AquaComms and Equinix to create high capacity connection between New York and London  

Equinix is working with Aqua Comms Limited (AquaComms), a provider of scalable, subsea capacity-based network solutions, on the deployment of its new transatlantic fiber optic system, America Europe Connect (AEConnect). Scheduled to be ready for service before the end of 2015, AEConnect, spanning more than 5,400 km across the Atlantic between Long Island, NY and the West Coast of Ireland with stubbed branching units for future landings, will provide high capacity connectivity from New York to London and beyond to greater Europe.

Equinix's New York and London International Business Exchange (IBX®) data center campuses serve as carrier-neutral network access points for AquaComms to connect its low latency subsea cable route. This new connectivity between North America and London allows network service providers to be able to tap into economic opportunities stemming from a presence in two of the biggest commercial centers in the world.

According to research by industry analyst firm TeleGeography, London (2) and New York (5) are in the top five global metros for peak international Internet traffic and the London to New York route is the second largest international Internet traffic route globally with multiple terabits of peak traffic. In its 2015 Global Bandwidth Research Service report, TeleGeography notes that private network bandwidth on the trans-Atlantic route eclipsed Internet bandwidth for the first time in history, rising to 13.9 Tbps and accounting for 56 percent of used bandwidth.

Explosive growth in mobile, content delivery, video streaming, tele-presence, social media, and cloud-based data traffic offers tremendous revenue opportunities for high-margin corporate and retail services such as Ethernet and MPLS. To remain competitive, network operators are expanding their infrastructures to meet demand for these new services—and are turning to colocation data centers that not only offer all the network-to-network connectivity of a telehouse, but also act as aggregation points for concentrations of customers in network-centric industries.

AquaComms’ AEConnect is one of the first subsea cables between New York City and London in nearly 15 years and was specifically designed to meet the high growth of bandwidth requirements of global data centers, cloud-based networks, financial services market participants and content providers. With more than 52 Tbps of available capacity, the 100G compliant system will utilize the latest optical technologies to provide the most advanced subsea system, coupled with a control plane based on a SDN platform to serve bandwidth-intensive applications.

Global businesses are increasing using more capacity to run IT operations including cloud-based applications. In both the New York and London markets Equinix offers direct connectivity to leading cloud service providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform via the Equinix Cloud Exchange™. These dedicated, private connections reduce network costs and provide higher, more consistent network performance than Internet-based connections for enterprise customers looking to build hybrid clouds.

Earlier this year Equinix announced that it is boosting interconnection capacity by opening new data centers in five major markets including New York and London. Equinix’s New York campus is the largest retail colocation campus in the New York metro and has a high interconnection rate, with more than 18,000 interconnections between businesses in this metro alone. By providing this increased capacity, Equinix expands its role in advancing the digital economy's interconnected era, in which businesses are demanding increasing levels of interconnection to accelerate business performance.