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 di...