Orange, Telxius partner on Dunant submarine cable to drive terrestrial backhaul extensions

Orange, one of world’s leading telecommunications operators, and major investor in over 40 submarine cables has teamed up with Telxius, the communications infrastructure company of the Telefónica Group, to collaborate in Europe and the United States on backhaul extensions for the Dunant cable, a Google project.

The Atlantic is one of the world's busiest network routes and the Dunant cable will address the massive growth in data and content needs between Europe and the U.S. This 6,600km-long transatlantic cable will connect the United States to the French Atlantic coast and aims to launch services in late 2020.

Under this agreement, Orange and Telxius offer co-location services at their respective Cable Landing Stations in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez (France) and Virginia Beach (US) and operate them. Both are strategic locations as they are located near main connectivity hubs on both sides of the Atlantic.

From its Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez (85) Cable Landing Station, Orange will enable terrestrial connection to Telxius up to Paris, while Telxius will connect Orange to Ashburn from Virginia Beach.

This collaboration represents a strong transatlantic bridge as both companies can effectively provide multi-terabit capacity on this Europe-US route.

It also reinforces Orange and Telxius’ respective positions to support the development of new digital usages for their international customers in Europe and America and bolsters the international leadership position of both companies on the wholesale market to better address the needs of content-providers and third-party operators.

“We are pleased to announce this agreement with Telxius, which will allow us to provide our customers with very high capacity end-to-end services, as well as network redundancy, on the strategic transatlantic route. We will be operating two fiber pairs of over 30 terabits per second between France and the USA. It is a valuable extension to Orange’s global network joining our Atlantic and Mediterranean routes to Africa, the Middle East and Asia with guaranteed best in class quality of service,” said Jerome Barré, CEO of Orange Wholesale and International Networks.

“This agreement confirms our commitment to provide the best services to our partners and customers, offering the latest technology, diverse routes and best latency. We are pleased to join forces with Orange on this new route which in combination with our existing MAREA system puts Telxius in an excellent position in the strategic Europe – US route,” said Mario Martín, Telxius CEO.