Telia Carrier builds new unique route from Stockholm to St. Petersburg and upgrades submarine cables in the Baltic Sea

Stockholm/St. Petersburg, Russia – 16 January 2017 – Telia Carrier today announced that it has established a new route stretching from Stockholm to St. Petersburg via Tallinn, and has upgraded multiple submarine cables to future proof its network, bringing lower latency and additional capacity. The new route further diversifies the wholesale carrier’s network and the upgrade enables Telia Carrier to provide 100G+ services to carriers, content and cloud providers in the Baltics, Russia and beyond.

The new network extension is the most direct route possible from Stockholm to St. Petersburg at just under 900 km. With a connection in Tallinn, Estonia, Telia Carrier’s mesh network extends in different directions reaching multiple cities including Riga, Latvia or Helsinki, Finland. This added diversity and geographical reach extends the value of the top-two ranked global backbone, AS1299.

As St. Petersburg and Moscow are important transit points for Asian traffic, the new route also allows Telia Carrier to service the increase in traffic coming into Europe from Asia via terrestrial cable routes from the East as well as directly from Russia.

The subsea cables reaching across the Baltic Sea have been upgraded using the latest coherent Flex-Grid technology allowing Telia Carrier to offer 100G, and future 150G and 200G services leveraging the latest modulation formats.

“As our network becomes more meshed throughout Eastern Europe and the Baltics, we are continuing to build out eastward to stay ahead of content demand and the resulting backbone traffic in the region,” said Johan Godal, global product manager, wavelength and network outsourcing services at Telia Carrier. “By extending the route from Sweden to Russia and upgrading the submarine cables in the Baltic Sea, we can now offer high capacity and low latency services via a highly-meshed network throughout the region.”

Telia Carrier’s global fiber backbone has grown organically, without acquisitions, and is the first to be 100G-enabled in both Europe and North America. It is also the first network to successfully transmit 1 Tb/s on its US network. According to Dyn Research’s global backbone rankings, AS1299, Telia Carrier’s global IP backbone is currently ranked top-two. Telia Carrier’s rapid growth and ascension through the rankings was recently highlighted in Dyn’s ‘Baker’s Dozen, 2015 edition’ report. The company enables worldwide connectivity by connecting more than 220 Points of Presence (PoPs) across Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East including over 70 PoPs in North America alone.