To build a totally global IoT, the data has to get from continent to continent, fast, secure and reliably. The only way we have to accomplish that right now is with undersea cables.
Equinix (News - Alert), a global interconnection and data center company, has announced significant momentum in the company's involvement as a strategic partner in submarine cable projects to get the data flowing better than Triton’s beard.
Equinix most recently secured a partnership with the Monet consortium, which will be an industry first deployment of an open submarine cable architecture with an integrated cable landing station. It will also incorporate co-location and interconnection inside a network-dense, multi-tenant data center.
The company is already an interconnection partner in more than 10 of the current submarine cable projects, and will provide direct access to an aggregation of networks and clouds at Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers that are located in proximity to the coastal termination points.
Current submarine cable projects that Equinix is engaged with and has publically announced include: Southern Cross Cable Network (California - Sydney); Aqua Comms (New York - London); Hibernia Express (New York - London); Cinia (Germany - Finland); Trident (Australia - Indonesia - Singapore); Globenet (Florida - Brazil); Asia Pacific Gateway (News - Alert) (China - Hong Kong - Japan - South Korea - Malaysia - Taiwan - Thailand - Vietnam - Singapore); Hawaiki Cable Limited (U.S. – Australia – New Zealand); Gulf Bridge International (News - Alert) (Middle East - Europe); FASTER (U.S. West Coast - Japan); Seaborn Networks (New York - Sao Paulo); and Monet (Florida - Brazil), the newest project announced today.
The recent announcement says that Equinix will host Monet’s Florida cable landing equipment directly into its MI3 IBX. The deployment will eliminate a separate cable landing station and simplify network design with the goal of speeding up deployment and reducing the need for dedicated cable station construction.
According to SubTel Forum, 93,000 miles of cable will be laid in 2016, more than in the last five years combined, and more than three and a half times the circumference of the earth at the equator. Because most intercontinental Internet traffic traverses submarine cables, a greater proliferation of submarine cables is essential in this digital age, when organizations depend on instant connectivity to people, locations, clouds and data worldwide.
“As data traffic continues to grow, from Facebook (News - Alert) videos and Instagram selfies to Office 365 sessions and IoT connected devices, there is an unprecedented surge in construction of new submarine cables that currently carry 99 percent of this and all Internet traffic between continents,” said Ihab Tarazi, CTO, Equinix. “The investors in these new submarine cable systems, which now include large cloud service providers and content companies, are finding that when these submarine cables terminate on land, Equinix data centers are the optimal location to immediately connect these point to point submarine cables into a single location that directly connects to thousands of networks.”