Due to go live in March 2012, Telstra claims the PoP underlines its credentials as a major Ethernet player in the European market, and gives it further scope for advancements in eastern Europe.
The interconnection will give the global operator two major entry points in the region through one of Europe’s most central locations.
As part of the expansion, announced at PTC 2012 this morning, Telstra said it is committed to developing more diverse routes between Europe and Asia, as part of a drive towards providing customers with low latency trading routes, in addition to addressing a growing demand for high speed services between the regions.
Jim Clarke, SVP for global carrier services at Telstra, said: “The Frankfurt PoP and the trans-Mongolian route offer one of Europe’s most reliable and shortest connections to and from Hong Kong compared to the traditional route via the Mediterranean Sea which is used to deliver bandwidth between the two regions.”
In a rather unprecedented move made late last year, one of Telstra’s major competitors NTT, through its European subsidiary, NTT Europe, avoided further expansion in Frankfurt and opted to go further east, with the launch of three PoPs in Budapest, Bucharest and Sofia. Simon Waller, head of EMEA sales at NTT commented at the time the furthest east NTT has traditionally looked is to Frankfurt, but there were now “so many elements to international backhaul it is increasingly hard to avoid the eastern part of the continent”.
It may depend on the success of NTT Europe in these regions, as to whether other global operators such as Telstra will also begin to look beyond Frankfurt to eastern Europe to meet its customer demands in Europe.
