One of the main transatlantic cable projects concerning France has just "landed" on a beach at Porge, near Bordeaux. The project was initiated by Facebook and built by Alcatel Submarine Networks. Orange, partner for the French part, was responsible for the operation. This required horizontal drilling 20 metres below the beach and the dune, in order to limit the impact on the environment and in particular the forest.

Named "Amitié", this cable links Massachusetts in the United States to Porge in France and Bude in England. It is 6,800 km long and carries a total of 16 pairs of optical fibres. It is scheduled to come into service in early 2022.

The French incumbent will benefit from two fibre pairs on this cable and will be responsible for the operation and maintenance of the "landing station". Orange will provide the terrestrial links from this station to Bordeaux, then Paris and Lyon, and finally the rest of Europe. It also states that the cable will enable new data centres to be set up in the Bordeaux area.

Another transatlantic cable, "Dunant", was recently commissioned in the Vendée by Google. With traffic between Europe and North America doubling on average every two years, investment in new infrastructure is needed to absorb the increase. Between them, "Dunant" and "Amitié" will have more capacity than any previous transatlantic cable.

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Source : L'Usine Digitale

On 13th July, Equinix announced the launch of a new international fibre optic cable project under the Manche. The network, called CrossChannel Fibre, will connect Equinix's London and Paris centres via landing stations in Brighton and Veules-les-Roses. It will be operational from the end of 2021.

"The 520-kilometre cable has 96 fibre pairs, will offer more than 20 Tbits per fibre pair, and will have the lowest latency of any network connecting London and Paris," boasts Equinix management, who also note that this is the first submarine fibre optic cable laying project in the English Channel for nearly 20 years.

This new project allows Equinix to continue to expand its network in France. To this end, the company recently signed a major partnership with Terralpha, the SNCF Réseau subsidiary responsible for developing the carrier's very high-speed network in France. The agreement will allow all companies hosted in Equinix data centres to use the 20,000 km of fibre optic cable running along the SNCF Réseau rail network.

The data centre operator expects to increase its turnover by 10 to 11% in 2021, thanks to the expansion of its data centre network and its cloud services.

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Source : ZDNet