Embracing Innovation, Collaboration & Agility with NJFX

Enterprises are all faced with how to best utilize and implement the ever-changing technology landscape.

July 17, 2018

WALL TOWNSHIP – Pick your acronym – IoT, AI, 5G – and no matter which one — the ability to embrace all of the capabilities and benefits of each them is centered around having the proper infrastructure to support it. A data center serves as the hub which brings together enterprises, as well as carriers, subsea cables and service providers, all in one place. Data centers are the heart of data processing and the infrastructure that houses the high capacity, low latency connectivity needed to process the vast amounts of data being generated every day.

NJFX is a unique data center operation with an immense amount of capacity available via subsea cables, along with US and global partners such as TI Sparkle, Zayo, Windstream, Epsilon and many others. As a Tier 3, highly secure and reliable colocation facility, NJFX provides a marketplace for carriers, enterprises and service providers to exchange traffic, and extend their reach across the U.S. and internationally. With over 10 carriers and four subsea cable systems coming into the NJFX colocation campus, enterprises, financials, gaming, education, media companies – and just about any organization that requires high speed bandwidth – can rapidly tap into reliable connectivity and reach the Caribbean, North America, Europe, South America and beyond.

Agility is an essential key to staying competitive. Organizations, colocated at NJFX, can not only scale their infrastructures to address new technologies and pave the way for the future, but also establish routes that bypass traditional network choke points such as in NYC and Miami. As noted in a recent Sub Cable World article, building more resiliency into networks is essential as is coming up with highly secure ways to move traffic. With NJFX at the center, organizations can interconnect to over one million route miles, both subsea and terrestrial, across 200+ countries and territories. This robust carrier-neutral ecosystem helps enterprises and carriers alike to drive innovation, collaborate and push opportunities forward.

To learn more, watch the JSA TV interview from Roy Hilliard, VP of Business Development at NJFX.

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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.

NJFX’s First Ever C-Forum Event Showcases Advances and Future Growth Potential

NJFX Blog / NJFX

NJFX’s First Ever C-Forum Event Showcases Advances and Future Growth Potential

June 19, 2018

Wall, NJ – NJFX hosted a CEO discussion and networking event called the C-Forum at its headquarters last week with a full house of carriers, providers and enterprise clients. NJFX partners and customers were given the opportunity to learn about each other and discover new interconnection options within NJFX’s robust ecosystem.

The forum included discussions on network best practices as NJFX positions itself as the preeminent East Coast location to redefine global reach. Attendees included executives from China Unicom, Epsilon, AquaComms, Bloomberg, TI Sparkle, Zayo, and PREPA Networks.

“With NJFX as our New York Metro bypass, we have rings on both sides of the Atlantic that are fully diverse, in Europe and the U.S.,” commented Michael Sauer, Vice President Americas – Partner and Federal for Aqua Comms. The company is continuing its investment in subsea cables by joining the HAVFRUE consortium to create the ‘North Atlantic Loop’ and NJFX plays an integral part in that connectivity.

Connectivity is crucial for China Unicom as well. “We are establishing connections between China and the rest of the world,” stated Chi (Andy) Zhang, Vice President – East Region. “We are focused on two verticals, the financial industry and the media industry, and have zeroed-in on cities around the globe that are hubs for those verticals, including 12 financial hubs and several media hubs such as London, New York and Los Angeles.” The connectivity is part of China Unicom’s ultra low latency global network, a key requirement of the financial industry, where milliseconds can make a difference in stock trading and other financial transactions. China Unicom executives attended the C-Forum to learn more about what NJFX can offer to facilitate the company’s global reach to and within the United States.

Epsilon executives educated attendees about the Infiny platform, deployed at NJFX, which is an on-demand connectivity platform that brings networking into the cloud era. Infiny customers can use the portal-driven platform to order, activate and manage local, regional and global connectivity and communication services.

PREPA Networks executives offered expertise in disaster recovery, after first hand experience post-Hurricane Maria, providing insight and knowledge about the impact of last year’s natural disasters on networks in the Caribbean. “The need for unique and alternative solutions such as the new Sparkle Americas route down to the Caribbean, bypassing New York City and Miami as points of failure, is a must,” commented Jose Casillas, General Manager for PREPA Networks. “ NJFX is working alongside PREPA on creative disaster recovery strategies for customers with traffic down to Caribbean.”

