Equinix to Open New Digital Gateway to Northern Europe with Eastern Light Submarine Cable

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and LONDON, May 16, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the global interconnection and data center company, today announced it is working with Eastern Light for its new international fiber optic cable route in northern Europe. The new cable system is non-amplified and designed to let customers use their own equipment on their own dark fiber and will go from Sweden (Stockholm) to Finland (Hanko, Helsinki and Kotka). Along this route the cable will terminate in two Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX®) data centers — HE6 in Helsinki and SK2 in Stockholm — which are key interconnection points for the Nordics and help facilitate the flow of global internet traffic in and out of the region.

As global enterprises look to capitalize on the business opportunity in the Nordics, they are finding that they also require more capacity to run IT operations including cloud-based applications and Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. By connecting to Equinix data centers, Eastern Light and its dark fiber customers can leverage Equinix's mature business ecosystems and interconnection platform – Platform Equinix™ – which provides unparalleled access to the markets and ecosystems that drive digital business worldwide.

Highlights / Key Facts

• The private Stockholm-based company Eastern Light is in the process of building a series of new international fiber optic cable routes in northern Europe, with a focus on selling dark fiber to operators as well as other customers with special requirements for controlling their own infrastructure. Eastern Light's main supplier of its sea cable system is NSW (Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke GmbH) and the system has been optimized to feature Ciena's GeoMesh solutions as part of its dark fiber offering. The Sweden–Finland portion of the cable is scheduled for completion in autumn 2017.
• The Eastern Light cable combines the cable landing station and interconnection hub into a single solution at Equinix's Helsinki and Stockholm data centers, eliminating the need for a beach cable landing station. This reduces cost, complexity and points of failure, and enables Eastern Light's customers to scale its bandwidth using advanced networking technologies like SDN.
• According to the European Commission's Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) 2017, Denmark (1), Finland (2), Sweden (3) and the Netherlands (4) have the most advanced digital economies in the EU. The index also states that, "access to fast broadband-enabled services is a necessary condition for competitiveness." DESI is a composite index that summarizes relevant indicators on Europe's digital performance and tracks the evolution of EU member states in digital competitiveness.
• Equinix's Stockholm and Helsinki data centers anchor Equinix's global interconnection platform in the Nordics to businesses that increasingly require interconnection at the digital edge. When subsea cable systems are linked to cloud and content ecosystems inside Equinix, users can access a variety of scalable cloud services almost anywhere they need to be. And because Equinix is carrier-neutral, subsea system operators can offer excess network capacity to customers who otherwise couldn't as quickly or efficiently reach the markets being served by new subsea architectures.
• During Equinix's recent Q1 2017 earnings call, the company announced that it is maintaining significant momentum as the interconnection partner for new submarine cable projects globally, including recently winning its fifteenth project.

Quotes

• Svante Jurnell, CEO and founder, Eastern Light:
  "We see a huge potential in connecting our system to Equinix' data centers. Eastern Light's focus is to build and provide efficient long-haul dark fiber routes in the Nordic region, and the new link between Equinix' HE6 and SK2 data centers will be considerably more direct and cost-effective than existing routes.

We have also made it our mission to make it as simple and reliable as possible for our customers to light up their own dark fibers by working closely with Ciena throughout the network planning phase. This ensured that we can provide accurate capacity statements and network optimization when bundled with a turnkey solution from Ciena."

• Dan Thompson, analyst, 451 Research:
  "Over the last decade, dramatic improvements were made in the electro-optical transceivers at the ends of the existing cables that increased the capacity faster than the load was growing, but that's an improvement that's run out of steam, especially given the increasing back-end data center traffic."
  
  
• Eric Schwartz, president EMEA, Equinix:
  "The vast majority of global data traffic is carried through submarine cables – this is critical infrastructure. A greater proliferation of these cables is essential in this digital age, when organizations depend on instant connectivity to markets and partners worldwide. As subsea cables connect more places, they enable the low latency that real-time technologies like those supporting electronic trading and the Internet of Things require."

Additional Resources

• Equinix Builds Momentum as a Critical Partner in Next-Generation Submarine Cable Projects to Accommodate Unprecedented Data Growth [press release]
• Taking Subsea Cable Systems to the Heart of Interconnection [blog]
• Visit http://www.easternlight.se/ for more information on Eastern Light [website]

About Equinix
Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) connects the world's leading businesses to their customers, employees and partners inside the most interconnected data centers. In 44 markets across five continents, Equinix is where companies come together to realize new opportunities and accelerate their business, IT and cloud strategies. www.equinix.com.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from expectations discussed in such forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause such differences include, but are not limited to, the challenges of acquiring, operating and constructing IBX centers and developing, deploying and delivering Equinix services; unanticipated costs or difficulties relating to the integration of companies we have acquired or will acquire into Equinix; a failure to receive significant revenue from customers in recently built out or acquired data centers; failure to complete any financing arrangements contemplated from time to time; competition from existing and new competitors; the ability to generate sufficient cash flow or otherwise obtain funds to repay new or outstanding indebtedness; the loss or decline in business from our key customers; and other risks described from time to time in Equinix's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, see Equinix's recent quarterly and annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, copies of which are available upon request from Equinix. Equinix does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this press release.

Equinix and IBX are registered trademarks of Equinix, Inc. 
International Business Exchange is a trademark of Equinix, Inc.

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SOURCE Equinix, Inc.