Connectivity Chronicles: Subsea landing stations and thriving East Coast markets

When you hear “East Coast,” you may think of the New York Yankees, chopped cheese sandwiches and corner store bodegas. However, there’s even more to the region than these cultural staples as you travel south.

Northern Virginia leads the global rankings in data center capacity and connectivity, with the eastern seaboard of the United States serving as a major gateway for international traffic flows from Central and South America, the Caribbean, Asia, Europe and other global hubs. Aside from these subsea landing stations, other market forces are driving the East Coast’s connectivity demands, including growth in Virginia and the Research Triangle.

Ashburn, Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” is one of the largest data center markets in the world, and, in some ways, constitutes the heart of the Internet. This area is home to 35 million square feet of data center space. It has also experienced tremendous local growth to serve the mission-critical technology requirements of nearby educational and federal organizations.

There are numerous factors that make this region attractive for data center investment, including its strategic geographic location, substantial tech workforce, comparatively affordable power and more. Other areas of Virginia, including Richmond, are also seeing major investments from data center companies, including QTS, PowerHouse Data Centers, Iron Mountain and others.

Further south, the Research Triangle comprises North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and is positioned between three major research universities, including Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. The Research Triangle has become a center for tech investment, constituting the second-fastest growing tech hub in the U.S., with over $4 billion in biotech investment in 2021 and its life sciences industry generating 2.4 billion in revenue.

As part of this tech hub, Raleigh is a booming hyperscale data center market, with Raleigh’s tech workforce growing by over six percent to 105,000 professionals from 2019-2021. Atlanta is also experiencing significant data center investment as one of the fastest-growing markets on the East Coast, with its leased data center space increasing by 706 megawatts in 2024.

Along with the requirements of ever-growing datacenters, the connectivity needs of the East Coast’s financial markets in major cities are accelerating as more companies pursue digital transformation. Amid these developments, reliable Tier-1 connectivity is vital as banking and related industries integrate cloud applications, their own data centers and end-users.

We’ve worked to expand our network along the East Coast and support these various markets, with always-on services and reliable regional and transatlantic connectivity proving essential for financial industries that work with latency-sensitive data across global industries. These expansions include our recent route in Boston – with essential diversity from traditional routes via Manhattan – and earlier projects such as our Virginia Beach routes and terabit-scale Point-of-Presence (PoP) at NJFX.

Our routes and PoPs provide high-capacity connectivity to Europe by leveraging the Amitié AEC3 seacable, the Telxius cable landing station, the MAREA & DUNANT seacables, the Havfrue/AEC2 & AEC1  subsea cable systems and others.

Our East Coast and Gulf Coast network presence

High-Capacity Virginia Routes

Amid accelerating growth in its data center markets, Virginia is one of our most strategic investment regions in the United States. In May 2023, we launched a route from Reston, VA, through North Carolina and Florida. This high-capacity route utilizes open optical line systems to support multi-vendor transponders and the latest coherent pluggable components, enabling cost-effective, scalable Wavelength services for our customers in thriving technology sectors along the eastern seaboard. Our route also provides additional capacity to support the terrestrial transport of traffic from new subsea cables to Latin America and the Caribbean terminating in Jacksonville and South Florida.

To serve our customers’ escalating demands for high-capacity bandwidth, we enhanced capacity on our high-traffic route from Ashburn, VA, to Atlanta, GA, with Infinera’s L-band technology. This upgrade doubles capacity per fiber pair, marking our first route with active L-band capacity in service. By upgrading one of our highest-traffic routes, we can bring more capacity to the North American market, an area where long-distance fiber is in short supply and often prohibitively expensive to build. This network enhancement showcases our continuous investment in optical innovation to maximize our network amid fiber supply constraints.

Fully Diverse Gulf Coast Route

Our network presence along the East Coast spans numerous regions, including Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, New York and other states. We also recently expanded our Gulf Coast network, continuing our ongoing investment in the Florida peninsula and surrounding areas to enhance network diversity. This expansion includes a fully diverse route from Houston, TX, to Jacksonville, FL, via Slidell, LA, Mobile, AL and Tallahassee, FL.

The route provides customers with low-latency IP services and terabit-scale capacities to support AI/ML applications and East-West traffic flows. This network expansion also connects traffic flows from East Coast landing stations to our PoPs in Texas and Mexico, driving growth in booming data center and technology markets along the Gulf Coast.

Tier-1 Connectivity Services For Financial Markets

As banking institutions and financial companies increasingly integrate cloud applications, their connectivity requirements heighten to enable low-latency, secure services across their vast business footprints. To meet these needs, we joined the growing connectivity ecosystem at DataVerge (the owner and operator of the only carrier-neutral interconnection facility in Brooklyn) in November 2023.

This network expansion provides affordable, low-latency connectivity to our wholesale and enterprise customers in the region, spurring further investment and innovation in Industry City, Brooklyn’s leading technology hub. DataVerge shares our philosophy of customer excellence, making them an ideal partner for enabling direct cloud access and other reliable Tier-1 services that are essential for the financial sector’s continued growth in New York City and surrounding areas.

In November 2022, we also launched a high-capacity transmission route connecting Boston, MA, to Seacaucus, NJ, and providing backhaul to the Amitié AEC-3 sea cable system. This route enhances our end-to-end transatlantic capability, providing customers with resilient connectivity and fast delivery that bypasses common routes through Long Island and Manhattan.

This network expansion establishes Boston as a DWDM service market and empowers companies, including financial services organizations, with diverse connection options and seamless terabit scale capability across multiple cables connecting into landing stations in the U.S. and Europe. This enhances these companies’ access to international markets by connecting to new and future subsea cables, enabling continued business expansion for our customers.

Why Arelion?

• We connect diversely between regional and global hubs, including:
  • Major Subsea Cable Landing Points in Boston, New York City, Wall Township (NJFX), Virginia Beach (Telxius), Jacksonville (Telxius), Boca Raton (Telxius), North Hollywood (OJUS) and Miami.
  • 4 routes between Ashburn and Atlanta and 3 routes between Ashburn and New York
  • Our Boston route optimizes diversity by bypassing the congested Manhattan market.
• Our network is 400G enabled and already en route to the next steps with the world’s first live 1.6 Tb/s Wave data transmission.
• Our #1 ranked IP network connects to everyone (and everything) that matters, offering IP transit, Cloud connectivity and Datacenter-to-Datacenter Ethernet with class of service for bandwidths up to 100G.

To learn more about our North American network presence, check out the rest of our Connectivity Chronicles blog series.

Johan Ottosson, VP Strategy & Product Management