“This was an excellent discussion centered around distributed networks in disruptive times. One key takeaway: there needs to be a transformation of network services to a much more interconnected ecosystem, and NJFX can offer that to our customers and partners,” stated Roy Hilliard, VP of Business Development for NJFX. To learn more about NJFX’s connectivity to markets around the world, visit the NJFX Marketplace. And to find out about NJFX’s ecosystem of carriers, view the list of network operators.

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About NJFX:

Nearly 300,000 New Jersey Higher Education Students Represented at Connectivity Event

NJFX Blog / NJFX

Nearly 300,000 New Jersey Higher Education Students Represented at Connectivity Event

March 29, 2018

New Jersey is a hotbed of tech and telecom activity. Companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google are either already making or considering infrastructure investments in the state due to the rich ecosystem of connectivity, data center options and a favorable business and technology climate. NJFX is working closely with enterprises, educational organizations, OTTs, carriers and service providers who want to be a part of this growth and leverage ways to:

Lower network latencies
Establish secure connectivity to the US, North America, South America, and Europe
Diversify their networks
Bypass the typical congested Manhattan routes
Access global connectivity from a Tier-3, secure and hardened facility that is protected as critical infrastructure under the Department of Homeland Security

To kick off another great week at Tier-3 by the subsea, NJFX had the pleasure of hosting NJEdge for a CIO Forum event. NJEdge aims to deliver and sustain a healthy, vibrant, and thriving technology ecosystem that is purpose-built for the communities that they serve. Through active collaboration, adaptive technology, transformative engagement and defined solutions, NJEdge has designed a national model of excellence in research and education networking in New Jersey and beyond. The event itself brought together 20 leading New Jersey CIOs, including those from Epsilon Telecommunications, Hammer Fiber and Tata Communications, and from colleges and universities representing nearly 300,000 students across their campuses.

Epsilon, a global connectivity and communications service provider, operates a carrier-grade, next-generation terabit optical backbone and has a presence in the NJFX colocation facility in Wall, NJ. To kick off the first presentation of the day, Carl Roberts, COO of Epsilon, introduced the company’s Global SD-WAN platform, which allows for pay-as-you-go international connectivity, available at NJFX.

The afternoon continued with Roberts and the Tata Communications team, who shifted gears and discussed bypassing New York City at NJFX. Through its proximity at NJFX, Epsilon customers can bypass congested and costly fiber paths in New York City coming from Ashburn VA, which has long been a choke point of data center connectivity. Furthermore, NJFX is able to provide the direct connectivity to the Ti Sparkle submarine cables from Brazil, which enter directly into the cable landing station Campus in New Jersey.

To wrap up the day, all attendees were provided an overview of the NJFX colocation facility, providing a first-hand understanding of the Tier 3 by the subsea high quality, secure infrastructure.

“NJFX is honored to host such a forward-thinking group,” commented Gil Santaliz, CEO for NJFX. “We look forward to continuing the discussion as our team drives next-generation connectivity solutions at the only colocation campus in the US located at a Cable Landing Station.”

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About NJFX:

Nearly 300,000 New Jersey Higher Education Students Represented at Connectivity Event Read More »

Latin America – Igniting the Subsea Activity Fire

NJFX Blog / NJFX

Latin America - Igniting the Subsea Activity Fire

March 22, 2018

The submarine cable sector has been heating up with new projects across the globe – stretching from the US to Latin America and Latin America to Africa. As reported by Capacity Magazine, Latin America is leading the sector globally with over $1.5 billion of new cable investment in 2017 and 2018. Gil Santaliz recently joined other industry experts at Capacity LATAM 2018 to discuss new subsea routes as well as the new owners of these fiber systems. “The shift of global network infrastructure is truly revolutionary,” commented Santaliz.

