The good news is that there are a number of carriers that span the Atlantic and offer connectivity into major European cities. Some American-based carriers have arrangements to hand off traffic to data centers in Europe. AboveNet recently announced just such an arrangement with ancotel GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany. Hooking up with ancotel’s Kleyer 90 data center gives AboveNet access to more than 430 service providers who represent 63 countries. These include bandwidth services, VoIP providers, hosting companies, content delivery networks and cloud networking. About 75% of the traffic that goes in and out of the Frankfurt data center is routed to destinations outside of Germany.
In addition, Frankfurt itself is a major financial hub for Europe. AboveNet specializes in low latency connections that support high speed trading. They offer a Gigabit Ethernet service between New York and London with the extreme low-latency needed for algorithmic trading and the secure completion of financial and banking transactions. AboveNet’s low-latency transatlantic service reaches the key financial locations in London including, Slough, The City and Docklands. In the New York Metro area, they connect you with Manhattan and New Jersey, including Newark, Weehawken, Secaucus, Carteret and Clifton. Metro access under 1 msec to hundreds of buildings in the New York and London metro markets.
Another carrier with a global reach is Level 3 Communications. They have multiple fiber optic connections from the New York metropolitan area cross the Atlantic and landing in England, France, Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands. From there, fiber networks connect to Germany, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Finland and other European destinations. They have an extensive network covering North America, so that your traffic is on-net even if you aren’t located on the East Coast.
Global Telecom and Technology also has extensive network connectivity in the United States and Europe. They have access to over 100,000 point of presence (POPs) worldwide and experience with installing networks in over 80 countries. GTT offers both international WAN connectivity and International Dedicated Internet Access (DIA).
What kind of international connectivity can you expect to find? The classic solution is a point to point telecom connection running over fiber optic undersea cable. At the low end are T1 lines in the United States and E1 lines in Europe. These run at 1.5 Mbps and 2 Mbps respectively. Faster services are the SONET/SDH fiber optic connections from OC-3 at 155 Mbps on up to OC-192 at 10 Gbps and perhaps OC-768 at 40 Gbps. Network cores are currently being upgraded to 100 Gbps. An alternative service is Carrier Ethernet at 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Ethernet can be configured as a point to point dedicated line or a point to multipoint connection to link multiple locations.
MPLS networks are becoming increasingly popular for international network connections. You can interconnect all your domestic business locations with a mesh network connection running over MPLS. That MPLS network can also include locations in Europe or elsewhere across the globe. What MPLS offers is high performance, security and lower costs than multiple point to point line connections.
Does your business need access to Europe to include sales, distribution or manufacturing? Do you perhaps have special requirements such as high bandwidth or ultra low latency for financial services? If so, there are telecom services available to meet your needs. In many cases, you can get multiple competitive bids for international network connections and choose which carrier to do business with.
