Connectivity Chronicles: Scaling our North American network

Amid our continuous network expansion, we’re creating a blog series detailing our global footprint, target markets and market drivers across numerous regions. How come? Well, while we may have been in business for about 30 years, we are constantly humbled by the fact that our brand is still not widely known. And while we’re known as an IP connectivity provider with roots in Europe, few understand the scale and depth of our North American network.

Our North American network now accounts for 57% of our total customer bandwidth, up 50% from two years ago and growing 40% year-over-year. So, we’re using this blog series as a chance to celebrate some of our team’s success in connecting the world for the past umpteen years. After all, someone has to do it!

In this blog post, we’ll explore why we continue to invest in North America, and the important role we believe that we can play in this heavily consolidated market. We will also introduce some of the themes we will cover in forthcoming blog posts.

Re-energizing growth in North America

Over the past decade, we’ve made substantial investments in new Wavelength routes, IP routes, Points-of-Presence (PoPs) and Wavelength markets across North America, including the Florida peninsula, the East Coast, from Atlanta down to Texas, and onwards to Mexico. Our continued investment in these markets is critical to our long-held mission of providing global connectivity that ensures technological innovation and bridges cultural divides.

Whether you’re attempting large-scale digital transformation, launching the next GenAI application, or scrolling through cat videos, our backbone network provides the foundation for the modern world’s technology needs.

Check out these visuals below to understand just how much we’ve scaled our North American network over the past 10 years. Even we’re surprised at how much it adds up over time!

Our North American network ten years ago:

Our North American network today:

These new North American routes and PoPs include:

• New York to Chicago
• Chicago to Denver to to the Bay Area
• The Bay Area to Los Angeles
• San Diego to El Paso, TX
• El Paso to Dallas, TX
• Dallas-Austin-San Antonio-Laredo-McAllen-Houston
• Dallas to Atlanta via Memphis
• Atlanta to Ashburn via Chattanooga
• Ashburn to New York via Philadelphia
• Chicago to Atlanta via Nashville
• Cable landing stations such as Virginia Beach and NJFX
• New York to Boston
• Jacksonville to Tallahassee
• US border to Monterrey, Mexico

What’s driving the North American connectivity market?

Fiber availability, consolidation and Middle Mile initiatives

The North American connectivity market’s lack of available fiber makes network expansion more difficult than in Europe. To overcome these challenges, we’ve been creative in leasing fiber from regional providers that can meet our network expansion needs.

We’ve invested in the North American market not only because it’s the powerhouse of the global tech scene, but also due to years of market consolidation. This consolidation heightens the need for customer-centric Internet carriers that specialize in IP connectivity and optical transmission, providing an alternative to incumbent operators.

Middle Mile grant programs also strive to enable equitable Internet access for underserved communities. To cater to that need, we’ve increasingly expanded into Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets and added new routes, positioning us to support these efforts through reliable backbone connectivity.

North America’s data center boom

North America’s data center industry is poised for growth, necessitating our continuous expansion to meet the connectivity requirements of global and local markets. In 2023, the primary market supply of the North American data center segment grew 26% year-over-year to 5,174 MW, with an all-time high of 3,077.8 MW under construction in primary markets. Hyperscalers are also making substantial investments in data center construction to keep pace with their business demands, including Google recently pouring billions into new data centers to facilitate AI and cloud growth.

AI growth strains power availability and capacity in Tier 1 markets, resulting in more data center growth in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets. We are well-positioned to support AI growth through our ongoing investments in these Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, providing capacity at scale and unique routes connecting into these new campuses.

Our technological expertise also allows us to provide customized network solutions that enable faster time-to-market and fully diverse connectivity, helping enterprises meet the accelerated timelines driven by the requirements of new AI applications.

Optical innovation supporting AI/ML and Enterprise use cases

As enterprises increasingly seek carrier-grade optical transmission solutions to serve their networking needs, we’re expanding into the North American enterprise market through Wavelengths, Ethernet and similar services. These services are strengthened by our investments in optical innovation, including sixth-generation 400G coherent pluggable optics, open line systems and more.

These solutions and our continuous fiber expansions serve the connectivity requirements of our primary market drivers, including data center growth, content delivery applications, enterprise use cases, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) and more.

Experts project the AI market will reach $1.81 trillion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.1% over the next decade. While AI traffic mostly stays in data centers for AI training, it may spill into backbone networks eventually for edge inference and other use cases. Due to our continuous network investments, we can handle both scenarios as AI proliferates.

If AI stays in data centers for training and learning purposes, our network can provide the capacity, speed, diversity and security required to route AI traffic efficiently and reliably across protected paths between data centers. However, if AI traffic hits backbone networks sooner than expected, our network can serve its immense capacity demands while providing low-latency connectivity to enable its real-time functionality and distribution to end-users.

Stay tuned for the next installment in our network expansion series, where we’ll zero in on our presence in Florida, including key routes, PoPs and underlying market forces driving the region’s technology boom.

Johan Ottosson, VP Strategy & Product Management