Industry News

Chile’s Digital Transformation

Leveraging its Pacific coast, Chile will soon host a digital gateway linking Latin America to Asia. But with the power to solve a nationwide challenge, it’s bringing more than connectivity, NJFX founder and CEO Gil Santaliz tells Melanie Mingas.

Article originally published by Melanie Mingas of Capacity Media on April 26th, 2021.

April 26, 2021

In March 2020, NJFX’s Gil Santaliz was in São Paulo for Capacity Latam. It was shortly before flights were grounded by the pandemic – a move that would force him to leave the show early – but that’s not the point of his story. As luck would have it, while Santaliz was out of the country, he received a phone call to say Chile’s Ministry of Transport and Communications (MTT) was visiting the US and wanted to tour NJFX.

“They wanted to get better insight into how cables operated in the US going to Europe, as well as going down to South America,” says Santaliz via video call from New Jersey.

In his absence, business development manager Sarah Kurtz hosted the delegates, alongside industry heavyweights from Tata Communications and Aqua Comms. But this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill tour. The visiting party included Natalia López, the head of the Telecommunications Development Fund division for the government of Chile and lead on the Asia-South America Digital Gateway Project.

López and the team didn’t just want to look at NJFX; the delegation wanted to understand the role of an integrated, colocation cable landing station (CLS) in creating a connectivity a gateway.

“They wanted to know how does it work for you guys in the US? How does it work to be in a campus environment supporting four different subsea cables? How do the subsea groups benefit from what you have created?

“And then trying to see first-hand the design of the building, how we segment subsea and terrestrial, what a carrier-neutral meeting room looks like, and talk in more depth about their projects,” Santaliz continues.

Due to the impending Covid lockdowns the party had to leave early, meaning Santaliz didn’t get to meet them in person; however, the knowledge share continued over the ensuing months and the Asia-South America Digital Gateway Project is
moving at pace.

“We haven’t travelled since, nor have they, but we had the communication with the ministry from Chile and they are moving forward with their project – Chile is becoming a new gateway for South America,” Santaliz explains.

The digital gateway was announced in 2019 when MTT and the development bank of Latin America, CAF, signed a $3 million technical cooperation agreement to finance feasibility studies, later conducted by Chile’s telecom regulator Subtel. A cable integration, the initial aim was to lay a cable up to 15,000 miles long with at least two fibre pairs and a transmission capacity of 10-20Tbps.

The Transoceanic Cable was confirmed the following year in July, with a route that would link Valparaiso, Chile with New Zealand and Sydney. According to the Chilean government it was the most cost-effective route, although Shanghai
was originally being considered before international concerns were raised.

That aside, Santaliz says: “They are moving on their efforts to have Chile become the gateway towards, in this case Australia and from there on to Asia, basically. So Chile is the first country in Latin America creating this new gateway
across to Sydney.”

The link will also play a part of the success of the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement, the “first of its kind” agreement that came into force in December, for digital trade and data flows between Singapore, Chile and New
Zealand.

During 2020 a series of further announcements emerged from the country. On the data centre front, EdgeConneX opened the first of two facilities in Santiago and Huawei announced its second hub in the country would open in the same city by the end of the year.

Google’s 10,500km Curie cable landed in the coastal city of Valparaiso and phase two of the Caribbean Express cable was announced, connecting Panama to Chile, then linking into Ecuador and Peru.

OECD analysis published this year concluded that Chile saw the most rapid adoption of mobile broadband in the OECD between 2010 and 2018, with a 10-fold increase in subscriptions. At 87.5%, household connectivity is on a par
with OECD averages and business broadband connectivity is also high, at 89.6%, according to the first Chilean ICT survey conducted in 2019.

However, fixed broadband penetration remains a challenge and, despite having one of the highest rates of annual growth of fibre subscriptions across OECD countries, it stood at 66.5% between 2018 and 2019. Further, fibre connections
account for 25% of total broadband connections and 50% of these connections concentrated in the Región Metropolitana, according to Subtel data.

Independent Latam

The knowledge exchange with NJFX has covered a number of topics, but many come back to tackling these, and similar, challenges.

“We have shared the concept of being open, the benefits of having a landing station used for multiple cables not just one at a time,” Santaliz explains.

“We gave our advice to them and they are reviewing it and we have conversations on their architecture. Depending on the final grouping they have, the members of this new cable, we might even be able to develop their landing station for them. So that’s an opportunity that we would consider, depending on who the anchor consortium members would be for that,” he adds.

