Russian telco Rostelecom is responding to growing competition from China Telecom Europe with plans to deploy a 100G connection on its Europe to Middle East cable.
The Russian operator has signed up Alcatel-Lucent to roll out the link over 3,500km of its North-South Transit cable in its home market, as it seeks to meet growing demand for bandwidth and cut its per-bit delivery costs. The infrastructure firm is supplying its optical coherent technology, which delivers 100Gbps on each of the 80 wavelengths of optical fiber.
“We need to cost-efficiently increase the capacity and throughput of our key backbone routes,” explains Ivan Zima, executive director of communications in Rostelecom’s network planning and development department. The investment will improve the “performance and flexibility,” of the firm’s optical network, “and enable us to address the rapid growth in demand for high-speed data transmission,” Zima adds.
However, the investment is also necessary to counter the growing presence of China Telecom’s European subsidiary.
Ou Yan, managing director of the firm, recently told Telecoms Europe.net the firm is looking to expand its regional operations with offices in Russia and Turkey, and is currently updating terrestrial cable links connecting Europe and China via Russia. The firm is also working on direct links between London and Dubai that would compete directly with Rostelecom’s connections.