Moderated by Mario Quijada of Altman Vilandrie & Company, the panel entitled, ‘An Outlook into the Vibrant Submarine Cable Sector: What is Driving the Regional Re-emergence of the Submarine Cable Construction Boom?’ included the following thought-leaders:

Artur Mendes – Angola Cables
Eduardo Falzoni – Globenet
Mike Constable – Huawei Marine Networks
Gil Santaliz – NJFX
Larry Schwartz – Seaborn

Panelists discussed the drivers of the subsea cable boom, boosted in large part due to the increase in international bandwidth demand, which is doubling every two years. Another driver includes the increasing demand of over-the-top (OTT) applications across the region. The LATAM region in particular is seeing a lot of activity from subsea operators, carriers and telecom providers. Their common denominator? They are all are focused on addressing this very dynamic market that has huge potential for growth.

Seaborn Networks constructed and operates the new Seabras-1, which is a private 6-fiber pair submarine cable between São Paulo (Brazil) and New York (US).

Larry Schwartz, CEO for Seaborn stated that “having a single operator approach is better than a consortium. Deciding to have the Seabras cable land in Wall, NJ was an important strategic decision geographically as it avoided hurricane zones and provided flexibility.” Santaliz added that Seaborn did a ‘great job with its systemic refresh. The new Seabras cable route avoids hurricane prone regions, which is key.”

Artur Mendes, CEO for Angola Cables, a multinational telecoms provider, commented that “it’s time to look for non traditional opportunities and approaches in regards to infrastructure and cable investments.” Angola Cables recently launched the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS), which is the first subsea cable system in the Southern hemisphere directly connecting Fortaleza, Brazil to Angola in South-West Africa. Focused on LATAM growth, Angola Cables, along with other providers, is also constructing the Monet cable, which links Brazil to Boca Raton, Florida in the United States. Angola Cables is also opening a data center in Fortaleza, Brazil, which interconnects cables with a meet-me-room and enables connections to reach traffic from other regions.

Serving customers in North and South America for over a decade, GlobeNet owns and operates a subsea cable network that spans more than 23,500 km. The company’s data center in Barranquilla, Colombia was designed and built to meet growing demand for wholesale telco, high-speed data and IT services across the Latin American market. Providing a presence at the most important exchange points in the Americas, GlobeNet offers a full suite of IP, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and cybersecurity offerings, and empowers its partners to rapidly embrace new market opportunities by deploying high capacity, reliable networking services.

In addition, Huawei Marine is building a 6000 km South Atlantic Inter Link (SAIL) submarine cable in the South Atlantic Ocean. SAIL links Cameroon with Fortaleza, Brazil. The project is designed to provide low latency routing between Africa and Asia in the east and the Americas in the west.

Clearly, there are a wide range of projects offering diverse routes, high network availability, robust services and reliable connectivity in the LATAM region, and as Santaliz said, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That’s how you avoid single points of failure.”

As for NJFX, operating the first and only Tier 3 carrier-neutral colocation facility in the US, it is positioned well to support all of this growth. The company, located in Wall, New Jersey has a high priority on the Interconnection of networks as its builds out to support new cable systems that are installing over the next 24 months. “NJFX plans to launch its expanded campus at the end of 2018 – Ready for Requirements,” stated Santaliz. “Exploring tenant build-to-suit options with power and operational independence, this campus uniquely sits at the Cable Landing with the most robust connectivity available in the US and interconnecting four continents.”

Santaliz is passionate about exploring how Latin America can work with the US and European marketplace – as the industry transforms with all of this new infrastructure. Seabras, coming up from Brazil, along with subsea capacity from Monet and BRUSA (Telefonica’s cable which connects Brazil with Puerto Rico and the US), makes NJFX the perfect hub for interconnection for South America, North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa. Santaliz added, “Capacity available in 2018 will be 10 times greater and pricing pressure will begin. The benefit is that Brazil will see a global marketplace open up.”

“It’s the carriers that really drive the environment,” commented Santaliz. “NJFX is just part of the solution. In order to be successful in today’s marketplace, specialization is key. Solutions that specialize in connecting Cable Landing Stations are going to play a pivotal role in pushing investments forward.”

As more fuel continues to feed the subsea industry fire, be sure to stay in the know for new submarine cable sector developments, developing trends and the continued drivers for global growth.

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About NJFX:

Thought Leaders Align

NJFX Blog / NJFX

Thought Leaders Align

March 21, 2018

Keith Schofield is General Manager of the International Cable Protection Committee. Gil Santaliz is CEO of NJFX.

