CONNECTIVITY THROUGH THE PANDEMIC: RISING TO THE CHALLENGE THROUGH COLLABORATION AND AGILITY

Originally published on the Pacific Telecommunications Council blog on August 13, 2020.

Now more than ever, it’s paramount that our connected world remains so. NJFX is handling the pandemic with the team’s usual forward-thinking approach. As a Tier 3 Cable Landing Station colocation campus with four subsea cable systems and nine terrestrial backhaul providers, NJFX is a designated critical infrastructure site. As such, our team is always prepared and ready with emergency response plans to address hurricanes, terrorist attacks, or even widespread power outages. A global pandemic, however, wasn’t part of that equation. The pandemic is certainly unique, unchartered territory and caused organizations globally to rethink standard operating procedures and exhaust spare inventory network capacity. Now, we continue to face supply chain issues as we prepare for the fall and a potential second wave or other unforeseen natural or man-made disaster.

There can be challenges in our ability to reach traditional network hubs in major U.S. cities, especially when considering having to use public transportation and elevators in high-rise buildings, which can go against current safety protocols. In addition, global social unrest continues to be aimed in these cities with the highest risk for additional virus outbreaks and potential violence. Our industry workforce component of essential employees has endured these challenges and will continue to do so. Still to come, challenges of returning to work while children may be continuing to engage in virtual learning for the new school year. In the U.S., as we continue down the path of subsea systems going on 20 years, we will soon be left with only four systems less than 10 years old this year, and one of those is in financial distress. In the U.S., our main East Coast fiber routes were all built about 20 years ago and have too much commonality, which allows for failures to potentially happen simultaneously. Combine that with an essential workforce that is stressed, and this could lead to unpredictable outage times.

Collaboration is needed for restoration on upcoming events and long-term investments to ensure this age of network interconnection can provide 100 percent uptime. In our current information age of instantaneous awareness through social media, every minute counts for us to know what’s happening.

At NJFX, we are fortunate with our suburban environment in a two-story building that was designed for contactless access. We now have more physical fiber count cables and capacity per cable than any other network hub in the U.S. Our role is vital. We built the facility as “Tier 3 by the Subsea,” but in this unpredictable world, the fear about the unknown continues and our team is focused on making sure we, along with our customers, are all prepared.

In this challenging time, the industry has had to either find ways to adapt to this very fluid situation or risk many unknowns related to both the physical health of our employees and the economic health of our businesses. This situation has forced organizations to rethink the status quo, be flexible, and not take normal operating procedures for granted.

What we have learned is that our industry is very resilient, robust, and able to rise to the challenge. The Internet did not break, it’s what has kept us together, connected, and relatively stable. As long as our collective focus remains on solving unique challenges and working together, we will continue in the spirit of what sets us apart. We’re ready and dedicated to ensuring our customers, employees, and vendors are prepared and safe. Together, we will not only deliver what our ecosystem has come to expect from us, but we will work to offer even greater capacity, connectivity, and opportunities than ever before.

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About NJFX:

NJFX is a Tier 3 Carrier Neutral Cable Landing Station campus. Our colocation ecosystem has expanded to over 35 network operators offering flexibility, reliability, and security. Our Wall, NJ location provides direct access to multiple subsea cable systems giving our carriers diverse connectivity solutions and offers direct interconnection without recurring cross-connect fees.

The North Atlantic Loop

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

The North Atlantic Loop

Published by SubTelForum on July 22, 2020

July 23, 2020

Aqua Comms, the independent carriers’ carrier and the owner-operator of five subsea cables will be launching its North Atlantic Loop in the second half of 2020.

The North Atlantic Loop will comprise of two major Trans-Atlantic cables and three regional cables to bring to the market diverse, resilient and uniquely routed subsea cables. These will combine to deliver enhanced capacity services to the North Atlantic markets of the US, through to Ireland, the UK and the Nordics – all with diverse routing and landings.

This new offering will provide critical infrastructure to key data centre markets as well as the major telecoms markets within the east coast of the US and western Europe.

Two of the 5 cable systems in play are:

AEC-1 (America-Europe Connect-1) that went RFS in 2016 and runs from New York to Dublin
CC-1 (CeltixConnect-1) that went RFS in 2012 and runs from Dublin to Wales and on to London

Three new cable systems are expected to go live in 2020:

AEC-2 (America-Europe Connect-2) from New Jersey (NJFX) to Denmark (Blaabjerg)
CC-2 (CeltixConnect-2) from Dublin (Clonshaugh) to UK (Blackpool)
NSC (North Sea Connect) from UK (Newcastle) to Denmark (Houstrup)

AEC-2 will be the first new Trans-Atlantic cable to land in Denmark (Blaabjerg) in nearly 20 years – since TAT-14, a cable which is due to be retired in December 2020. On the US side, AEC-2 lands in NJFX in Wall, New Jersey – an industry-leading carrier-neutral cable landing station (CLS) campus and Tier 3 data centre. AEC-2 will also branch into Ireland (Old Head), a diverse landing to the existing AEC-1 landing Killala, before routing on to Dublin. This new cable therefore offers route diversity from end to end, and will deliver secure, modern subsea cable capability from the US to the Nordics, Ireland and the UK.

CC-2 will be Aqua Comms’ second unrepeated cable across the Irish Sea, running from Clonshaugh, Dublin via the CLS in Loughshinny, to Blackpool, UK. CC-2 will offer multiple fibre pairs on a brand new route, again designed to deliver secure and reliable services between Ireland and the UK. CC-2 will partner with CC-1 to deliver diversity and resilience between the UK and Ireland as part of the North Atlantic Loop.

NSC will connect Denmark (Houstrup) to the UK across the North Sea to the Stellium carrier neutral data centre in Newcastle, UK. Its Danish landing will connect through a terrestrial fibre link to Blaabjerg as part of the North Atlantic Loop whilst also providing diversity of landings for NSC and AEC-2.

To continue reading the rest of this article, please read it in Issue 113 of the SubTel Forum Magazine on page 39 or on our archive site here.

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About NJFX:

The North Atlantic Loop Read More »

“Every Submarine Cable Project Is Unique”

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

“Every Submarine Cable Project Is Unique”

An interview with Michael Cunningham, CEO of Crosslake Fibre

Originally posted 23 June 2020 on SubCableWorld.com.

June 29, 2020

WALL TOWNSHIP, NJ –

Editor’s note: In recent years, submarine fiber optic cables have been appearing everywhere. The industry is familiar with the large-scale OTT-sponsored cables being built around the world, but others are taking advantage of the advancement in submarine cable technology to put cables along routes that were never considered before.

One system that definitely falls into the latter category is a submarine cable system that entered service last year in Lake Ontario. Built by Crosslake Fibre, the cable is, as far as SubCableWorld can determine, the longest fiber optic cable ever installed in a body of fresh water.

SCW recently had the pleasure to speak with Michael Cunningham, CEO of Crosslake Fibre, about the Lake Ontario project and the company’s plans for future systems.

Mr. Cunningham: Crosslake Fibre is a submarine fiber optic cable system developer based in Toronto, Canada. We’ve built a cable across Lake Ontario connecting Canada and the United States and we’re developing three other submarine cable systems.

The Lake Ontario cable entered service in October. This is a 58-kilometer cable installed across the lake that forms part of a route between Buffalo and Toronto. Now that the route is in service, we are looking to extend our network. Early this year, we announced that we were have extended our backhaul capacity into Equinix’s TR2 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) in Toronto and its NY4 IBX in Secaucus, New Jersey. Our network also extends to the NJFX submarine cable landing station/data center complex in Wall, New Jersey, where we can connect to some of the international submarine cables landing there, such as the transatlantic cables and Seaborn’s Seabras-1 to South America.

Due to the relatively short distance across Lake Ontario, we were able to use non-repeatered cable with a high fiber count. The submarine cable we used supplied by Hexatronic and has 192 fiber strands. This gives us a design capacity in the thousands of terabits per second.

As the non-repeatered cable isn’t powered in the way that repeatered cables are, we didn’t need the traditional large cable landing station. We were able to bring the submarine cable right into the network on either side of the lake.

Every submarine cable project is unique and presents a different set of challenges and the Lake Ontario build is no different. In terms of a location and geography to install a cable, it’s definitely one where there is a comparatively benign environment, especially compared to the ocean conditions where most submarine fiber optic cables are laid. In Lake Ontario, you have a lakebed that is relatively soft and easy to install a cable into. You don’t have a lot of challenging geologic features. It’s not the busiest place in the world and there’s not a lot of current. The weather is not as extreme as you see in the ocean. So it was a very good kind of place to install a cable.

