Int’l Roundup: Sparkle, Airtel, Data4, NetIX, Liquid, Africa Development Bank

Five global infrastructure moves on three continents:

Sparkle has sold some significant subsea capacity to Bharti Airtel. Airtel Business will be using both the Blue & Raman Submarine Cable Systems. Blue will connect Italy to Israel, and Raman will go from Jordan to India, bypassing the the terrestrial leg across Egypt for some geographical diversity.

Data4 is investing some major euros in Greece. They are putting over €300M toward a new data center campus on 7.5 hectares in in Paiania, near Athens. Backed by 90MW of power capacity, ATH1 will add some 500 permanent jobs to the local economy. Data4 currently operates in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany, and its entry into the Greek market comes at a time when the country is finally getting its due share of infrastructure attention. 

NetIX has continued its global expansion by adding another 5 exchanges to its distributed platform. They have extended their existing relationship with DE-CIX to include the company’s exchanges in Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Munich, Marseille, and New York. They now count some 50 IXPs around the world, having brought exchanges in Fortaleza, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Kyiv online just last month.

Liquid Intelligent Technologies has upgraded its footprint in eastern Africa. The 1,300km route between the coastal city of Mombasa and Busia on the Ugandan border along with other upgrades will increase Liquid’s resilience to and across a key border. Liquid now operates some 110,000km of fiber across a significant fraction of the African continent.

And on the other coast of Africa, the Central African Republic is celebrating the arrival of some new fiber infrastructure. Backed by €33M from the African Development Bank and the EU, a 900km fiber network connection from Cameroon and Congo arrived last year, completing an infrastructure loop. Since then they’ve launched a digital training center at the University of Bangui, at which they’ve now built a humanoid robot called “Mama Africa”.

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Categories: Datacenter · Fiber Networks · Interconnection · Internet Backbones · Undersea cables