MegaFon, a leading Russian telecom operator, announced late last week the launch of ‘DREAM,’ an ambitious Eurasian fiber optic communications landline project that connects Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany and Hong Kong in China.
To undertake this endeavor, which has cost MegaFon 600 million rubles (about $18 million), the Russian company partnered with KazakhTelecom, a leading telecom operator in neighboring Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, and Interoute, the owner of Europe’s largest cloud service platform running data and collocation centers and 60,000 km of fiber. The partners opted not to disclose their investments in the effort.
The 8,700 km long DREAM FOCL, which has a bandwidth capacity of 8Tbit/s, runs through seven countries from West Germany to the Kazakhstan-China border and is expected to enable end customers to access reliable 1-to-10Gbit/s DWDM communications channels. Built on equipment supplied by China’s Huawei, the system helps reduce the round-trip signal delay along the Frankfurt-Hong Kong route from the market average 195 ms to 175 ms, MegaFon claimed.
A terrestrial network, DREAM is also easier to maintain than underwater systems that currently provide up to 80% of traffic between Europe and Asia, the Russian company underscored.
DREAM will only be available in the B2O and B2B market segments, MegaFon stated.