Our next project will connect the United Kingdom and France across the English Channel. There hasn’t been a new and dedicated fiber optic cable built across the English Channel in almost 20 years. We’re looking to be the next generation of cables along that route.

We’re in the process of developing the cable project and to kick off the material work in the next month. It’s a very similar design to the Lake Ontario cable. It’s non-repeatered and has the same fiber count — 192.

The cable, however, will have to deal with much greater risk factors in the English Channel than in Lake Ontario. It will have to deal with fisheries and avoid anchorage zones. There is also the issue of unexploded ordnance (UXO). That required a lot more study and a lot more planning. We’ve done a UXO study and the survey will kick off in July.

We decided to go with 192 fibers in both the Lake Ontario and the UK-France cables. We could have gone higher, but what we have to keep in mind is the repair, especially in the English Channel with the many threats that face cable there. We have to assume that over the life of the system, repair will be a requirement. We have to insure that we’ll be able to get the sea repair done quickly and that means that we can’t have too high a count – it just takes too long. There are cables out there with fiber counts in the thousands of pairs and the repair plan for those is to just replace the cable. That can be done on some very short links of only a few kilometers, but for the scale we need, that isn’t practical.

We also are working to develop two other cable systems. One is the Wall-LI cable between the NJFX complex in Wall, New Jersey, and Long Island, where other transatlantic cables come in and there is a lot of infrastructure for international traffic. Wall-LI will allow that traffic to bypass New York City.

The other project we’re looking at is back in Lake Ontario. It’s called Maple Leaf Fibre and will have a submarine component running between Toronto and Kingston, followed by a terrestrial component to Montreal. The submarine cable in this case will run more or less east-west in Lake Ontario, rather than north-south as was the case with the original Buffalo-Toronto cable.

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About NJFX:

CenturyLink arrives at NJFX cable landing station colocation campus

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

CenturyLink arrives at NJFX cable landing station colocation campus

The connection into NJFX, which offers access to four submarine cable systems and seven independent U.S. fiber-based backhaul providers, offers the CenturyLink’s customers more connectivity and service options.

Article published by Stephen Hardy, Lightwave, on June 16, 2020

June 17, 2020

Wall Township, NJ –

NJFX, which operates a cable landing station (CLS) colocation campus in Wall, NJ, says that CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL) is the latest communications service provider to establish a presence at the site. The connection to CenturyLink’s underground terrestrial fiber network provides access to the service provider’s routes across North America.

CenturyLink’s global fiber network runs approximately 450,000 route miles. The connection into NJFX, which offers access to four submarine cable systems and seven independent U.S. fiber-based backhaul providers, offers the CenturyLink’s customers more connectivity and service options.

“Establishing a point of presence at NJFX allows CenturyLink customers close proximity to data, decreasing network latency, along with delivering smart options to further diversify and plan their international connections with clarity and accuracy,” commented Warren Greenberg, vice president and general manager for CenturyLink in New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut. “We look forward to offering our services suite at the NJFX campus and to our enterprise customers.”

Open for business in September 2016 (see “New Jersey Fiber Exchange set to open Tier 3 by the Subsea colocation facility ”), NJFX offers a 64,800-sq-ft Tier 3 CLS colocation facility on a 58-acre campus in Wall. The facility enables direct access to the TGN1, TGN2, and Seabras submarine cables. The building will serve as the cable landing for the HAVFRUE/AEC2 system when it comes online later this year as well as the Wall-LI submarine network in the future. The submarine cables offer connectivity options to Europe and South America.

“Cable landing station colocation is where networks live today and at NJFX, there are petabytes of data per second being transported across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe and South America,” said Gil Santaliz, CEO for NJFX. “We welcome CenturyLink, which has arguably one of the most interconnected and deeply peered networks in the U.S. today, to our growing ecosystem of terrestrial carriers that provide diverse, private routes to transport all of that data from our CLS campus across North America and beyond.”

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About NJFX:

CenturyLink Anchors Network at NJFX Cable Landing Station Colocation Campus

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

CenturyLink Anchors Network at NJFX Cable Landing Station Colocation Campus

June 15, 2020

Wall Township, NJ – NJFX, the only Cable Landing Station (CLS) co-location campus in the U.S. offering Tier 3, carrier-neutral data center capabilities, announces today that CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL), a technology leader delivering hybrid networking, cloud connectivity, and security solutions, has anchored at NJFX with an underground terrestrial fiber network, linking key routes across North America.

