Int’l Bytes: Sparkle, NEC, PDG, CityFibre

Four bits of news from around the world to catch up with:

Sparkle is investing in the reach of its international network deeper into Greece and the Balkans. They have opened a second PoP in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki and their eighth in Greece overall. From Thessaloniki they can access routes north to Bulgaria, east to Istanbul, west to Albania, and south toward Chania and the BlueMed subsea cable.

The SJC2 consortium and NEC say that the Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 is now officially in service. The cable links Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan with additional branches along the way, spanning some 10,500km and consisting of 7 pairs of optical fiber. The consortium includes, China Mobile, Chunghwa Telecom, Donghwa Telecom, KDDI, PT Telekom, Singapore Telecommunications, SK Broadband, True Internet, and Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group.

Princeton Data Group has a new minority investor. Stonepeak will be investing $1.3B in the Asian data center operator, bringing PDG’s recent capital raised to $2.5B. PDG operates 1.1GW of data center across six countries. Stonepeak joins Warburg Pincus, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and Mubadala.

And CityFibre offered an update on another of its FTTx buildouts. The UK last mile provider says it has now laid 286km of fiber under the streets of Bognor Regis. The resort area is home to a seven-beach promenade along the coast to the east of the southern city of Portsmouth. Companies taking that fiber to market include Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone, Cuckoo, IDNet, toob, and Zen.

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Categories: Datacenter · FTTH · Internet Backbones · Undersea cables