Int’l Roundup: Level 3, SEACOM, Ericsson, Retelit

The USA may have been off for the past few days, but there’s been plenty of news elsewhere that is of interest. Here’s a quick review:

This morning Level 3 announced a new contract on the multinational front. They’ll be providing Ethernet IP VPN services to Hexcel Corporation, which manufactures advanced composites. They’re replacing a legacy frame relay network, bringing modern bandwidth to their 25 site worldwide footprint. Hexcel is also using Level 3’s Hayes UK data center for colo.

SEACOM made a pair of interconnection moves to start off September. The pan-African submarine cable operator partnered up with France-IX to resell peering and interconnection to African service providers. It’s not the first such agreement they’ve made, and which leads to the second announcement this morning. SEACOM launched a new remote peering service, bundling their exchange point partnerships with NAPAfrica, France-IX, LINX, and AMS-IX to become a regional one stop shop.  SEACOM has been a much more general regional force than I had expected when it was just a submarine cable project.

Ericsson is making a big data center investment to power its global ICT business. They’re planning to invest SEK7B ($1.07B) into three giant new facilities, two in Sweden and the other in North America — each near the company’s main R&D hubs. Combined they will feature 120,000 square meters, or 1.29 million square feet, of space. The new infrastructure will be designed to reduce energy consumption up to 40%. The Swedish facilities would come online at the end of 2013 and then 2014, with the North American location starting up in early 2015.

The Italian fiber specialist Retelit is upgrading their network to 100G and OTN. They’re deploying Ciena’s coherent optical gear across their national network and eight metro markets. The first route to get the new gear will be the main backbone between Milan and Rome, which they expect to come online by the end of October.

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Categories: Datacenter · Internet Backbones · Internet Traffic · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables