Zayo Add Fastest Direct Fibre Network From Manchester to New York
The Zayo Group, which operates a large metro and long-haul fibre optic network in the UK and globally, has launched the “fastest direct network route” connecting Manchester to New York with its new transatlantic subsea fibre. The link provides a direct route to North America that “avoids backhauling to global internet hubs in London and Paris” (i.e. reducing transatlantic latency).
The official announcement does not contain any useful technical details about the full route or its capabilities, although they appear to be using the America Europe Connect-2 (AEC-2) cable for most of it (system capacity of 108Tbps). The clear intention here is for Zayo’s customers in the North of England and across Europe to receive “faster and more efficient” connections to North America.
Zayo says the new route will enable the following improvements:
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➤ The UK government’s Northern Powerhouse vision for a super-charged, globally connected Northern economy;
➤ A faster, Northern-based direct gateway for the independent Internet Exchanges in the North of England and Scotland;
➤ More resilience and reliability in the North. By upgrading the Manchester Internet gateway and leveraging capacity from Zayo’s huge Zeus subsea cable, we’ve added a direct route to Amsterdam. This gives our customers three Internet routes; from Manchester to the US, Dublin and The Netherlands. This complements the three routes we also have to London.
➤ A direct gateway for Manchester to attract both large enterprises and innovative new start-ups as Manchester is the UK’s second “technology city” after London.
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➤ Lowered latency for customers in The Netherlands as the new Manchester transatlantic route acts as an alternative path for all packet traffic in Amsterdam, by avoiding the heavy traffic centers of London and Paris. Amsterdam is the third largest Internet hub in the world; and
➤ Resilience to the UK’s Internet backbone – no longer reliant on London as so many other IP networks are.
“Cultivating an enhanced performance for our customers is at the forefront of Zayo’s mission,” said Yannick Leboyer, Europe Chief Operating Officer at Zayo. “The new subsea route is Zayo’s latest step towards providing fast, reliable infrastructure to connect global Internet hubs both within Europe and to the U.S.”
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I guess that explains why there were so many Zayo vans in the street chambers outside Equinix MA5 in October and November 🙂
Excellent. Increasingly Manchester is becoming more and more of a hub: all my data goes there initially so anything that improves connectivity and reduces reliance on London is very welcome.
Yes, always good to have alternatives than going down to London and back for everything. Would be nice to get some Azure/AWS zones in Manchester, and if ISPs wouldn’t just terminate everything in London, but I understand things take time to improve.
This is one of the problems with PPPoE, all the LNS being in London area. Hopefully pretty soon we’ll move to a situation where providers are breaking out into IP as close to customers as reasonably possible so that smart choices can be made on the best way to reach the outside world rather than just tunneling everything to London and going from there.
It’s time Northern Ireland had a direct link that continues on to the mainland.
Already there: Exa North.
https://exainfra.net/our-network/
I’ll wager that this “Manchester direct” connection is simply linking across to Dublin, then across Ireland to connect to AEC-2 proper (which also extends onto Denmark). AEC-2 was laid as far as I can observe as transatlantic capacity primarily for the US data centres located in Ireland for tax avoidance reasons, although the bulk of end users for the services at those DC’s are EU and GB. So linking to Ireland (population about 2x that of Greater Manchester) is pointless until there’s onward connectivity ti GB and Europe. So according to my guesswork, yes there’s a direct path Machester-US, but this is directly via the Ireland data centres. Lets face it, Zayo aren’t spending hundreds of millions to try and improve retail ISP customer’s transatlantic latency, nor are they giving a tinker’s cuss about the UK government’s “levelling up” propaganda.
And a quick visit to submarinecablemap.com shows many competing links between GB and Ireland for the same reason.
The Zayo Manchester to Ireland link has been there for years.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/11/zayo-upgrades-and-expands-long-haul-500km-fibre-ring-in-the-uk.html
From memory it was built by Geo (who Zayo later acquired):
https://www.offshore-energy.biz/geo-networks-completes-optical-fibre-cable-system-between-uk-and-ireland/
Curious if which (home broadband) ISP will divert their traffic from Manchester to New York with this fibre. It will benefit me most as living in the North West.