Equinix, Inc. (NASDAQ: EQIX) and EllaLink say that the EllaLink submarine cable system between Europe and Latin America is fully operational. The undersea cable will provide connectivity from São Paulo in Brazil to Lisbon, Portugal, and Madrid, Spain, leveraging Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in the three cities.
EllaLink began lighting its transatlantic submarine cable system earlier this year (see “EllaLink begins lighting Europe-to-Brazil submarine cable with Infinera”). The four-fiber-pair submarine cable lands in Sines, Portugal, and Fortaleza, Brazil. Branching units to Madeira and Cabo Verde are part of the initial deployment, with additional branches to French Guiana, Mauritania, the Canary Islands, and Morocco planned. The backbone link has a design capacity of 100 Tbps; the link between Portugal and Madeira will support 30 Tbps over a single fiber pair, while the planned link to Morocco will support 40 Tbps over two fiber pairs, according to Vincent Gatineau, chief marketing and sales officer at privately held EllaLink. Infinera supplied the SLTE equipment.
Each of the cable landing sites will connect with an Equinix IBX data center. On the Brazil side, the network will link with SP4 in São Paulo; in Europe, the fiber network will link to LS1 in Lisbon, with further connectivity to MD2 in Madrid. Serving the needs of submarine cable system operators has become a growing business, according to Equinix; the company provides interconnection services in more than 40 current undersea cable projects, Equinix asserts.
"Offering one-hop connections between Latin America and Europe with a 60-ms latency is a game changer from a transatlantic latency perspective,” stated Diego Matas, COO of EllaLink. “During these last months, EllaLink continued working directly with Equinix in order to secure carrier-neutral connections from our PoP locations in Equinix's data centers and we are now enabling our customers to directly access the rich ecosystems of networks, clouds, and financial and IT service providers that Equinix hosts."
"More data is being produced and processed today than ever before—and almost every byte of data that moves over the internet touches a subsea cable. As a result, organizations require access to high-capacity, low-latency networks capable of connecting them to data centers across oceans with the highest levels of reliability. This is where Equinix plays a critical role and offers a huge advantage to customers,” added Jim Poole, vice president, business development, at Equinix. “Any user of a subsea cable network that lands inside one of our global data center termination points has instant, low-latency access to a host of industry ecosystems inside Equinix."
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