This year businesses all over the world will be more connected than ever as new submarine cables will link Europe to Asia, Africa and the Middle East. While these cables present a number of new business opportunities, the real break with the past is how they will interact with their anchor points.
Until now, each submarine cable would connect to landing stations that were operated by only one or two backhaul providers. Using these older cables therefore meant being stuck in a non-competitive backhaul environment that increased operational costs. However these new cables are flipping that script by using carrier-dense data centres as endpoints. This will give communications providers a range of backhaul vendors to choose from.
Two such cables will be setting up end points in Marseille in 2016, which already acts as one of the primary connectivity gateways to Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
In April 2014, Interxion saw the opportunity to invest in Marseille for just this reason. Marseille is ideal as a gateway to and from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia and there are already 12 subsea cables that terminate in the city. When fully built out, MRS1 will offer approximately 6,400 square metres of equipable space.
MRS1 already houses more than 80 connectivity providers that will interconnect with these cables as they come online. Among these providers are a number of EU network backhaul providers that can interconnect with businesses entering the continent for the first time, affording competitive pricing for backhaul from Marseille to other key cities in Europe including hubs like Frankfurt, Paris, London and Amsterdam.
All of this will be in the service of a much more fluid connectivity market that will be reflected in not just competitive backhaul pricing, but improved latency and larger global reach for businesses working between data centres.
Read more about our data centre in Marseille to better understand the benefits of having a presence in this highly sought-after PoP.