Developing a CLS takes up to two years, by which time Chile’s requirements will have progressed significantly, but the country – and wider region – are well ahead in preparing for future needs.

“There’s an incredible amount of investment already happening in South America,” says Santaliz, citing the Monet, BRUSA and Seabras-1 cables.

“They are going to start going through the end-of-life cycle with the existing cables that are there and one of the challenges is to make sure that the new cables – even though they have so much greater capacity than the old cables – you’re going to still need more of them,” he adds, before revealing that, “we should expect two more cables announced within the next two years.”

However, this next generation of cables – such as Ellalink, connecting Latam to the US, and the South Atlantic Cable System linking Angola with Brazil – will not depend on the US. It’s a trend Santaliz says is bringing independence to the region, but it needs to extend beyond the shoreline – and that’s a subject Santaliz is so passionate about, he features on this year’s day three Capacity Latam panel, Delivering diverse connectivity to Latin America.

“The last challenge is you have the arteries built but do you have the capillarity in place? Is there going to be a competitive landscape for capillarity in Latam? Because inexpensive international capacity doesn’t give you very much if you don’t have competitive local access. The ministry is very aware that it is not about landing a cable – how do we get that cable’s connectivity across the country?

“So that’s the next challenge you’re going to have to develop – getting that infrastructure built,” Santaliz adds. While he’s a fan of the public-private model championed by the US for its rural connectivity needs, he sees another trend
unfolding in the industry.

“What you are seeing is partnerships that we have not seen before.”

Giving an example, he explains: “The MVNOs [mobile virtual network operators]… In the US, if you have Verizon making the investment, they are going to allow Comcast, they are going to allow Altice, AT&T to piggyback on the deployment of their 5G. So you are going to see multiple partners that are non-traditional, starting to work together, to make the economics of 5G work in the US.” In short, it’s all about “understanding what the private sector’s costs are in deploying private infrastructure”.

While these partnerships are all about managing the cost, other market shifts are starting to make waves too.

“The private sector adapts to the environment it has and we are part of that private sector and we are adapting to higher availability, better security and better network architecture,” Santaliz says.

For Santaliz, one major adaptation that connectivity will allow – in all regions – is the creation of more over-the-top operators (OTTs). Not just peddling content but providing essential services such as banking and healthcare.

“Facebook was an idea, today it is running global network architecture,” he says. “The banking industry needs to make sure their stuff always works also – they have a philosophy of never being down, never missing a transaction. How can you let a social media company have a better up time than a bank? Who are you going to trust in the future, your Facebook account or your banking account?

“You are going to see a new wave of OTTs who cannot afford not to have the best-in-class assets. They are going to know how the architecture works and they are going to redistribute how their connectivity gets applied.”

Whether more industries taking matters into their own hands is a sign of progress or failure on the part of the incumbent connectors is a point of debate – however, whether banking, healthcare, or both, Santaliz could be onto something.

“This connectivity revolution that we are a part of is changing social dynamics and it is going to allow us to rethink traditional industries in a way that will provide a lot more efficiency.”

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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.

Chile’s Digital Transformation Read More »

New Age of the CLS

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

Originally published in SubTel Forum, November 2020, Issue 115

Operating the NJFX CLS Campus

Originally published in SubTel Forum, November 2020, Issue 115

November 16, 2020

HawkTalk 52 with Gil Santaliz, CEO at NJFX

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

HawkTalk 52 with Gil Santaliz, CEO at NJFX

Published by datacenterHawk on September 1, 2020

WALL TOWNSHIP, NJ –

“Covid has transformed and accelerated the process of which was already happening in terms of workforce enablement, flexibility, and data anywhere.” – Gil Santaliz, CEO for NJFX

Santaliz explains all of this and more in his recent interview with datacenterHawk’s Founder, David Liggit. Check it all out in the Hawk Talk Video Episode 52.

Starting his career with MCI back in 1990, Santaliz commented that the industry has certainly seen a lot change since then, moving from fax machines to the cloud. Years later Santaliz transitioned from the voice side of the industry into fiber infrastructure with his company, 4Connections, which deployed dark fiber routes across New Jersey and New York. His team supported key infrastructure needed to connect hospitals, schools and Cable Landing Stations (CLS). As Santaliz put it, it was the, “true heart of global network infrastructure.” 4Connections was later sold to Optimum Lightpath, a subsidiary of New York cable operator Cablevision (now Altice USA), in 2008.

