Monday Roundup: Aqua Comms, Cogent, Proximity, Lightpath, Iridium

One subsea update, some satellite launch plans, and a couple of metro expansions.

Aqua Comms’ AEC-2 cable finally has its Irish branch. According to Capacity, the company has officially landed the cable in Old Head within the northwestern Irish county of Mayo. The main branch of AEC-2/Havfrue connects New Jersey with Denmark, and of course has another branch up to Norway as well. The Irish branch now also enables direct connectivity between Ireland and Denmark, bypassing the UK entirely.

Cogent had more going on last week than just the acquisition of the old Sprint wireline business. They also expanded their UK presence with the help of Proximity Data Centers. The expansion leverages recently deployed dark fiber at Proximity’s Nottingham and Chester Gatwes edge sites and improve’s Cogent’s connectivity in the Midlands and North West of England.

Meanwhile, Lightpath has been busy up in Connecticut. They revealed a metro fiber expansion in the southwestern corner of the state, adding 70+ route miles of new fiber from Trumbull and Norwalk with Katonah across the border in New York. This investment in Connecticut complements similar moves in Queens and New Jersey, not to mention the recent expansion up in Boston.

And Iridium says it will launch five of its last six spare satellites next year. SpaceX will be handling the launch, which will be shared with other payloads, sometime in the middle of 2023. Iridium has 75 satellites up there, which were launched between 2017 and 2019.

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Categories: Datacenter · Internet Backbones · Metro fiber · satellite · Undersea cables