The connection, which has an initial throughput capacity of 1.7Tbps, runs overland through Poland and Belarus.
“The new route between Moscow and Frankfurt is yet another step for MegaFon towards securing a foothold on the Europe-Asia data transmission market, where fast content delivery is key,” said Natalya Taldykina, MegaFon’s director for corporate business development.
Bertold Frech, head of carrier enterprise services at Deutsche Telekom International Carrier Sales & Solutions (ICSS), added: “Deutsche Telekom ICSS already has a reputation as a top-quality service provider in the region. Our customers can now enjoy even more benefits from this high-performance, large-capacity route. We were pleased to be chosen to work together with MegaFon, a collaboration that highlights the advantages of cooperative partnerships.”
ICSS provided the 17 wavelengths of 100G each between the Polish/Belarusian border to Frankfurt.
The partners said that making the route as short and straight as possible was a priority of this project. “The optimal cable length combined with state-of-the-art coherent DWDM equipment enables a 15% increase in the data transfer rate for virtually all services provided by the company, from mobile internet to large-scale customer services.”
Taldykina added: “Available capacity has already been fully booked by our Russian and international customers until the end of 2018. We chose to work with ICSS over other competitors because of their technical know-how and contractual criteria.”
MegaFon CTO Pavel Korchagin said: “At present, there are lots of links to Frankfurt, including underwater cable systems, but our route outperforms them in terms of both the RTD and the service support quality. For instance, a failure in an underwater cable takes from two weeks to three or four months to fix, whereas for overland routes the average repair time totals four to six hours.”
Deutsche Telekom ICSS and MegaFon have long worked together. Five years ago they announced plans to expand the TransBaltic Gateway eastwards towards Asia. For that project, MegaFon provided the connectivity through its network in Russia and its capabilities in Kazakhstan, and planned to extend its present route to run from Frankfurt to China.
