MedNautilus Operations, part of Telecom Italia Sparkle, and Cyta have entered into an agreement for the deployment of the KIMONAS fibre-optic submarine cable.The new system will be operational by the end of 2015 and will connect Cyprus and Greece through a subsea fibre pair between Cyta’s landing station at Pentaskhinos (Cyprus) and the MedNautilus landing station at Chania (Crete, Greece). KIMONAS will be Cyta’s first wholly owned fibre-optic cable system connecting Cyprus and Greece, and will complement the telco’s alternative segments on the MedNautilus subsea cable network, in particular the MINERVA cable (linking Cyprus and Sicily) and the ATHENA system (Athens-Crete). Extending to Athens through the ATHENA ring and to Bulgaria via Thessaloniki (by utilising the fibre infrastructure of its wholly-owned Greek subsidiary Cyta Hellas), KIMONAS will create a new telecoms corridor – connecting the Balkans and Central Europe with Egypt and other Middle Eastern destinations – via Cyprus. At the same time, it will allow interconnection to Turkey in the east and Italy and other European destinations in the west through Telecom Italia Sparkle’s network.
Netherlands-based international service provider LinxTelecom selected Ekinops to provide equipment for the Pangea Baltic Ring, which connects Tallinn in Estonia, Helsinki (Finland) and Stockholm (Sweden). The upgraded fibre-optic submarine infrastructure enables LinxTelecom to offer higher bandwidth to its customers through its 40 channels of 100Gbps capacity. The next-generation 4Tbps submarine link replaced an existing optical network launched in 2000, with Jonathan Amir, Ekinops’ VP Sales for EMEA, saying: ‘The new Ekinops submarine network provides more than 30 times the capacity compared with the previous network and will provide even greater capacity with future technologies Ekinops plans to release. Using an existing submarine cable proved extremely economical and extended the life of the cable by many years’. Elsewhere, Russian operator ER-Telecom has deployed Ekinops’ 100G DWDM channels over its countrywide network which stretches over 5,000km.
Google and Antel Uruguay have entered into a partnership agreement to deploy a fibre-optic submarine cable network between Maldonado in Uruguay and Santos (Brazil), El Observador reports. The 2,000km cable will comprise six fibre pairs, with a total design capacity of 90Tbps, and will interconnect with the Monet system, which will link the cities of Santos and Fortaleza in Brazil with Miami in Q4 2016. Antel will invest a total of USD30 million in the new infrastructure, on the back of the USD47 million earmarked for the deployment of Monet. The new Uruguay-Brazil cable will be completed by the end of 2017; the construction contract has been awarded to Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks.
The SeaMeWe-3 submarine cable has reportedly been damaged yet again. The Register reports that Australian ISP iiNet has informed its subscribers that it is likely to experience ‘higher-than-usual latency’ until 10 November due to ‘a submarine cable fault impacting our international links between Perth and Singapore.’ TeleGeography notes that the 39,000km SeaMeWe-3 is the sole operating link between Australia and Singapore. The submarine infrastructure has been damaged on numerous occasions in recent years, with the most recent fault reported in September 2015.
CoreSite Realty Corporation has announced that its CoreSite data centre in Los Angeles will host the FASTER submarine cable network’s landing in the US. The cable will connect the west coast of the US to major Asian cities including Chikura and Shima in Japan and Tanshui (Taiwan).
AquaComms has selected Ciena to facilitate 100Gbps connectivity on its new AEConnect Cable System which links New York to London and beyond. Leveraging Ciena’s GeoMesh solution, AquaComms will seek to provide low-latency, reliable and scalable connectivity. In related news, data centre solutions provider Digital Realty Trust has confirmed that the AEConnect Cable will be available at its data centre situated at 32 Avenue of the Americas (New York) by the end of 2015, with plans to expand the availability to its two other data centres in the city at a later date.
Service provider Gulf Bridge International (GBI) – which owns and operates a multilayer carrier neutral network that provides connectivity to the Middle East – has joined two of DE-CIX’sglobal Internet exchanges, namely DE-CIX in Frankfurt (Germany) and UAE-IX in Dubai (UAE).
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