Telefonica's infrastructure subsidiary Telxius is joining forces with Orange on Google’s Dunant project to connect the US to the French Atlantic coast via a 6,600 km submarine cable. Under the terms of the deal, Orange and Telxius will offer co-location and operation services at their respective cable landing stations in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez (France) and Virginia Beach (US). Specifically, Orange will enable a terrestrial connection for Telxius up to Paris, while Telxius will connect Orange to Ashburn from Virginia Beach.
The aim of the collaboration is to bolster the respective wholesale capacity of Telxius and Orange with a view to better addressing the needs of content providers and third-party operators by effectively providing multiterabit capacity on this Europe-US route, said the partners in a joint statement.
Dunant is on course to launch in late 2020, becoming the first new submarine cable linking the US to France in more than 15 years, said Orange, adding that it will be offering two fibre-pairs with a capacity of more than 30 Tbps per pair.
