Equinix signs on for Florida-Brazil subsea cable
Datacentre and internet exchange company Equinix has announced signing on as a strategic partner with the Monet Consortium, which is constructing and deploying an "industry first" open submarine cable, an integrated cable-landing station, and a multi-tenant datacentre for collocation and interconnection.
Specifically, Equinix will host Monet's Florida-to-Brazil cable-landing equipment directly in its MI3 IBX datacentre, with the company touting faster deployment, a simplified network design, more interconnection opportunities, and easier onward transport.
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The Monet Florida subsea cable will allow for content distribution to South America, with Equinix collaborating with carriage service providers on network and cloud technology to meet the increasingly data-heavy needs of consumers.
"As data traffic continues to grow from Facebook videos and Instagram selfies to Office 365 sessions and IoT connected devices, there is an unprecedented surge in construction of new submarine cables that currently carry 99 percent of this and all internet traffic between continents," Equinix CTO Ihab Tarazi said.
"The investors in these new submarine cable systems, which now include large cloud service providers and content companies, are finding that when these submarine cables terminate on land, Equinix datacentres are the optimal location to immediately connect these point-to-point submarine cables into a single location that directly connects to thousands of networks."
According to Equinix, cloud service providers and content providers now have a "major interest" in the construction and operation of submarine networks, in addition to traditional telecommunications carriers, because data traffic is being driven by growth in cloud and content services.
As such, the popularity of streaming services means content needs to be staged closer to end users through subsea cables, Equinix said.
Equinix is also involved with the Trident subsea cable between Australia, Indonesia, and Singapore; the Hawaiki cable between the United States West Coast, Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand; the FASTER cable between Japan and the US West Coast; the Asia-Pacific Gateway between China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore; the Southern Cross Cable Network between California and Sydney; the Aqua Comms cable between New York and London; the Hibernia Express cable between New York and London; the Cinia Northern Digital Highway cable between Frankfurt and Helsinki; the Gulf Bridge International cable between the Middle East and Europe; the Globenet cable between Florida and Brazil; and the Seaborn Networks cable between New York and Sao Paulo.
Equinix in July signed on to provide its International Business Exchange (IBX) datacentres in Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, and Jakarta, as well as a landing point in Perth, for the AU$400 million Perth-to-Singapore Trident subsea cable.
Trident's submarine cable will have a bandwidth of 28Tbps, utilising 100Gbps coherent dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology, which is upgradeable to 400Gbps, and will connect the west coast of Australia with Singapore via Indonesia. It is expected to be completed by the second quarter of 2018.
The 14,000km Hawaiki subsea cable will have a capacity of over 30Tbps, and finally commenced construction in March, while the 10,000km FASTER cable system will have six fibre pairs making use of 10Gbps wave technology for a total of 60Tbps bandwidth, making it the highest-capacity subsea cable in the world.
Equinix has also been expanding its datacentre offerings by investing $97 million into building out a fourth Sydney datacentre that is already being utilised by 20 customers and will eventually house the Hawaiki subsea cable.
The launch of the SY4 datacentre, announced last month, takes the company's total global datacentre tally up to 146 across 21 countries.
"All of the biggest cloud providers in the world know the traffic the cloud is enabling is going to surpass the current undersea cable capability," Equinix Australia managing director Jeremy Deutsch said in August.
"The Facebook, the Apples, the Googles are funding these new cables. There are some 50 projects in the world today ... many of these new cables are landing into Equinix."