Speaking at the recent Submarine Networks Europe event in London, there are few better connected people than Schofield and Santaliz. And great minds, on this occasion at least, really did think alike.

Subsea Cabling Systems and the UK – A 64 Billion Dollar Concern.

Schofield and Santaliz agree on one thing. That subsea cabling systems must be recognised as critical infrastructure. And they were specific as to why:

“Subsea cables bring nations together, keep consumers happy and keep data safe. We are investing billions of dollars for the betterment of humanity,” said Schofield.

These comments come on the back of a new report claiming subsea telecommunications cables facilitate $64 billion of trade for the UK economy, each year.

And Schofield’s thoughts were echoed by Gil Santaliz, CEO of NJFX, who said that investment in the subsea cabling sector was critical to safeguard the security and prosperity of future generations.

“Fundamentally, we need the internet to work and for that to happen we need those subsea connecting cables to work. Today, Internet of Things technology is no longer a nice to have – it’s a must have,” he said.

What UltraMAP think.

At UltraMAP we are detail people. We deal with real-world facts and absolutes. To contextualise Schofield and Santaliz’s comments, the amount of trade and commerce facilitated by subsea cable systems for the UK alone exceeds the total value of the UK’s annual trade deal with China.

That’s big.

The Chain

And as committed as we are to what we do, we also understand that here ay UltraMAP we are merely a link in a chain. However, it is our job to keep the links of the chain connected.

That’s the only way the data can move. And the only way commerce can move. 64 billion dollars worth each year in the UK alone.

So is it worth leaving cables unattended? Unmonitored, even for a single minute of a single day? When a cable strike can happen in any single minute and on any single day?

We don’t think so. How about you?

See the original article at www.Ultra-Map.org

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About NJFX:

The Factors Driving Disruption in the Subsea Industry

NJFX Blog / NJFX

The Factors Driving Disruption in the Subsea Industry

March 2, 2018

Subsea industry leaders fresh off a game changing conference have a lot to think about. Submarine Networks Europe 2018 brought together cable operators, carriers, builders and OTTs to talk about what’s ahead for the industry, what’s changing within the subsea sector and where we go from here.

Perhaps the most obvious development is the sheer number of projects currently in the works or on the horizon. This is the second building boom since the internet came to be. Before this latest round of new cable project announcements, when the internet was still in its infancy, the demand for capacity was nowhere near the levels it is today. It’s becoming clear the current cable building boom is not only timely, but necessary. These new projects are as the most recent cables near their end of life.

“We are seeing the next generation of subsea deployments, not seen since 2000, which will support the next 20 years of as we experience an explosion in the amount of data that traverses the globe,” comments Gil Santaliz, Founder and CEO of NJFX. “These new cables have a new financial model driven by the OTT’s with fewer carriers involved. Some carriers will be left to operate in the secondary market only. NJFX’s unique Tier 3 colocation model allows us to address the requirements that subsea cable operators have for higher capacity, reliability, security, and flexible interconnection options to North America, South America and Europe.”

Santaliz adds that it is inevitable that OTT players would have a huge role to play in the financing of future subsea projects and that the industry must learn to work with them. “Companies like Facebook, Google and the rest represent stable tenants for operators,” he says.

Today subsea cables are critical infrastructure completely necessary to keep up to date and functioning at the fastest rate possible. “Fundamentally, we need the internet to work and for that to happen we need those subsea connecting cables to work. Today, Internet of Things technology is no longer a nice to have – it’s a must have,” Santaliz said.

The carrier- neutral model at the cable landing station is becoming very beneficial. Massive bandwidth demands and the need for highly reliable network infrastructure are driving the need to locate multiple subsea cable systems in one place. “There are huge economies of scale in this model,” continues Santaliz. “Operators are recognizing that it’s extremely hard to have all of these elements – elevation, backhaul optionality, and power in one place. A carrier-neutral CLS allows for a best of breed community versus the traditional monopoly carrier landlord model and paves the way for the new economy.”

