DREAM aims to connect Europe and China with a 8,700km terrestrial route. From China, the cable will connect into PoPs across Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Austria and Germany.
The project is schedule to launch in mid-October.
(L to R) Evgeny Chermashentsev, director, corporate business, MegaFon; Raphael Abykhanov CCO, Kazakhtelecom; Ivan Tavrin CEO, MegaFon; Renzo Ravaglia, EVP, service provider business, Interoute; Alexander Teremetsky, carrier business director, MegaFon, at the DREAM launch event.
“The unique geographical position of Russia allows us to offer the optimum data transmission route for the growing Asian and European markets,” said Alexander Teremetsky, carrier business director at MegaFon. “We believe that development in this area is particularly promising as the volume of traffic transmitted from Europe to Asia is constantly growing year-on-year, and demand for capacity is growing as well,” he added.
According to Teremetsky, during Capacity Russia 2013, held in Moscow this October, a key Russian player in the international transit market confirmed that it sold more capacity between Europe and Asia last year than it had done in the preceding five years.
MegaFon has exclusively shared with Capacity that it is targeting a 20% share in terrestrial Europe-Asia bandwidth going through Russia for the first stage of the DREAM project.
According to the company, the initial capacity for the route between Frankfurt in Germany and Zharkent in Kazakhstan will be approximately 100Gbps, with a potential upgrade of up to 8Tbps. The DREAM project strengthens a long-term partnership between Russian carrier MegaFon and Kazakhtelecom, and the launch is expected to further provide resiliency and redundancy in connecting the two markets.
“We hope that our joint activities with Kazakhtelecom for this project will lead to further projects in the future,” said Teremetsky. “We would like to establish further commercial activities with the Kazakh operator in the fields of IP transit, lease-lines and perhaps voice interconnections.”
