Google has selected Equinix for its Los Angeles area cable landing station (CLS) supporting the Curie subsea cable system, the first subsea cable to Chile in the last 20 years. In the U.S., the cable will land directly at the Equinix LA4 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre located in El Segundo, Calif. Google has selected Equinix as its CLS at LA4 due to the company’s expertise in delivering and managing cable landing stations. The Curie cable is expected to go live in 2019.
The Equinix CLS configuration is ideal for extending the backhaul capacity of a subsea cable system directly to the ecosystems of companies in its high-density IBX data centres. This architecture greatly simplifies network design and allows cable operators easy access to a dense, rich ecosystem of networks, clouds and IT service providers. Equinix has been selected as an interconnection partner in more than 25 of the current subsea cable projects.
The level of global data traffic is expected to reach 3.3 zettabytes by 2021, and almost every byte touches a subsea cable as cloud service providers, network service providers, content providers and enterprises push to move data globally in real time. The rapid growth of data—from basic web browsing and e-commerce to streaming video and AI—is helping drive a global surge in new subsea cable construction. Subsea cables are key to the internet and global connectivity, as 99% of intercontinental traffic crosses a subsea cable with less than one percent of the remaining traffic carried through satellite systems.
According to the second annual Equinix Global Interconnection Index (GXI), Interconnection Bandwidth (the total capacity provisioned to privately and directly exchange traffic with a diverse set of counterparties and providers at distributed IT exchange points) is expected to grow more than 10 times the internet globally by 2021. Emerging market dynamics and growing digital business adoption position Latin America to be the fastest-growing region for Interconnection Bandwidth, with 59% per annum growth expected. Furthermore, Interconnection between Enterprises and Cloud and IT Providers is projected to grow 98% per annum through 2021, supporting businesses building out new digital services and migrating existing workloads to third-party cloud platforms.
Jim Poole, Vice President, Business Development, Equinix, stated: “With the significant increase in global data traffic, we see corporations running global businesses demanding access to high-capacity, low-latency networks capable of connecting them to data centers across oceans with stringent levels of reliability. Any user of a subsea cable system that lands inside one of our Equinix global data center termination points has instant, low-latency access to a host of vibrant industry ecosystems inside Equinix, and that’s a huge advantage.”
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