On Wednesday, digital multinational infrastructure firm Equinix and telecommunications giant Vodafone announced that they will jointly build a new subsea hub in Genoa, Italy, to be called GN1. Under the partnership, Vodafone, which is the cable consortium’s lead for European landings, will land its 2Africa cable system at Genoa, using Equinix’s GN1 facility as a strategic interconnection point for the subsea cable system.
Located on the northwest coast of Italy, Genoa has been a global center for maritime trade for many centuries, and with the advent of digital trade, remains well-positioned as a major location on the global subsea cable map.
2Africa
2Africa is one of the world’s largest submarine telecommunications cable projects, driven by a group of partners, including Vodafone, along with China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, stc, Telecom Egypt, and WIOCC. The cable will circumnavigate the entire African continent, directly connecting 16 countries to Europe and the Middle East. Equinix hosts over 2,950 cloud and IT service providers on its global platform and can support subsea cable systems in 40 subsea-enabled metros around the world. 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.
GN1 will deliver added internet capacity and reliability, supporting the further growth of 4G, 5G and fixed broadband access for hundreds of millions of people. The project will also drive the growth of increasingly digitized economies across Europe by strengthening connectivity between European countries. The hub is being built in line with global environmental standards and is expected to utilize 100 percent renewable energy.
Milan
Equinix recently launched a major International Business Exchange (IBX) colocation data center in Milan, known as ML5. The project marks Equinix’s fourth data center in Milan, where its digital infrastructure sites support more than 160 companies, including multiple major financial firms and Italy’s only stock exchange, Borsa Italiana. GN1 will have a direct fiber connection to ML5, allowing Equinix customers to increase the number of partners they connect with and expand their reach into new markets.
“I am thrilled we are adding a new metro to our EMEA portfolio,” said Equinix’s EMEA President Eugene Bergen Henegouwen. “Equinix’s Genoa site provides a great landing hub for subsea cable operators, whilst at the same time boosting the digital ecosystems at our recently announced Milan flagship, ML5.”
The combination of 2Africa’s landing in the new Genoa site and the direct connection to Milan means GN1 will offer a new, complementary and diverse alternative option for the Mediterranean region. As Genoa’s first carrier-neutral data center, GN1 will provide a capacity of 150 cabinet equivalents, and colocation space of approximately 6,000 square feet (560 square meters).
“The 2Africa project is vitally important to improving connectivity between Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and will also improve intra-European connectivity,” said Vodafone Carrier Services Director Nick Gliddon, in a statement on the deal. “By linking Spain and Portugal directly to Genoa and Milan, the system will avoid fiber bottlenecks that naturally occur between France and Spain, further strengthening Vodafone’s Gigabit networks.”
Growth market
2Africa is expected to deliver more than the total combined capacity of all subsea cables serving Africa today, with a design capacity of up to 180 Tbps on key segments of the system. This will be vital to help build a digital society ready for services that require a large amount of data transfer, such as cloud computing or video.
The African continent is experiencing a critical period of digital transformation and development of its digital economy. Per Equinix, digital technologies are expected to play a major part in improving quality of life for people across Africa over the next few years, while driving regional economic development. Figures from industry group GSMA indicate the number of mobile internet users in Africa will continue to grow rapidly, largely due to the popularization of smartphones and lack of fixed-line telecommunications infrastructure, which in turn has led to a boom in new services such as mobile payment, instant messaging, online streaming media and short video.
Equinix recently released the fourth edition of its Global Interconnection Index (GXI) market study, which predicts overall interconnection bandwidth—the measure of private connectivity for the transfer of data between organizations—will achieve a 45 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2019 to 2023, globally. Expected growth will be driven by digital transformation, primarily through greater enterprise demand, as companies extend their digital infrastructure from centralized locations to distributed edge locations.
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