Int’l Bytes: Sparkle, Telefonica, Equinix, Hibernia

October 3rd, 2016 by · Leave a Comment

Here’s a quick look at some news on the international front from this morning and the end of last week:

TI Sparkle and LITC announced an upgrade of the technology deployed on their jointly owned submarine cable system. It’s a 570 kilometer cable under the Mediterranean between Sicily and Libya, and will now have 100Gbps capability. Sparkle has been quite active across its footprint over the last few years, and has been spending quite a few euros on making the island of Sicily into a key interconnection point between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Telefonica seems to be wasting no time in the wake of the cancellation of the Telxius IPO. They are taking a fresh look at the IPO of their O2 division in the UK, and this time they might open up the process to individual investors. The idea would be to generate extra demand for the company’s shares via its own customers, who number some 25 million. Generally, IPOs focus on institutional investors, with shares trickling through to individual investors from them. But Telefonica is hoping to change the equation enough to make an IPO more attractive from their perspective in the wake of Brexit, which hurt the exchange rate for the British pound.

Equinix is opening another node on its Equinix Internet Exchange. The plan is to expand the company’s IX fabric into Helsinki, Finland. The data center giant operates six data centers in the Helsinki metro area, and house one of the endpoints of Cinia’s new C-Lion1 cable with a direct route under the Baltic to Frankfurt, Germany.  The expansion is expected to come online in Q1 of 2017.

And Hibernia Networks offered an update last week on what its media business has been up to. They handled the transmission of the Olympics’ Summer Games down in Brazil for the Irish television and radio broadcaster RTE. Hibernia’s latency to the Americas dropped by a large chunk last year when they formally launched the Hibernia Express cable system, allowing them to bring live video from the event that much faster over to Ireland and elsewhere in Europe.

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Categories: Datacenter · Financials · Interconnection · Undersea cables

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