Fastweb partnership will boost our international capacity services connecting Sicily to Europe
We recently announced a strategic partnership with Fastweb, one of Italy’s most important telecommunications operators, to offer enhanced connectivity to customers in the Middle East, Africa and Asia looking for routes into Europe by offering Sicily as an entry point. This partnership will allow both companies to better utilise our infrastructure to increase international submarine connectivity, deliver more capacity and enhance customer service.
Data traffic on today’s networks is at unprecedented levels, driven by consumers’ global digital lifestyles and enterprises shifting to cloud services delivered over the public internet. Global traffic rose by over 60% in 2016 alone. Mobile data usage has also grown 18-fold in the last five years[1]. As a result, network operators are facing tremendous pressure to support this data-led ecosystem.
To help our customers respond to these data demands, we have evolved our services to deliver offerings with assured Quality of Experience for multiple applications. We are working with some of the world’s most innovative network operators to launch new services, reach new markets and ensure a global presence, focused on supporting rising data demands and shifting traffic patterns while delivering value.
In fast-growing markets such as the Middle East, Asia and Africa rising data traffic means demand is starting to outstrip capacity for many network operators. Working with Fastweb we have designed a solution that extends our Pan European Network through Fastweb’s fiber optic, high speed, low latency, single hop backbone in Italy, connecting international submarine cable systems that come into the connectivity hub of Sicily.
The partnership is a true win-win: it enhances Fastweb’s access to major submarine cable systems, and enables us to fully satisfy the capacity requirements and connectivity needs of operators from Europe to the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
A key outcome from this partnership will be jointly delivering high-quality international capacity services for customers in the Middle East, Africa and Asia utilising landing capacity in Sicily to offer an additional entry point into Europe as a strategic alternative to Marseilles (France). We can now offer seamless end-to-end back-haul services with significantly reduced latency and fully diverse paths, supported by premium Service Level Agreements thanks to the high reliability of our combined networks.
BICS is ideally positioned to enable new communications services and solutions for network operators around the world with the relationships, technical capabilities, and network infrastructure to make this a reality. And we are constantly exploring new ways to expand our service portfolio to providing customers with first class connectivity. This partnership confirms our position as a bridging partner for operators expanding their capacity provision throughout Europe.
