Interoute opens new diverse fibre route in Southern Italy to help subsea cables connect to Europe
1300km high capacity fibre route brings added diversity and reliability for international submarine cables
London on 17 March 2015
Interoute, owner operator of Europe’s largest cloud service platform, has announced that it has added a third route to access its pan European fibre network, from two of its submarine cable landing stations in Southern Italy. The new 1,300 km stretch of fibre is part of Interoute’s 7,000 km Italian network, which helps make up its 67,000km pan European platform. The new route will provide diverse, high capacity connectivity from Interoute’s landing stations in Mazara del Vallo (Sicily) and Bari (Puglia), for submarine cables looking to connect to Europe. In recent years cables from Greece, Malta, Tunisia and Israel have all come ashore at Interoute’s Southern Italian landing stations.
Submarine cables play an integral role in international economic cooperation and social development, providing terabits of reliable capacity between the world’s major economies while also enabling critical applications in developing countries and fast growing economies. Driven by the increasing demand for internet services and bandwidth hungry applications, Terabit Consulting identified 160 new submarine cable projects, with a total value of $22.6 billion, which are confirmed to be under consideration by operators and project developers. In the same report , Terabit Consulting estimates that 37% of new Credible Proposed Submarine Fibre Optic Projects will involve the regions of South Asia, Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean. For all these new cable developments Interoute is positioning itself as the premier destination for operators from outside Europe who want to get into Europe.
The design of the new route is planned to support 8 Terabit/s of traffic, offering wavelength service up to 100Gbit/s. More significantly though, thanks to this new route, Interoute can now offer its customers three completely diverse routes from both Mazara del Vallo and from Bari, to the major cities connected on its pan-European network. This not only reduces the vulnerability and risks associated with a single point of failure, but it enables significantly shortened submarine cable routes by offering an alternative landing point in the South of Italy to those further afield, such as Marseille. Renzo Ravaglia, Interoute EVP, Service Provider said, “With this further expansion of its network Interoute is making Southern Italy the most attractive landing point for all the submarine cables wanting to reach Europe, that come from the Far East, Middle East and Africa. With Cisco estimating that the Middle Eastern and African regions will continue to have the highest growth of IP traffic until 2018, predicting a fivefold growth with a compound annual growth rate of 38% (Cisco Visual Networking index, 2014) the demand for broadband services looks set to keep rising.”
With this investment the South of Italy is on track to become one of the main exchange points for the European internet network. Submarine cables entering the Mediterranean will now find a landing point that is able to offer high levels of diversity and the capacity required to support future demand.
i Submarine Telecoms Industry Report, Issue 3, 2014
About Interoute
Interoute Communications Ltd is the owner operator of Europe’s largest cloud services platform, which encompasses over 67,000 km of lit fibre, 13 Virtual Data Centres, 12 hosting data centres and 31 collocation centres, with connections to 195 additional third-party data centres across Europe. Its full-service Unified ICT platform serves international enterprises, as well as every major European telecommunications incumbent and the major operators of North America, East and South Asia, governments and universities. These organisations find Interoute the ideal partner for computing, connectivity and communications and developing new services. Its Unified ICT strategy has proved attractive to enterprises looking for a scalable, secure and unconstrained platform on which they can build their voice, video, computingand data services, as well as service providers in need of high capacity international data transit and infrastructure. With established operations throughout mainland Europe, North America and Dubai, Interoute also owns and operates dense city networks throughout Europe’s major business centres.
