastern Light for its new international fibre-optic cable route in northern Europe.

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The new cable system is non-amplified and designed to let customers use their own equipment on their own dark fibre and will go from Sweden, Stockholm, to Finland in Hanko, Helsinki and Kotka. The increased interconnection on the data route will drive more opportunity for Nordic businesses.

Along this route the cable will terminate in two Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres — HE6 in Helsinki and SK2 in Stockholm — which are key interconnection points for the Nordics and help facilitate the flow of global internet traffic in and out of the region.

"We see a huge potential in connecting our system to Equinix' data centres. Eastern Light's focus is to build and provide efficient long-haul dark fibre routes in the Nordic region, and the new link between Equinix' HE6 and SK2 data centres will be considerably more direct and cost-effective than existing routes,” said Svante Jurnell, CEO and founder of Eastern Light, which is in the process of building a series of new international fibre optic cable routes in northern Europe.

“We have also made it our mission to make it as simple and reliable as possible for our customers to light up their own dark fibres by working closely with Ciena throughout the network planning phase. This ensured that we can provide accurate capacity statements and network optimisation when bundled with a turnkey solution from Ciena." 

Eastern Light's main supplier of its sea cable system is Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke GmbH (NSW) and the system has been optimised to feature Ciena's GeoMesh solutions as part of its dark fibre offering. The Sweden–Finland portion of the cable is scheduled for completion in autumn 2017.

The Eastern Light cable combines the cable landing station and interconnection hub into a single solution at Equinix's Helsinki and Stockholm data centres, eliminating the need for a beach cable landing station. This reduces cost, complexity and points of failure, and enables Eastern Light's customers to scale its bandwidth using advanced networking technologies like SDN.

By connecting to Equinix data centres, Eastern Light and its dark fibre customers can leverage Equinix's mature business ecosystems and interconnection platform – Platform Equinix – which provides unparalleled access to the markets and ecosystems that drive digital business worldwide.

Eric Schwartz, president of EMEA at Equinix, added: "The vast majority of global data traffic is carried through submarine cables – this is critical infrastructure. A greater proliferation of these cables is essential in this digital age, when organisations depend on instant connectivity to markets and partners worldwide. As subsea cables connect more places, they enable the low latency that real-time technologies like those supporting electronic trading and the Internet of Things require."

During Equinix's recent Q1 2017 earnings call, the company announced that it is maintaining significant momentum as the interconnection partner for new submarine cable projects globally, including recently winning its fifteenth project.





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