Hurricane Electric picks BICS for 100G expansion

BICS, a subsidiary of Belgacom, says it has signed an agreement with Hurricane Electric for the U.S-based carrier to use BICS’s Pan European Network (PEN) 2.0 fiber-optic network to connect major European cities.

BICS says its 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) enabled network will enable Hurricane Electric to meet growing bandwidth requirements while keeping operating expenses down.

Fremont, CA-based Hurricane Electric operates its own global IPv4 and IPv6 network and says it is considered the largest IPv6 backbone in the world as measured by number of networks connected. Within its global network, Hurricane Electric is connected to 75 major exchange points and exchanges traffic directly across more than 3200 different networks.

In Europe, Hurricane Electric needed a high-quality carrier with a large European footprint able to deliver low latency 100GbE wavelengths. BICS owns and operates 9000 km of fiber in Europe with a cable landing station in Marseille accessing the Europe India Gateway (EIG) and SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable systems.

Johan Wouters, senior vice-president, capacity business management, BICS said, “Since the end of 2012 our Pan-European Network has been 100GbE ready. It allows our customers to expand their IP backbone network and interconnect bandwidth intensive sites in a fully managed service model. A large range of extra features such as protection, rerouting options, upgrades and restoration, and liquid bandwidth render our solution both flexible and robust.”

Reid Fishler, director of carrier services, Hurricane Electric, concurred. “BICS’ PEN 2.0 is the perfect solution to enable us to deploy high capacity circuits between different European cities. With this agreement in place, our customers will benefit from faster Internet connections between Hurricane Electric’s core routers in Europe,” he said.

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