Labor Day Roundup: GCX, RETN, Nokia, Hawaiki

The US may have been at the beach for a long weekend, but the rest of the world seems to have kept busy enough.  Here are three bits of news from around the globe, and especially undersea:

Yesterday, 3i Infrastructure officially completed its purchase of GCX. The purchase cost the investment company $512M, although via acquisition debt raised earlier this year they only had to put in $377M.  GCX owns a bunch of aging subsea systems, and it should be interesting to see what 3i Infrastructure does with those as a starting point. According to Capacity, GCX CEO Carl Grivner has confirmed the dropping of GCX’s plans for the Eagle cable between China, India, and the Middle East. 

RETN has been busy adding depth to the Nordic and Baltic parts of its network. They have added a new longhaul network route between Riga and Stockholm through Gotland, which to the uninitiated is a Swedish island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. On the Latvian side the route lands at Ventspils. The route cuts 30km off of existing options, with a round trip latency of 6.07ms between the two cities.

Nokia and SK C&C are teaming up for SD-WAN in South Korea. SK C&C will be using cloud-managed technology technology from Nokia’s Nuage Networks with the help of local partner Dongkuk Systems. By going this route, SK C&C can focus on deployment of SD-WAN to its customers via an opex model, eschewing upfront capital expenditures.

And according to Capacity Hawaiki Nui is taking a look at extending the Hawaiki subsea cable to French Polynesia. They are working with OPT on building a 2000km branch over to Tahiti. OPT operates the Honotua cable between Tahiti and Hawaii as well as the Manatua cable from Tahiti to Cook Islands, Niue and Samoa. BW Digital bought Hawaiki Nui in May of this year. 

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Categories: Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions · SDN · Undersea cables