CenturyLink offers an extensive global fiber network including approximately 450,000 route miles of fiber and a network serving customers around the world, providing secure and reliable services to meet the growing digital demands of businesses. Focused on customer success, CenturyLink’s expansion into NJFX offers its customers more options to connect and leverage cutting-edge services.

NJFX, home to four subsea cable systems and seven independent U.S. fiber-based backhaul providers, serves as a strategic distribution center for data demarcation into and throughout North America. Its community of carriers make the NJFX CLS a marketplace rich with fiber networks and platforms providing multiple options for routes, security and diversity.

“Cable Landing Station colocation is where networks live today and at NJFX, there are petabytes of data per second being transported across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe and South America,” comments Gil Santaliz, CEO for NJFX. “We welcome CenturyLink, which has arguably one of the most interconnected and deeply peered networks in the U.S. today to our growing ecosystem of terrestrial carriers that provide diverse, private routes to transport all of that data from our CLS campus across North America and beyond.”

“Establishing a point of presence at NJFX allows CenturyLink customers close proximity to data, decreasing network latency, along with delivering smart options to further diversify and plan their international connections with clarity and accuracy,” comments Warren Greenberg, vice president and general manager for CenturyLink in NYC, NJ and CT. “We look forward to offering our services suite at the NJFX campus and to our enterprise customers.”

When a colocation data center campus is physically located at the meeting point of multiple subsea cable landings linking three continents, international connectivity is just a single cross-connect away. The result is a high-resilience, low-latency network with direct interconnection options for service providers, enterprises, carrier-neutral operators and cable companies.

NJFX’s unique CLS model offers more than just the landing point as it helps carriers and subsea providers get data out into the hands of the companies delivering the data, provide faster on-ramps to cloud infrastructure and power communications more reliably.

For more information, please visit www.njfx.net or contact info@njfx.net.

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About NJFX:

For NJFX media inquiries, please contact: emily@njfx.net

About CenturyLink

CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) is a technology leader delivering hybrid networking, cloud connectivity, and security solutions to customers around the world. Through its extensive global fiber network, CenturyLink provides secure and reliable services to meet the growing digital demands of businesses and consumers. CenturyLink strives to be the trusted connection to the networked world and is focused on delivering technology that enhances the customer experience.

Learn more at http://news.centurylink.com/

For CenturyLink media inquiries, please contact:

Kerry Zimmer
CenturyLink
509-720-4441
kerry.zimmer@centurylink.com

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In the Eye of the Storm: Planning for the necessary shift of global networks

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

In the Eye of the Storm: Planning for the necessary shift of global networks

As we realize connecting virtually is crucial to our current reality, we understand the infrastructure enabling that connection has never been more important. Today, solid network infrastructure with reliable and diverse paths is not a “nice to have”, it’s a must-have.

Originally published by Data Center Dynamics on May 18, 2020.

WALL TOWNSHIP, NJ – In the past, we might have seen a need to reroute or redirect traffic for a brief period. Disaster recovery companies were the norm, providing an alternative for a day or two. Hurricane Sandy, which hit the US east coast back in 2012, taught us that having a network route around New York could offer much needed increased resiliency, and that was eye-opening. Today, the game plan is not “what is my back up plan for the next two days?”, but “where do I go for the next three months?”

Carriers need to re-route traffic and it must be working from the DR sites. Or, consider if you have a remote workforce, do you have a plan for your US employees to interact with your Frankfurt and London offices, using your home internet connection? It still needs to be secure. It still needs to go through a centralized data center on both sides of the pond. Again, all the employees have to be able to get into those data centers via home modems to make sure traffic can then go across the subsea cables between Europe and the United States.

Avoiding single points of failure

So, keeping this all mind, we should be wondering whether the carriers and multinational enterprises truly know how their networks are orchestrated so they can avoid single points of failure. If you have an international or domestic network issue, but you don’t know how your network has been routed or you don’t know how you access your subsea cable, you really can’t have confidence in your network reliability.

Now more than ever, we need to know how our networks work. We need cable diversity, both terrestrially and at the subsea level. If, for example, the U.S. pandemic epicenter – New York City – will be under quarantine for an extended period and you potentially need to re-route your traffic, what do you do? Do you know who to call and can you count on them to be able to do it? Hopefully, someone on your team thought through the ‘what-ifs’, put it into the network agreements so that re-routes could be done without having to physically travel to lower Manhattan.

