Outline of the Atlantic Fibre Optic Cable Seascape: EXA

EXA has emerged as the dominant player on the Atlantic routes. Its original subsea network consisted of the the highly diverse North and South Hibernia cables complemented by the much faster and younger Express cable. 

  • North EXA cable was RFS 2001. It connects London & New York via landings highly diverse to its competitors. North lands in Canada at Halifax and at Southport, UK. In contrast, most Atlantic cables land near New York City and in Cornwall near Bude. North's diversity makes it an excellent choice for network planners focusing on resiliency. Obviously, the cable's latency is high, but that is generally the tradeoff one must accept to achieve physical diversity. I think the RTD 60 Hudson/Telehouse London is probably 76 ms. dfs
  • South EXA cable was also RFS 2001. It lands at the same CLS as North on both sides of the Atlantic. I believe the latency is slightly higher. 
  • Express was built much later (RFS 2015). It is designed to be the lowest latency path from LD4 Slough Equinix to NY4 Secaucas Equinix. It has six fibre pairs and each pair is spooled in order to create latency tiers. Most of these tiers are priced high enough that the only interested parties are low latency traders. But the slowest tier at around 67 ms RTD is meant for general bandwidth consumers. 


  • EXA is ambitious. It has purchased via IRU a Dunant fibre pair in order to offer its highly popular direct Ashburn Equinix to Paris route that completely bypasses Ireland and the UK. Dunant is diverse to the usual suspects that move traffic to Europe via UK landings. Furthermore, the key East Coast Internet hub is Ashburn Equinix. New York is simply not that important any more. Both 111 8th Avenue and 60 Hudson have been dethroned. 
  • EXA has also acquired spectrum on the Amitié and Havfrue cables. This enables the carrier to offer a wide range of transport options. Amitié lands at EXA's Boston CLS with backhaul to Manhattan POPs & Secaucus Equinix. On the European side it lands at Bordeaux with a subse branch to London. Finally, Havrue connects New York to Copenhagen while bypassing Ireland and the UK. So the EXA subsea transport menu is really unbeatable. It offers a combination of low latency and highly diverse routes that provides one stop shopping to most carriers. EXA is well positioned to dominate the market. 




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