Crosslake's CrossChannel Cable

Besides Scylla and Zeus, Crosslake's CrossChannel is the only other new English Channel cable built in the last 20 years. There was a 1998-2002 subsea construction boom and in wake of the subsequent capacity glut affecting the Atlantic and Europe, all further building ceased until the last 5 years. Scylla and CrossChannel are similar in many respects : unrepeatered 96 fibre pair double armoured cables owned by private operators as opposed to consortiums and both backed by infrastructure funds. The consortium model is less common in North America and Europe because there are fewer barriers to entry such as monopoly or semi-deregulated telecom markets. So including the incumbents in order to facilitate landing a subsea cable is unnecessary. It is interesting that all three cables are unrepeatered. Prior to their construction, most or all of the English Channel cables were low fibre count, repeatered networks. I suspect improvements in fibre purity and more importantly coherent optics (thanks to Mark Tinka for this point) played a big role in getting the industry to consider unrepeatered options. Scylla uses ultra-low loss Corning glass and that makes sense given the absence of amplification along the route. 

CrossChannel is an ultra-high capacity system capable of 2.4 petabits using current technology that bypasses London and directly connects the Telecom Mecca of Slough Equinix to PAR3 and PAR7 in Paris. Since London is a single telecom point of failure and most players can already be reached outside of London proper in the suburbs where Slough Equinix' main facilities are located, this bypass routing is a huge physical diversity advantage. The other advantage is that CrossChannel is the lowest latency path from the UK financial market trading engines, housed in Slough Equinix data centres, to their French counterparts. This is why EXA Infrastructure, which focuses on low latency routes and owns the famous Express Cable, purchased a pair on Crosslake's English Channel network. EUNetworks has also purchased CrossChannel capacity which it uses for low latency routes between the UK, French, and Spanish financial markets.