The NY metro area survived 9/11, but with all the major carrier hotels in one concentrated area, it was a challenge. Back then, we were all focused on it. We said we can never let that happen again. So, many of the data centers went to New Jersey. Then, Hurricane Sandy hit, and we said we have to make sure we have alternate sites and alternate ways to do things. But they left all the international communications — the subsea system network hubs — in NYC. The data was sitting outside NYC, but all the important interconnection points for the global networks were left in Lower Manhattan. Legacy subsea systems, the ones built between 1999 and 2004, are still handing off 85 percent of their traffic through Lower Manhattan. That’s a staggering amount of voice and data concentrated in one area.

However, companies like DE-CIX are expanding beyond the original lower Manhattan hub. The company offers peering by having a point-of-presence in 15 facilities in and around the Tri-State area, creating a metro ring of service for ISPs.

“Our model relies on distribution. The more facilities we can enable and all to the same virtual platform, the better. From the customer’s perspective, it is extremely important for all types of networks. While you may be physically shut in, you are digitally free and it has never been more obvious that freedom is crucial and must be delivered reliably,” states Ivo Ivanov, COO of DE-CIX. “Every single type of network wants to rely on this, streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, collaboration platforms like WebEx and Zoom, gaming platforms, financial services, healthcare and supply chain. The beauty is in the diversity. We need this diverse and robust ecosystem to grow.”

In this current crisis, 80 percent of all major US providers are present at NJFX. In my mind, the world’s fastest-growing internet exchange, DE-CIX, is leading the way. We have some of the previous challenges covered, such as having control of the property, fiber points and entry manholes, along with an ecosystem consisting of seven independent facility-based terrestrial telecommunications operators (some with dual underground systems), four physical subsea cables with SLTE gear – all interconnecting three continents. The largest internet operators are all present.

Hunter Newby, Owner of Newby Ventures was one of the original architects of the modern colocation facility with meet-me rooms, cross-connects and network interconnection all in one place. “Change is the only constant. This is an evolution, not a journey, it doesn’t end with one thing. I was around when (the last round of) new subsea cables were being built. The next generation is coming, and it’s logical that the new subsea cables may not be terminating in the same facilities on the east coast,” comments Newby. “There must be vision and foresight as we plan for the next generation of connectivity.”

The beauty of the telecoms industry is that it is always evolving. Through collaboration, strong partnerships and leveraging new architecture models we, as an industry, can better prepare and ensure continuity of global communications. No matter what may come our way. The future is bright, let’s work together.

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About NJFX:

NetIX Selects Industry-Leading and Strategically-Located NJFX Data Centre as its Newest East Coast Partner

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

NetIX has expanded and improved its reach by adding NJFX data centre to its global network

Sofia, Bulgaria – 18th May 2020: NetIX, the leading global distributed platform for connectivity and peering services is proud to announce it has solidified its partnership with leading New Jersey data centre, NJFX, and has now brought it fully on-net by installing equipment in the facility.

NetIX selected NJFX for its unparalleled global connectivity from the East Coast. As the only Cable Landing Station (CLS) colocation campus in the U.S offering Tier 3, carrier-neutral data centre capabilities, NJFX is directly connected to the landing station providing direct routes across the Atlantic to access European traffic and down to South America to access traffic from Latin America.

“We are excited to have an award-winning Internet Exchange like NetIX in our facility,” commented Gil Santaliz, Founder and CEO of NJFX. He continued, “our partnership with NetIX will offer so many opportunities to our tenants who want to access global solutions and a global network simply, quickly and through one cross connect from one location.”

“We are thrilled to have NJFX as a new Point of Presence (PoP) on our global network”, said Neven Dilkov, founder of NetIX. “We always want to offer as much choice as possible to our customers into high quality facilities, and help them improve their coverage and reach, but similarly we’re looking forward to helping East Coast-located networks improve their reach across Europe where we are a leading player in the marketplace.”

NJFX tenants will be able to connect onto NetIX’s global network giving access via a single port to the full portfolio of solutions including the Global Internet Exchange blending over 30 IXPs and 140+ members of traffic together, DDoS protection solutions including the newly launched Smart Blackholing service, and Audio/Video streaming services.

About NetIX

Our next-generation network accelerates the Internet; we connect content creators with users faster, cheaper, and more directly than ever.

Our network stretches across more than 150 global data centres in 65 cities from 35 countries. It connects our 140+ members to content from 6,000+ visible networks and 30+ Internet Exchanges.