Santaliz went on to tell the story of how NJFX got its start. The property next to where NJFX resides today was first developed by Tata Communications during the dotcom craze. Subcom had invested in a cable that went from Wall, NJ around the world, anchored by Tata’s substantial Cable Landing Station. NJFX and its partners invested in the property next door to the CLS, built a meet-me-room and in 2015, NJFX was born as the first carrier-neutral CLS campus in the United States.

Making the World a Smaller Place

Today, CLS’s play an important role, as the transmission location for 99% of internet traffic globally. NJFX interconnects three continents with four subsea cables connecting North America, South America, Caribbean and Europe.

It took six to seven minutes to transmit a message across the original subsea cables dating back to the 1800’s. Today, it takes a fraction of a second. “Subsea cables made the world a smaller place,” commented Santaliz.

Impact of Covid 19: Challenges and Solutions

And even though the impact of life during Covid-19 is still evolving, some of the immediate effects we’ve seen include a huge increase of global IP. Gil shared how the pandemic has shown us even more how critical data centers are. The home has become the new disaster recovery site.

“Covid has transformed and accelerated the process of which was already happening in terms of workforce enablement, flexibility, data anywhere,” commented Santaliz.

“Fascinating to see the changes. I’m not sure the world would have moved as quickly obviously into this technology advancement, unless something like this [Covid] was in place,” stated Liggit.

The Who’s Who in Telecom

With a great community of carriers and strategic location 65 feet above sea level, NJFX is actively courting new subsea cables. The company has a proven track record in operating the facility, as well as the land that it owns. As Gil explained, “We have one of the largest banks in the U.S moving in to take advantage of the NJFX infrastructure and to be part of the subsea community. [Organizations] need to know how their networks work. They are no longer able to just be a customer of subsea systems. They need to be actively involved in the design and how that system is managed because they need to be digitally enabled – and that is the magic word today. You have to be digitally enabled in order to be able to conduct busines, educate students and conduct public safety. If you don’t have your connection, you don’t exist, you have got to be connected all the time.”

Liggitt agreed, “That is true. That is the quote of the conversation. You do have to be connected all the time. It is the expectation today in the world we live. It will be fun to watch the growth take place as you are in the middle of it.”

To catch the whole conversation, see below or click here.

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About NJFX:

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

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

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:

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:

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:

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!

###

About NJFX:

Will Tax Incentives Jump-Start NJ’s Data Center Industry?

Newsroom / Sarah Kurtz

Article by Rich Miller, published by Data Center Frontier

Can New Jersey re-establish itself as a major player on the U.S. data center scene? Gil Santaliz believes it can, if the Garden State can follow the lead of at least 27 other states and offer tax incentives for the data center industry.

Santaliz, the founder and CEO of the NJFX data campus in Wall, N.J., says he has been in discussions with state officials about the merits of data center incentives, and is hopeful that the dialogue will lead to legislation.

“We’ve met with the governor and leaders in the legislature,” said Santaliz. “Twenty years ago, New Jersey probably led the country and data center space, but we haven’t moved the needle at all in 20 years.”

New Jersey was once a hotbed of data center activity, with thriving markets for colocation and financial data centers. The state maintains a substantial and strategically important data center community, but the hottest leasing action has shifted elsewhere, primarily to Northern Virginia.

“We are helping the state of New Jersey evaluate the opportunities,” said Santaliz. “There is a bill being looked at, and it looks very similar to the broad strokes of what you see in Virginia.”

NJ’s Business Incentives in Transition

Northern Virginia is the world’s largest data center market, has experienced unprecedented growth amid the shift to cloud computing. At more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity, it is twice the size of any other market in the United States.

In Virginia, most data center facilities are exempt from state sales and use taxes, so long as they spend at least $150 million and create between 25-50 new jobs in the area. Those tax breaks are good through 2035, providing long-term visibility into operating costs for data center operators.

“If we get a package like that, we’re back in business again as a state,” said Santaliz. “Data centers create no burden on the school’s fire district or roads. It’s just tax revenue on the real estate side, without all the people. The labor unions love data centers. They’re good for electricians and construction.”

“I think data centers will only go where they’re welcome.”
Gil Santaliz, CEO of NJFX

The outreach from the data center sector comes as New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is seeking to revamp the state’s approach to economic incentives for business. The state Economic Development Authority (EDA) has awarded more than $11 billion in tax breaks to corporations since 2005, but Murphy says applicants have been poorly vetted and the programs have failed to deliver for New Jersey residents.

“The return on investment the state achieves through these programs is unacceptable, and the ability for well-connected interests to exploit the many loopholes of the programs is shameful,” the Democratic governor said in 2019.

