FEATURE
OTEGLOBE:
The Enabler for New Interconnection Opportunities in Greece and the Mediterranean BY PANAGIOTA BOSDOGIANNI
I
n today’s Internet, route and provider diversity, quality characteristics and security, are requirements that are mainly driven by content and cloud providers. Companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are responsible for almost three quarters of the total international traffic growth. This trend, not only sets new rules for resiliency and redundancy, but also impacts the topology of networks as we know them today. The increased adoption of IoT, the need for faster decision making, the minimization of outages on major cloud providers, the evolvement of 5G and the growth of Machine to Machine communication, push OTTs and cloud providers to bring the intelligence of cloud services to the edge. New services and available computing resources on many of the connected devices, put more strict quality and security requirements on the network. The cloud should ensure proximity in order to achieve the minimum latency and jitter. In the past, submarine cables landing in Europe were serving traffic aiming the main Western European hubs. However, today’s explosion of demand for digital content in Africa, Middle East, and Asia means that European interconnection hubs should no longer be the only Points of Interconnection to reach the most popular content, since
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content providers will prefer to move this content to the Edge. For Europe this means moving closer to the landing stations of international cables. We have seen this happening already in Marseille, but starts to emerge in other areas with similar potential, like Athens, Greece. The Mediterranean Sea is an area with traditionally strong presence of submarine cables. As expected, there are two types of submarine cables, mainly classified by their purpose and span: • Regional cables (with landing points mainly within the Mediterranean Sea). They are used to interconnect islands with the mainland, neighboring countries or Northern African/ Western Asian countries with the closest opposite country in Europe • Intercontinental cables (with landing points mostly outside Mediterranean Sea) that are used to interconnect Asia to Europe. After nearly a decade of limited investment in submarine cables, the last few years have seen a market increase in the number of new cables all over the world, which is also reflected to the Mediterranean region, as depicted in the Figure below: