Equinix, Inc. (NASDAQ: EQIX) says it has agreed to work with privately held Swedish company Eastern Light on the latter's planned submarine cable system that will connect Sweden (Stockholm) to Finland (Hanko, Helsinki and Kotka). Equinix's HE6 International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Helsinki and SK2 IBX in Stockholm will serve as combined cable landing stations and interconnection hubs.
The Sweden-Finland system is part of a network of fiber-optic routes Eastern Light plans across northern Europe. The system will be non-amplified and designed to enable customers use their own equipment on their own dark fiber. Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke GmbH (NSW) will serve as the main supplier of the undersea cable system, which will leverage the GeoMesh submarine network technology portfolio from Ciena Corp. (NYSE:CIEN). The submarine cable system should be completed this autumn.
Use of the IBX data centers as both landing stations and interconnection hubs reduces complexity and improves reliability, Equinix says. The Stockholm and Helsinki data centers will offer access to Equinix's global interconnection platform as well as a variety of cloud and content ecosystems. The carrier-neutral approach of the Equinix IBXs enable submarine network operators to offer excess network capacity to customers quickly and efficiently.
"We see a huge potential in connecting our system to Equinix' data centers," said Svante Jurnell, CEO and founder of Eastern Light. "Eastern Light's focus is to build and provide efficient long-haul dark fiber routes in the Nordic region, and the new link between Equinix' HE6 and SK2 data centers will be considerably more direct and cost-effective than existing routes."
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