US network provider Aqua Comms has selected British colocater Telehouse to provide an European hub for its sub-sea cable which links New York, US to London, UK.
Aqua Comms has now joined Telehouse Carrier-Interconnect, a group of over 750 connectivity partners, including London’s Internet Exchange (LINX).
The European hub will be based at Telehouse’s Docklands Campus, where its data centres top nearly 100,000 sqm of commercial hosting space.
According to the companies, there are multiple diverse routes from the Telehouse London Docklands campus across EMEA.
Aqua Comms’ America Europe Connect (AEConnect) subsea fibre optic cable system was announced in August 2015 and has been operational since January 2016.
The cable crosses the Atlantic and traverses 5536Km. It connects Shirley, Long Island, NY to a PoP in Killala, Co. Mayo, in the West Coast of Ireland and then it uses a diverse backhaul to link into Dublin, Manchester and London.
It also has two stubbed branching units for future landings. Currently, the cable has 52 Tbps of available capacity and 130 x 100 Gbps per fibre pair. Aqua Comms claims that the AEConnect offers of 99.999% of service availability.
The infrastructure was designed to meet the exponential surge in bandwidth demand from carriers, global data centres, financial services companies, global media, and cloud and content providers that require exceptional network reliability, scalability and performance.
On both the US and European side, the cable transverses the minimum length to shallow water of the continental shelf whilst obtaining one to five meters of burial throughout.
The network provider has plans to expand the cable further into the UK and into London, via Wales and directly into Slough.
Aqua Comms has also unveiled plans to build a twin cable, named AEConnect#2, with a landing PoP in the State of Virginia (around Norfolk) and a PoP in the French region of Bordeaux. No deployment dates have been announced so far.
Greg Varisco, COO at Aqua Comms, said: "In addition to further enabling reliable, secure, and low latency global connections for our customers, this partnership provides Aqua Comms with a host of business opportunities on either side of the Atlantic as well as at Telehouse North Two."