Colt & Apollo South

Colt has bought capacity on Vodafone's Apollo South cable, one of the first Trans-Atlantic cables to directly connect France to the United States (along with Flag Atlantic 1). Apollo was RFS 2003. I was surprised Colt would buy capacity on a 8 terabit cable that has already 22 years of service under its belt. Apollo is a low capacity system facing similar operating expenses to higher capacity systems, hence its pricing should be generally much higher. In general, Colt appears to be mostly interested in serving the low latency end of the financial markets, mostly market markers (providing a bid and ask for a financial asset) and financial traders. Hence the most plausible explanation is that Apollo South provides a low latency route connecting Paris and Frankfurt to the NYSE and NASDAQ data centers in New Jersey as well as the other financial markets like BATS located at NY4, Secaucus Equinix. Another possible angle might be that the cable is not only low latency, but also highly diverse to FA1. Flag Atlantic 1 is a bit lower latency than Apollo, but the two cables are diverse. So Apollo could be the backup for financial traders. EXA's Express is the lowest latency cable NY4/LD4, but only end users in general can be buy its capacity. So Colt is probably combining Flag Atlantic 1 with Apollo South to provide a second best low latency service. Mind you, this is just informed speculation on my part. I have no insider sources of information at Colt. More information available at https://lnkd.in/dtrNm-AT.#

Postscript. Did learn from a Colt source that this capacity was part of the Lumen acquisition, which means it is probably a fibre pair.

Map of Apollo South Subsea Cable


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