NetIX offers the best possible Internet connectivity: our members can directly exchange traffic with peers, giving their end-users faster page-load times on 90% of the most popular sites.

Our members include Internet service providers, broadcasters, telecoms operators, and content delivery networks – all the peers your tenants need to access!

About NJFX

NJFX owns and operates a 64,800 square foot purpose-built Tier 3 Cable Landing Station (CLS) Colocation facility and 58-acre campus in Wall, NJ. This unique campus is the only carrier-neutral CLS colocation campus in the U.S supported by several route-independent carriers that offer direct access to multiple independent subsea cable systems interconnecting North America, Europe, South America and the Caribbean. The facility offers direct access to TGN1, TGN2, and Seabras. The building is the subsea cable landing of HAVFRUE/AEC2 this year as well as Wall-LI in the future. High and low-density colocation solutions are available with 24/7 support.

For NJFX media inquiries, please contact: media@njfx.net

NetIX Selects Industry-Leading and Strategically-Located NJFX Data Centre as its Newest East Coast Partner Read More »

NJFX Welcomes A Top Five Global Network, Cogent Communications, to Its Cable Landing Station Campus

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

NJFX Welcomes A Top Five Global Network, Cogent Communications, to Its Cable Landing Station Campus

Expanding Its Global Ecosystem and Bringing the World Closer Together

May 11, 2020

Wall Township, NJ – NJFX, the only Cable Landing Station (CLS) colocation campus in the U.S offering Tier 3, carrier-neutral data center capabilities, announces that Cogent Communications, one of the world’s largest internet service providers, has established its presence at the NJFX CLS campus.

As a multinational, Tier-1 facilities-based ISP, Cogent Communications is consistently ranked as one of the top five backbone networks in the world. The company specializes in providing businesses with high speed internet access, Ethernet transport and operates one of the largest and highest capacity IP networks in existence.

“Cogent is focused on expanding its network to get businesses the internet connectivity they need, especially at times like these when the world is counting on the power of the internet for everything we do to live, work, learn, entertain and communicate,” comments Dave Schaeffer, Founder and CEO for Cogent Communications. “Being in a carrier-neutral facility such as the NJFX Cable Landing Station campus is very important to us, as we believe competition between carriers is good for both the industry and end-users. We look forward to growing our presence at the NJFX CLS as it ties locations together from around the world and offers reliable and redundant network options.”

“NJFX welcomes Cogent to our telecommunications ecosystem and looks forward to further collaboration and expanding options to power global communications,” comments Gil Santaliz, Founder and CEO of NJFX. “Bringing the world closer together, through strong telecom partnerships showcases the advantage that lies in carriers interconnecting. Even though we have to be physically apart during this pandemic, now, more than ever, our communications are more critical. The connections between people can still occur and bring us all together.”

“Cogent chose to have a presence at NJFX to reach more markets and more customers, all with reliability in mind. By connecting in multiple locations, we can not only address our clients’ bandwidth capacity requirements, but further ensure reliability and access to redundant options if ever needed, ”Schaeffer continues.

Serving over 205 markets across 46 countries, the Cogent network spans 58,000 intercity route miles and over 36,000 metro fiber miles.

NJFX CLS campus offers access to four subsea cable systems and seven independent U.S. fiber-based backhaul providers, enabling a carrier-neutral marketplace and providing multiple options for route diversity, availability, reliability and security.

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About NJFX:

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Now More than Ever, We Need to Know How Our Networks Work

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

Now More than Ever, We Need to Know How Our Networks Work

An interview with Gil Santaliz, NJFX CEO, conducted by SubCableWorld

April 9, 2020

Editor’s Note: Submarine cables are a critical infrastructure even during normal times, but as the world deals with the Coronavirus and COVID-19, the global submarine fiber optic cable network takes on an even greater importance.

As SubCableWorld has noted, the U.S. government has identified workers at submarine cable landing stations and cable depots, as well as cable ships crews, as essential during this crisis because making sure that global Internet traffic continues to flow is essential as well.

With this backdrop, we wanted to speak with Gil Santaliz, CEO of NJFX, which operates a combined cable landing/colocation campus in Wall, New Jersey. We wanted to get his views on how the pandemic is impacting his company, especially given its proximity to New York State, which has been hard hit by COVID-19, and New York City, with its massive telecom market, as well as the broader questions of disaster recovery and the activity level of the industry. The following are his comments:

Mr. Santaliz: NJFX is still working in this time of crisis. We’re not on lockdown, we’re installing customers every day. In fact, there are three major installations going on right now [at the time of the interview]. We’re at Stage Yellow, as we call it. We’re monitoring the movement of people more closely.

Inside, what we’ve done is taken extra precautions to separate employees from vendors coming into the building — separate bathrooms, run temperature checks for people coming in, filling out forms explaining that you’ve not been exposed to anyone with COVID-19. We’ve taken lots of precautions. We got lucky because the building was designed in such a way that you don’t touch anything when you come in — it’s all card keys with automatic faucets, soap dispensers, hand dryers, etc. I’m not going to say it was done on purpose, but we’re lucky that there are not a lot of surfaces that you touch at NJFX, so everyone goes straight to their space and when you finish your work, you leave the building.

What we’re seeing during this pandemic is that every multinational organization has put in place their disaster recovery (DR) plans. Their employees are working either from their homes or are being asked to go to their DR sites. They’re creating quadrants of employees; basically telling them who goes where and we’re seeing this at NJFX. We’re seeing traffic being re-routed. How do I get that DR site the kind of IP it needs? Remember, those sites really were meant to be a place to work from for two or three days, not three or four months.

In the 1990s, companies like Comdisco existed and they were the places that people could go to for a day or two. Hurricane Sandy taught us that this could last for a long time and that was eye-opening – wow, it lasted two weeks. And now the game plan is “where do I go for the next three months?” You have to re-route traffic and it has to be working from the DR sites. Or, if you have your employees at home, did you ever plan for your New York employees to interact with your Frankfurt and London offices, but they’re all going to be at home? It still needs to be secure. It still needs to go through a centralized data center on both sides of the pond. Again, all of the employees have to get into those data centers and then go across the cables between Europe and the United States.

Did they know how their networks were orchestrated so they could change them? If you have an international or domestic issue, but you don’t know how your network works or you don’t know which cable your traffic uses, you really can’t make decisions on re-orchestrating what you have. Now more than ever, we need to know how our networks work. You know you have cable diversity terrestrially and you know you have cable diversity at the subsea level, but if New York City will be suffering potential issues for a period of time and you have to re-route your traffic, what do you do? Do you know who to call and that they are going to do it? Hopefully, you will because someone thought “I may need to do this someday” and put it into the agreements and built it into the infrastructure so that it could be done dynamically or by dialing in because guess what, I can’t travel to NYC anymore. I’m not allowed to go in and move things around. I can’t coordinate the way I did before. So your plan had to think that through – that people can’t move around easily any longer.

Unfortunately, things are not going to get better. Are you ready to lose a major PoP and if you do, can the other PoPs take over? The example that keeps coming up is NYC. It survived 9/11 and back then we were all focused on it. We said we can never let that happen again. So, many of the data centers went to New Jersey. Then Hurricane Sandy happened and we said we have to make sure we have alternate sites and alternate ways to do things. But they left all of the international communications — the subsea systems and backhaul — in NYC. The data was sitting outside NYC, but all the important interconnection points for the global networks were left in Lower Manhattan. Now, once again we have a major issue where getting to Lower Manhattan is a problem and the legacy subsea systems, the ones built between 1999 and 2004, are still handing off 85% of their traffic through Lower Manhattan.

We have several customers that have been quick on their feet. For example, Aqua Comms has a wholesale model only, as opposed to others. The benefits of that is that if you sign a contract with three or four national providers that come into NJFX, then you can have thousands of customers running across the Havfrue transatlantic system in a couple of days. They have the MSA paperwork with everyone, they have the backhaul – it’s all in place.

We also have a customer, Bulk Infrastructure, who has large customers via a spectrum ownership model. They turn up those customers and they’re up and running in just a matter of days because of the scale of their operations. Bulk has been public about Amazon Web Services being their customer and Aqua Comms is the landing party for its partners, such as Facebook and Google on the Havfrue system, and can also turn their capacity on immediately.

Migrating customers from one cable system to the next requires lots of planning. TAT-14 will be retired at the end of the year, so everyone is planning on moving their capacity over. The natural cable that they’d move it to is Havfrue/AEC-2, because it lands in the same place in Denmark so you can use the backhaul and your existing systems. All you have to do is take your couple of hundred Gigabits and find a home on Havfrue through Aqua Comms or Bulk and off you go.