It wasn’t that long ago that the Internet was just email. Now it’s live broadcast, applications and services. “I expect to be in a driverless car in the next five to ten years, making my life a lot easier as I get older. The last thing I want to hear is that my car won’t work because they lost some application that was being supported out of France or Frankfurt and there is no connectivity and the cars aren’t working. We need to modernize our infrastructure to support how important it is that these things continue to work,” comments Santaliz.

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About NJFX:

NJFX Spotlight on Epsilon: The Age of Digital Transformation

NJFX Blog / NJFX

NJFX Spotlight on Epsilon: The Age of Digital Transformation

February 19, 2018

Global communications are changing at a very fast pace in large part due to the rise of Internet of Things, video streaming, social media, big data, multi-cloud use and a ton of new applications. It is estimated that the total amount of data created by any device will more than double, reaching 847 zettabytes (ZB) per year by 2021. There is no doubt that telecommunications infrastructure must be bolstered to keep up. As seen, through a multitude of new subsea cable projects led by both content providers and telecommunications carriers.

Carriers and service providers are also positioning to meet this challenge by increasing capabilities and capacities for themselves as well as for their end-users. Epsilon, a global connectivity and communications service provider, operates a carrier-grade, next-generation terabit optical backbone and has a presence in the NJFX colocation facility in Wall, NJ. Its Global Interconnect Fabric includes a dense mesh of service providers, data center providers, subsea cable operators, internet exchanges and carriers.

“A lot of people are just now realizing that networking needs to be more fluid and agile than ever before. It’s the way it has to be moving forward,” commented Paul Verhoeven, General Manager Americas for Epsilon. With over 15 years of providing global infrastructure, Epsilon provides a foundation for the applications and ecosystems of the future. The company enables digital transformation and helps its partners to leverage new technologies and prepare for the future. Epsilon delivers connectivity and communications services globally via innovative automation, flexible portals and APIs. Its unique on-demand networking technology is deployed to over 90 PoPs, connecting 600 network operators and cloud service providers and has a reach to over 170 countries.

Enabling Innovation

Operating a Tier 3 carrier-neutral colocation campus, NJFX is an integral part of an ecosystem of key connectivity providers such as Epsilon, as well as new subsea cable projects and connects them all at the cable landing station where the cables make landfall. “Epsilon sees real value in working with partners like NJFX,” continued Verhoeven. “What Epsilon is presenting to the tenants in the NJFX ecosystem is the ability to turn up services in between our 90+ points of presence. All this can be done through our platform-based model which interlinks data center ecosystems to make it a much more fluid fabric. This is where companies can transit to clouds, other data centers and other carriers where ever and whenever they need it.”

To help providers and enterprises keep up with the fast pace of innovation, Epsilon is taking the ordering of bandwidth beyond the standard approach. “The whole industry is shifting,” stated Verhoeven. “We are removing the pain points that have been traditionally a part of managing network infrastructure. By providing the power that supports cloud services and allows all the apps to run on it, we can reduce lead times that used to take weeks and now spin up capacity in a couple of minutes.”

Epsilon enables services through an automated API function and offers an on-demand interconnected mesh fabric of subsea cable providers that stretches across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. This allows organizations to turn up bandwidth when they need it – whether it’s to another cloud, data center, or to bridge the last mile.

With the rise of data intensive applications, organizations also need to migrate, back up and move data, often using larger bandwidth capacities and for shorter timeframes. Epsilon enables the connection of platforms and networks through APIs with a click of a button. Use cases include:

Data replication providers – help enterprises and IT departments move infrastructure into cloud services; for example, an organization may need a 10Gig pipe for only 3 months for the initial back up.
The rise of hybrid cloud usage – using multiple clouds instead of just one; can replicate data from one cloud to another or to a hosted service.
Data center operators – need to offer connections beyond space and power; NJFX offers direct interconnections to the Epsilon fabric.

Flexible models are also important as seen in the next-gen breed of managed service providers. Consumer and enterprise models are changing due to the vast amount of content and applications that are out there stemming from gaming, watching videos/movie content and more. For gaming companies, requirements can quickly change from 100Mbps to 10Gig. So, it is not always about deploying temporary bandwidth, but more about having the ability to scale as the provider’s requirements change and grow. In addition, these providers require certain traffic volumes to get to other parts of the world.

