European Fibre Upgrades: EXA Strikes Back

EXA has deployed G.652d fibre across much of its European backbone with the important routes receiving priority. Chart below shows the paths that have been upgraded. EXA's western European network consists largely of the Interoute assets plus a Bulgarian company that had fibre and conduit into Turkey. It is a highly dense network that gives EXA's Atlantic cables and Trans-Atlantic capacity (it owns a fibre pair on Dunant as well as some capacity on Amitié and other cables) the ability to deliver traffic from Chicago and Equinix all the way to Instanbul. This dense footprint allows to deliver traffic at lower costs then its main competitor, Telxius.

The carrier has the same basic reasons to upgrade as EUNetworks, namely fibre depletion, hyperscaler demand for long haul dark fibre, and the improved performance of modern fibre with less bending and linear attenuation. Its marketing emphasizes that it is deploying G.652d fibre, but I believe this is just marketing to reassure potential customers the fibre is backward compatible for splicing purposes.. EXA is using Corning Ultra G.652d fibre. And this fibre meets the bending attenuation requirements of both G.657a and G.657b. To quote Corning, "SMF-28 Ultra fiber is fully compliant to ITU-T G.652.D as well as ITU-T G.657.A1... SMF-28 Ultra fiber maintains full backward compatibility with traditional standard single-mode fibers, which means no trade-offs and splice performance..." EXA says that the attenuation on its Corning low loss fibre should be .18, which puts its very close to the .15 dB per kilometer mark for standard submarine cable.

So EXA's fibre choice looks identical to what carriers like EUNetworks is deploying and probably for the same reason. Improvement in linear attenuation is slowing. So one of the few areas where we can significantly improve signal to noise ratio and get higher throughput is via reducing the bending attenuation that occurs in building, splice boxes, manholes, etc. What does differentiate EXA from other European long haul carriers is the amount of empty conduit at its disposal. Interoute built a lot of conduit. This means EXA can do very cost effective, large scale upgrades as the labor cost is not much more to install 2X fibre pairs than X fibre pairs. There is a bit ambiguity in EXA press releases regarding the number of pairs being deployed. My reading suggests the magic number is either 216 or 432 fibre pairs. I suspect the former number is more likely although if this is a viewed as a regular 20 year upgrade cycle a strong case for the latter. EXA is owned by a venture firm capital. These firms have generally 3 to 5 year investment horizons. They demand rapid growth so they are quite willing to make big investments in fibre. One difference between EXA and EUNetworks is that the latter has pension fund owners. They have much longer investment horizons which means less pressure and less likelihood of mistakes.