Arelion carves out a resilient Baltic to Western Europe network path
Arelion has completed an expansion of its Baltic network, constructing a fully diverse, high-capacity route between Helsinki and Warsaw. This route will create a resilient ring for traffic between Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
The new terrestrial path reduces latency between the Baltics and Western Europe, increases diversity in a geopolitically sensitive region, and secures future capacity for an underserved EU region.
Like other expansions it has made in recent years, this route delivers backbone-grade performance with predictable service-level agreements (SLAs) to reduce downtime risk, ensuring reliable business continuity for customers in cloud, financial services, manufacturing and other critical sectors.
“This new route enhances diversity and bandwidth between the Baltics and Western Europe, delivering the secure, low-latency connectivity our customers need to scale AI and cloud applications,” said Mattias Fridström, VP and Chief Evangelist at Arelion.
What is the EU's Connecting Europe Facility 2 (CEF2)?
CEF2is a $39 billion program for 2021-2027 that funds infrastructure projects in the transport, digital, and energy sectors to create a more integrated and sustainable European Union. The program’s key goals include modernizing transport networks, deploying 5G and other digital infrastructures, and connecting European energy markets to increase security of supply and support decarbonization.
A collaborative approach
Arelion is taking a collaborative approach to this new network build.
By combining fiber from regional partners with Arelion’s own infrastructure, the expansion provides enterprises and service providers with scalable connectivity amid increased investment in local markets.
This project, which leverages funding from the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility 2 (CEF2) program, highlights how strategic investment can advance digital sovereignty in a historically underserved region.
Focus on diversity
A big focus of Arelion’s new Baltic route is network diversity.
This diverse terrestrial route connects the Baltics to Western Europe via subsea and land systems from Helsinki through the Baltics to Warsaw, bypassing Copenhagen and Stockholm to avoid bottlenecks and ensure high-availability connectivity for customers.
Leveraging the latest open optical line systems with 400G coherent pluggable optics and 1.6 Tbps wavelength services, the route provides scalability to support the massive data flows of next-generation applications in Europe’s growing AI sectors.
Arelion’s expansion connects numerous Points-of-Presence (PoPs) throughout the region, including:
· Arelion’s Iso-Roobertinkatu 21-25 PoP in Helsinki, Finland
· Greenergy’s Tallinn DC-1 PoP in Hüüru, Estonia
· Tet’s Data Center Pērses in Riga, Latvia
· The Riga TV Tower data center
· The Delska DC2 (formerly RackRay) data center in Vilnius, Lithuania
· The Vilnius TV Tower data center
· Equinix’s WA1 data center in Warsaw, Poland
The investment provides customers with connectivity from Baltic markets into Nordic, Central and Western European data center hubs. It also offers metro routing flexibility in major cities, including Warsaw and Helsinki, and supports scalable IP Transit, Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Ethernet, DDoS Mitigation, and other global services.
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Sean Buckley
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