These use cases are a perfect fit for Epsilon. Enabling innovation, these scalable models translate to a new breed of next-gen managed service providers. As Verhoeven stated, “The industry is used to having on-demand capabilities with cloud computing and now Epsilon is enabling the agility of the network infrastructure to catch up.”

Epsilon is a true enabler, allowing companies to white label new platforms without investing in the DevOps and operations needed to support and manage them. By partnering with Epsilon, organizations can offload a lot of the time spent in development and allow organizations to transform themselves in this new age.

NJFX provides the flexible foundation that allows it to work with like-minded services providers, such as Epsilon, to transform global communications.

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About NJFX:

Latest News & Updates

Stay informed with the latest press releases, industry news, and more.

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Cross River Fiber completes Latency-Sensitive Route to NJFX & Becomes New International Gateway to NYC Financials

Industry News, Press Releases / NJFX

Cross River Fiber completes Latency-Sensitive Route to NJFX & Becomes New International Gateway to NYC Financials

January 22, 2018

Morristown and Wall Township, NJ – Cross River Fiber, a New Jersey-based, boutique network infrastructure and telecommunications solutions provider, announces the completion of its fiber network to the NJFX Tier 3 colocation campus in Wall Township, NJ. The highly-anticipated fiber route provides both enterprises, as well as the international community, with a robust interconnection option between the NJFX campus and key financial exchanges and carrier hotels in NY and NJ.

Offering high-capacity, latency-sensitive dark and lit services, Cross River Fiber designs, constructs and maintains its own independent network and distinguishes itself from other providers by custom-building its network to client specifications. NJFX operates the only carrier neutral Tier 3 cable landing and colocation campus and through its Subsea Exchange platform, carriers, service providers and content companies have direct access to a vital marketplace. The completed fiber route deploys all new optical glass, as well as a path that is diverse from other legacy infrastructure options, which equates to an extremely reliable network for NJFX customers.

“We are excited to enable the global business community through our high-capacity, latency-sensitive and diverse network,” says Vincenzo Clemente, CEO of Cross River Fiber. “By providing purpose-built transport options between the NJFX campus and these important exchange points, we are enabling any enterprise who conducts critical business transactions domestically and abroad, effectively closing the loop between subsea transport and the NY-based interconnections that drive business.”

“Cross River Fiber provides a key gateway to New York metro financial hubs, and we welcome them to our new Subsea Exchange ecosystem,” states Gil Santaliz, CEO for NJFX. “This marketplace allows subsea operators and US fiber-based providers to interexchange their capacity, ensuring network diversity through transparency. Cross River Fiber shares our commitment to providing highly reliable infrastructure, which is paramount to keeping global networks and financials operating 24x7x365.”

For more information about Cross River Fiber, please visit www.crossriverfiber.com.

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About Cross River Fiber
Founded in 2011, Cross River Fiber provides custom, scalable, and secure high-speed fiber network solutions for carriers, wireless mobility providers and enterprise businesses. Our purpose-built fiber network extends into key data centers, carrier hotels, enterprise buildings, wireless access points, and financial exchanges within New Jersey and New York. Providing dark and lit transport solutions, Cross River Fiber connects businesses to a digital world. Cross River Fiber is a Delaware LLC owned by its employees, business partners and Ridgemont Equity Partners. To learn more about Cross River Fiber, visit www.crossriverfiber.com. To learn more about Ridgemont Equity Partners, visit www.ridgemontep.com.

For Cross River Fiber Media Inquiries, please contact:
Melissa Stanislaw
Director of Sales and Marketing
[email protected]
(908) 409-6981

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About NJFX:

Global Communications Innovation: A Look at What’s Ahead

NJFX Blog / NJFX

Global Communications Innovation: A Look at What’s Ahead

July 22, 2022

Subsea cable systems play an integral role in today’s communications, serving as the primary backbone to transport data, video and voice traffic globally. Spanning continent to continent, and across the world’s oceans, subsea cables are the foundation in which content is served up, videos are viewed, phone calls are made, social media is posted and businesses operate. And despite popular perception, more than 95 percent of all U.S. international voice, data, and Internet traffic travels by submarine cable. Submarine cables provide higher quality, more reliable, more secure, and less expensive communications than satellites provide.

