Equinix’s data center in Miami will host the Florida cable landing equipment of the Monet submarine cable system.
The Monet submarine cable, which will deliver 60 terabits of capacity between the U.S. and Brazil, is owned by Algar Telecom (a Brazilian telecom company and ISP), Angola Cables, Antel (the Uruguayan telecom company) and Google, which is also the U.S. landing party for Monet. Construction of the system is underway and is expected to be completed in 2017.
The Monet cable will terminate in the U.S. at Equinix’s MI3 International Business Exchange (IBX) data center. In Brazil, Monet will land in Fortaleza and Praia Grande near São Paulo. Landing facilities in those markets are to be provided by Angola Cables in Fortaleza and Google in Praia Grande.
Equinix said this represents an industry first for deploying an open submarine cable architecture together with an integrated cable landing station; colocation and interconnection inside a network-dense, multi-tenant data center.
Current submarine cable projects that Equinix is engaged with and has publically announced include: Southern Cross Cable Network (California – Sydney); Aqua Comms (New York – London); Hibernia Express (New York – London); Cinia (Germany – Finland); Trident (Australia – Indonesia – Singapore); Globenet (Florida – Brazil); Asia Pacific Gateway (China – Hong Kong – Japan – South Korea – Malaysia – Taiwan – Thailand – Vietnam – Singapore); Hawaiki Cable Limited (U.S. – Australia – New Zealand); Gulf Bridge International (Middle East – Europe); FASTER (U.S. West Coast – Japan); Seaborn Networks (New York – Sao Paulo); and Monet (Florida – Brazil).
“As data traffic continues to grow, from Facebook videos and Instagram selfies to Office 365 sessions and IoT connected devices, there is an unprecedented surge in construction of new submarine cables that currently carry 99 percent of this and all Internet traffic between continents. The investors in these new submarine cable systems, which now include large cloud service providers and content companies, are finding that when these submarine cables terminate on land, Equinix data centers are the optimal location to immediately connect these point to point submarine cables into a single location that directly connects to thousands of networks,” stated Ihab Tarazi, CTO, Equinix.
