Earlier this week, RETN unveiled a newly completed upgrade on the terrestrial path between Europe and the Far East. It’s an improvement to the company’s TRANSKZ network that was finished up last month in partnership with Transtelecom JSC.
TRANSKZ now supports three diverse routes across central Asia to the Chinese border, the North Way, the South Way, and the Central Way. The Central Way supports connectivity from Frankfurt to Hong Kong at RTD latency of 150.56 ms. That puts RETN in a strong position hooking up the financial markets in both regions. At least until they finally get those Arctic cable projects going at last.
Of all the routes in global internet infrastructure, the ones that always seem to take the least direct paths always seem to connect Europe and the Far East. It has generally been easier and cheaper to go undersea the long way round than to deal with the geographical and political realities of crossing Asia terrestrially. Perhaps this new infrastructure is part of a shift back to land? I suppose the ultimate key to building terrestrial infrastructure is having markets along the way that are desirable to reach.
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The terrestrial fibre routes between Europe & Asia via Russia always commanded a premium. The only consumer ISPs that I know of from traceroute latency data that actually route Asia to Europe traffic on rented Russian wavelengths are China Telecom & China Unicom which recently started routing Western Europe traffic via Russia. They always routed some Russia/Central Asia traffic directly over the border but general Western Europe traffic to their POP’s in London/Paris/Frankfurt/Moscow now run on rented Russian wavelengths. The Russian backbone providers Rostelecom & Transtelecom in conjunction with China Telecom/China Unicom recently completed a 100G wave upgrade from the western borders of Russia all the way to the eastern borders (including subsea Vladivostok to Japan) and cross-border systems into Mongolia & China.
See: https://www.capacitymedia.com/articles/3799526/Rostelecom-to-double-Europe-Asia-cable-throughput-to-2Tbps
It is now estimated that 20% of Chinese traffic bound for Europe go through Russia now. This is new as consumer traffic used to flow via the USA and only the premium corporate VPN AS used to route via Russia.