The physical point in which subsea cables make landfall is at a Cable Landing Station (CLS). It is at these critical network junctures where the cable is brought from the ocean into a terrestrial hub and then broken out into terrestrial fiber paths to connect with metro and long haul routes. Carriers, content and service providers, as well as enterprises and financials are all clamoring to be closer to the edge, which means – closer to where the cable is physically accessed to avoid unnecessary points of failure.

While subsea cable systems have been around since the 1850’s, the landscape of today’s Cable Landing Stations and their role are rapidly changing. Gil Santaliz, CEO and Founder of NJFX, believes the future of Cable Landing Stations lies within the ecosystem effect where a healthy density of diverse networks is created and attracts other infrastructure development. NJFX, known as Tier 3 by the Subsea, offers a Subsea Exchange ecosystem, which combines the right number of carriers participating in a marketplace to interexchange capacity. This offers the capability of tapping into the network at the Cable Landing Station, which can in turn lower latencies, increase speeds, increase capacity options and remove single points of failure.

”When a campus has resiliency, redundancy and also the capability for tenants to now have a choice of using shared services or not – or remain completely separate in a hardened facility – you’ve got a good combination. It’s a unique ecosystem-type approach,“ says Amy Marks, CEO of XSite Modular, a design-builder of Cable Landing Stations. “There are only so many routes you can go through. But what NJFX is doing in terms of creating diverse routes to and from a protected campus is really the perfect solution and quite innovative.”

A Cable Landing Station that is located at a coastal, terrestrial, secure site with high elevation, reliable power and direct accessibility to multiple backhaul providers is crucial, and exactly what NJFX offers. Santaliz believes this combination of ingredients will be hard to achieve in the future and why NJFX is uniquely positioned. NJFX is the result of the innovation of the world’s first colocation campus that strategically intersects a carrier-neutral subsea cable landing station meet-me room with a Tier 3, carrier-neutral data center. Its facility is a 64,800-square foot purpose-built data center, which offers direct access to multiple independent subsea cable systems that interconnect North America, Europe, and South America.

There is a definite need for networks to interconnect, and the benefits of the Tier 3 CLS campus infrastructure include having multiple operationally independent builds, each with two sets of independent bores to the ocean that are miles apart, and with two independent buildings. Additional benefits include:

Tier 3 concurrently maintainable systems
Location proven to withstand natural disasters at 65 feet above sea level
Multiple Points of Points entry
Eight independent fiber based providers
Multiple independent meet-me rooms supported by audited Department of Homeland Security standards

All of this is enclosed in a fenced campus which has independent access roads, further providing a secure solution.

Bypassing the typical telecom route through NYC metro, NJFX offers a smart way for organizations to plan their network architectures with resiliency. In addition, NJFX’s close proximity to a power substation further ensures high reliability. “Cable Landing Stations and cable operators need extremely reliable power, as evidenced by the issues from some of the 2017 hurricanes, which caused outages lasting for weeks,” comments Santaliz. “Data centers and carrier hotels are not meant to run on generators for that long. In times of disaster, power utilities have to be turned back on as fast as possible.”

Crosslake Fibre is using a high fiber count submarine cable from NJFX to reach an independent Cable Landing Station on Long Island bypassing NYC, which further increases network diversity and resilience. “The power of being able to cost-effectively shift traffic across different TransAtlantic routes is now possible, because of new connectivity options,” comments Mike Cunningham, CEO of Crosslake Fibre. “These new routes, like the Wall-LI cable, can be segments within larger mesh networks enabling flexibility and necessary resilience around Tier 3 infrastructure.”

Massive bandwidth demands and the need for highly reliable network infrastructure are driving the need to locate multiple subsea cable systems in one place. “There are huge economies of scale in this model,” continues Santaliz. “Operators are recognizing that it’s extremely hard to have all of these elements – elevation, backhaul optionality, and power in one place. A carrier-neutral CLS allows for a best of breed community versus the traditional monopoly carrier landlord model and paves the way for the new economy.”

For more information and to learn more about the changing subsea cable landscape, visit www.njfx.net.