The other cables that land at NJFX are TGN-1 and TGN-2. They were built by TyCom back in 2004. They have thousands of customers and Terabits of capacity, but it’s no secret that most of that capacity goes through NYC. Seabras-1, a Seaborn cable of which TI Sparkle owns half of the fibers, runs to Brazil non-stop bypassing the hurricane activity in the Caribbean, but they too initially had all their traffic going to NYC. Now, they’re handing off traffic at NJFX, rightfully so, because we have a community of carriers that can buy from there. As mentioned, we also have the Havfrue cable that is going RFS soon. They have their gear ready to go at NJFX so they can offload customers by working with their carrier community.

Meanwhile, NJFX is prepared and working through this crisis and helping our carrier and subsea clients augment network architectures where needed. We’re still active, still working, nothing has changed. We’re just monitoring more closely across every level.

Read the original article on SubCableWorld’s website.

Also published in Ocean New’s and Technology’s May 2020 Edition!

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About NJFX:

DE-CIX Establishes Point of Presence in NJFX

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

DE-CIX Establishes Point of Presence in NJFX

February 10, 2020

Wall, NJ – NJFX, the only Cable Landing Station (CLS) colocation campus in the U.S offering Tier 3, carrier-neutral data center capabilities announces today that DE-CIX, the world’s leading Internet Exchange (IX) operator with the largest IX in the New York market, has established a Point of Presence (PoP) in the NJFX CLS.

Providing premium interconnection services, DE-CIX operates a range of carrier and data center-neutral Internet Exchanges in Europe, India, the Middle East, Asia, and the U.S. The new PoP at NJFX will provide access for customers to exchange traffic so that their data can traverse directly from the U.S. East Coast to Europe and beyond, as well as up and down the East Coast U.S. corridor to the New York metro area, and to Ashburn, Virginia. Customers can also interexchange traffic across the multiple subsea cable systems available at NJFX, including TGN1, TGN2, and Seabras, in addition to HAVFRUE/AEC2 later this year.

“DE-CIX is establishing more than just a point of presence at NJFX,” comments Felix Seda, General Manager for NJFX. “With the deployment of a router to exchange traffic directly at NJFX, it decreases the hops and increases security while improving latency, and allows carriers and service providers to reach their destinations more directly.”

Currently, DE-CIX serves more than 1850 network operators, Internet service providers (ISPs), and content providers from 100+ countries with peering and interconnection services at its more than 20 locations in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. DE-CIX North America operates two IXs in Dallas and New York. DE-CIX New York is the region’s largest neutral IX and one of the top five IXs in the U.S., which features access to over 220 networks through a single connection

“For global enterprises, ISPs, CDNs and network operators, having access to diverse terrestrial and subsea options for connectivity is the coin of the realm, the foundation of their ability to reach new customers and penetrate new markets,” states Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX International. “By establishing a presence at the NJFX CLS colocation campus, customers are now able to leverage direct, low latency routes to major U.S. business hubs in New York and Ashburn that avoid legacy chokepoints. In addition, customers can also gain access to multiple subsea cable systems for intercontinental data exchange, including critical transatlantic connectivity to Europe. We are also seeing the LATAM market as one of the focus regions for networks we want to connect in NJFX to DE-CIX New York.”

Home to four subsea cable systems and seven independent U.S. fiber-based backhaul providers, NJFX offers a marketplace rich with fiber networks and platforms providing multiple options for route diversity, availability, reliability and security. For more information about how NJFX is creating a new model of the CLS as a hub of unprecedented capacity and connectivity, please visit www.njfx.net or contact info@njfx.net.

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About NJFX:

NJFX media inquiries, please contact: emily@njfx.net

About DE-CIX

DE-CIX is the world’s leading Internet Exchange operator and will celebrate its 25th anniversary this year. Having started operations in 1995, DE-CIX in Frankfurt am Main is the Internet Exchange (IX) with the world’s highest data throughput at peak times, at more than 8.1 Terabits per second (Tbps). Its technical infrastructure has a total capacity of 48 Terabits.

In total, DE-CIX serves over 1800 network operators, Internet service providers (ISPs), and content providers from more than 100 countries with peering and interconnection services at its more than 20 locations in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. Further information at www.de-cix.net

For DE-CIX media inquiries, please contact:
iMiller Public Relations
+1.866.307.2510
pr@imillerpr.com