A new 100 GB link under the Atlantic for OVH customers

To handle ever increasing traffic, on March 15, 2016, the OVH network team installed a new submarine link under the Atlantic. The undersea cable, FLAG Atlantic-1, joins Northport in the United States and Skewjack in the United Kingdom.

To handle ever increasing traffic, on March 15, 2016, the OVH network team installed a new submarine link under the Atlantic. The undersea cable, FLAG Atlantic-1, joins Northport in the United States and Skewjack in the United Kingdom.

Each day, more than 12 petabytes (tens of thousands of terabytes) flow under the Atlantic through OVH’s own network. Developed progressively, for several years now, this network delivers data from numerous points of presence in the United States and connects the North American datacentres with the group’s other 14 European datacentres. In September 2015, Laurent Allard announced at the OVH Summit the construction of new datacentres around the world, with two in the United States, located respectively on the east and west coasts of the country.

For Antoine Guenet, member of the OVH Network Team, installing this transatlantic link serves as a step forward for the group’s customers. With a latency of as little as 67 milliseconds round trip time (RTT), this link allows for larger volumes of data to be transferred even faster and offers OVH the possibility to send traffic much closer to its customers’ local operators. The group has signed agreements with US operators such as Comcast, Cox, Bell and Videotron for direct interconnections with its own network.

There have been fibers connecting the two continents for several years, but on March 15, 2016, a new direction was taken by installing a new 100 GB link connecting the United Kingdom with the United States. Passing under the Atlantic, this cable can transit up to 100GB of data per second. In the weeks to come, several more 100 GB links will be installed, increasing the overall capacity of the transatlantic network to 6 x 100G.