The Murphy administration is expected to overhaul the state’s business incentive programs later this spring, after receiving a final report from a task force on the issue. That could provide a window of opportunity for the data center industry.

Some States See Big Boost From Data Centers

At least 27 states now use economic incentives to attract data center projects, yearning to land deals with Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft that would signal their transition to the new digital economy. In some areas, incentives for data centers have become a hot button issue, with taxpayers and legislators questioning the value of perks for giant tech companies

Emergency backup generators

Generators inside a New Jersey data center. (Photo: Rich Miller)

The math behind data centers is focused on tax revenue, rather than the traditional economic development benchmark of job creation. That’s because data centers involve huge capital investment, but are highly-automated and typically create between 25 and 50 full-time positions.

But the economic development power of data centers has been showcased by a revenue windfall in Virginia’s Loudoun County, home to a large cloud cluster in Ashburn. County officials expect the direct tax revenue from the data center industry will exceed $320 million in the current fiscal year – nearly double the projections from 2018.

That cloud building boom enabled the county to adopt a 2019 budget featuring reduced property taxes, a $76 million increase in funding for county schools, and the addition of 204 new positions in county government.

Experiences vary by region and city, but there is a growing body of data affirming the impact of data centers in revenue and jobs for local economies. In an environment where many local jurisdictions struggle to balance their budgets, Virginia’s success illustrates the potential for data centers to be compelling engines of prosperity.

There is also recent evidence that incentives can make an impact. The state of Illinois recently passed data center incentives, hoping to offset a slowdown in data center leasing in the state. The move has seen immediate benefits in expansion announcements from T5 Data Centers and Microsoft.

NJ Data Center Market Struggles to Compete

The New Jersey data center market is home to about 2.1 million square feet of data center space, according to research from datacenterHawk. With a vacancy rate hovering between 15 and 20 percent in recent years, New Jersey has more unfilled space than many leading data center markets, reflecting lower demand.

In the 1990s, New Jersey benefited from its proximity to New York, with many financial service providers shifting their IT workloads to facilities across the river. That trend gained pace after the 9-11 terror attacks, as financial regulators cracked down on key financial players that had both production and backup data centers in the five boroughs.

Colocation facilities thrived in Weehawken, Secaucus and Clifton, while an active wholesale market emerged in Central New Jersey around Piscataway. Meanwhile, many large financial services firms built stand-alone data centers in New Jersey, including the NYSE and NASDAQ stock exchanges. The rise of automated trading strategies, including high-frequency trading (HFT) brought added momentum.

All of these market drivers took a hit in the financial crisis of 2008-2009, as Wall Street retrenched and has had a less robust appetite for data center space ever since. That led to a surplus of space in 2011-12, from which the NJ market has been slowly recovering.

In recent years there has been a modest uptick in demand, with Iron Mountain, CyrusOne and QTS Data Centers entering the market. Last year saw a significant uptick in leasing of wholesale data center space, paced by an expansion by Bloomberg at several sites in Central New Jersey. “New Jersey achieved a large increase of more than 10 MW in leasing by financial firms,” said North American Data Centers in a market analysis released this week.

Can NJ Win the Big Cloud Deals?

But New Jersey has largely missed the cloud computing boom, as large deals have sought states where it is cheaper to do business. Northern Virginia had a record 270 megawatts of leasing in 2018, or more than 20 times the volume of New Jersey’s leasing.

Cable to Cloud: New Data Flows Raise Hopes

One issue is the price of electricity. Power in New Jersey is significantly cheaper than New York, which helped attract customers moving out of Manhattan. But in recent years NJ has lost out to East Coast states with even cheaper power, including Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia.

Santaliz believes the best way for New Jersey to gain traction is with tax incentives. “New Jersey is plagued with high taxes,” said Santaliz. This is a way to combat that.”

NJFX is one of the largest recent data center construction projects in New Jersey. In 2016 it opened 64,000 square foot Tier III data center built next to a cable landing station in Wall Township operated by Tata Communications. Santaliz believes the subsea cables offer a focal point for future development. NJFX has additional land and power capacity for large hyperscale data centers – a lucrative sector that is often wooed through tax incentives.

“We’ve got critical mass in undersea cables,” said Santaliz. “We’re one mile from the ocean, but 64 feet above sea level. You can’t get that anywhere else on the East Coast. We’re positioned between New York and Ashburn. We couldn’t be better located

“I think data centers in the United States will only go to states where they’re welcome,” he added. “New Jersey is not as expensive as New York, and not as cheap as Ashburn. But with the right incentives, we could find ourselves looking just like Ashburn, only with better weather and the subsea cables already in place.”

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