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About XSite Modular

XSite Modular is the most well-known and prolific design-builder of cable landing stations. XSite stations are built in a controlled environment with experienced labor forces while their process provides design flexibility to meet clients’ requirements, both technically and aesthetically. Unlike containers, XSite’s modular building process provides large column free spaces with gracious ceiling heights for ease of equipment installation.

XSite’s design-build process dramatically reduces project schedules and provides cost certainty from the earliest concept phases through completion. XSite utilizes an engineered, optimized and productized approach that is easily customized for clients’ specific telecom DC power requirements and space/program needs. This transformational approach allows us to dramatically reduce risk for clients by providing a turnkey landing station to deliver time-sensitive, critical infrastructure to often challenging locations.

XSite has worked on six of the seven continents in both urban and remote locations on systems including ECLink, CFX-1, SEACOM, Matrix, Fibralink, TGN Pacific G6, Seabras-1, Hawaiian Telcom Makaha CLS (SEA-US), Atisa and SPM. XSite also provides PFE shelters, ILA huts, modular data centers and all types of terrestrial telecommunications buildings. For more information on XSite Modular, please visit http://www.xsitemodular.com

About Crosslake Fibre

Crosslake Fibre was established to develop fibre-optic projects throughout North America. Crosslake’s innovative approach to developing next-generation networks will bring new backbone routes to telecommunications carriers and web-centric customers, and last mile broadband to consumers. Crosslake Fibre’s leading project is its Lake Ontario project to construct a new subsea cable from Toronto, Canada to Buffalo, New York. For additional information, see www.crosslakefibre.ca.

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About NJFX:

NJFX GENERAL MANAGER, FELIX SEDA, BRINGS NJFX INTO 2018 AND BEYOND

NJFX Blog / NJFX

Felix Seda: Big data and the submarine cable building boom

We live in a digital universe, and data is at the center of it. This universe is growing exponentially – 40 percent each year into the next decade.

July 22, 2022

Not only are more people and businesses doing everything online, but all of those “smart” devices connected to the internet: your phone, your television, your watch, your home security system, and more, are generating or receiving data. By 2020, this digital universe may contain as many digital bits as there are stars in the ACTUAL universe. It is doubling in size every two years, and by 2020 will reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes.According to Cisco, global internet traffic reached the zettabyte era last year, with a run rate of 1.2 ZB annually. Annual global IP traffic will reach 3.3 ZB per year by 2021. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) will carry 71 percent of Internet traffic by 2021. And smartphone traffic will exceed PC traffic.

Who needs space?

If you’ve seen the Disney-Pixar movie WALL-E, you may remember the scene of Earth shown from space many decades in the future. It’s depicted as shrouded in thousands and thousands of orbiting satellites. It seems a logical prediction by the Disney-Pixar animators, but the fact is, the vast majority of the massive amount of data that is generated in the next decade, will travel via submarine cable.It might seem that space would better connect the Internet than running really long cables (no thicker than a garden hose) thousands of miles across the ocean floor.

Which, by the way, is a method developed more than a hundred years ago. But as it turns out, it’s not. Submarine cables are simply faster and cheaper than satellites.So as content increases, content giants will drive the demand for submarine cables. Market research firm Telegeography estimates an increase of new cable deployments worth more than $8.1 billion over the next three years.Google, Microsoft and Facebook, once just customers, are now financing cable ventures and joining submarine cable projects. Microsoft and Facebook have partnered for the MAREA transatlantic submarine cable system just deployed. The 4,100-mile (6,600 km) cable system is the first new system built south of the North Atlantic since 1999. Google dipped its toe in the water with the Monet cable, a link between Florida and Brazil. And more are sure to come.It’s clear submarine cables dominate data delivery. But, how does that data get on land, across continents and to your device?

Cable landing stations are that meeting point. Once data has traveled thousands of miles along the submarine cable, it comes ashore at landing station. The landing station is an important component of the submarine cable system.Sites are generally chosen for gently sloping coastline, little marine traffic, accessibility to power source and secure location. But what should also be part of the equation is carrier access closer to the edge, as well as route diversity, which are both addressed by colocation.It’s becoming clear that it can be cost prohibitive for networks and carriers to set up individual data centers. A colocation campus is a much less expensive option that can still provide the interconnection necessary.

Felix Seda is the General Manager for NJFX

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