Int’l Roundup: Liquid, BICS, China Mobile, Liberty

The US was off yesterday, but the week did start on Monday for much of the world.  here’s a quick look at some news from overseas:

Liquid Telecom says that it has completed an upgrade of part of its network to 100G.  The pan-African network operator has deployed Ekinops gear on key routes of its East Africa Fiber Ring.  The deployments provides 100G links between Kigali, Kampala, Tororo, Nariobi, and Mombasa.  Additional upgrades are planned to supplement the expansion.

BICS is deploying some new connectivity down to the southern French port of Marseille.  The Belgian network operator is apparently adding a third fiber route from Paris down to Interxion’s facility in Marseille where they can pick up AAE1, EIG, and Sea-Me-We-5.  The expansion is expected to be ready by the end of 2017, and will give BICS diversity on what is becoming an even more critical route when it comes to Europe-Asia connectivity.

China Mobile is taking aim at Africa.  They’ve signed an agreement with Djibouti Data Centers under which they will be setting up a colo presence in the tiny East African country.  From there they will be in close proximity to some 9 submarine cable systems.  Djibouti certainly seems to have been getting more than the normal share of infrastructure headlines lately.

And Liberty Glboal is making an NFV move.  They are deploying Juniper’s vMX virtual route reflector solution as part of the global cable operator’s network infrastructure.  Juniper’s vMX consists of a fully featured virtual edge router running on x86-based servers, and will let Liberty spin up new virtual reflectors on-demand.  Liberty uses various other Juniper technology throughout its network already of course.

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Categories: Datacenter · Fiber Networks · NFV · Telecom Equipment