RETELIT S.P.A. Retelit becomes a global operator, joining the international AAE-1 (Asia Africa Europe 1) consortium together with some of the major telecommunications operators of the three continents, signing an agreement for the construction and the maintenance of the first high capacity and low latency undersea cable in the world between the Mediterranean and Hong Kong.
The AAE-1 system, with 25 thousand kilometres of undersea optic fiber cable, will link all the main countries of South East Asia, India, Africa and Europe via the Middle East, connecting more than 40% of the world population. The project involves some of the main global telecommunications operators. Through an overall investment in infrastructure of more than 50 million dollars, which will allow the Group to have a capacity on the cable in the order of terabits per second, to reach fast growing markets. Retelit will provide to AAE-1 the connection with Italy as one of the gateways to Europe thanks to the construction of a Landing Station in Bari and the expansion of its own terrestrial network to Frankfurt, Marseilles and London. Thanks to this operation, of high strategic value, the Group executes the first phase of the previously announced international expansion. The project will include the expansion of the infrastructure backbones owned by the Group in Italy to the main European cities, thus making Retelit one of the most important Mediterranean gateways between Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The AAE-1 system will connect Hong Kong, Djibouti, UAE, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Italy and France using the 100 Gigabits per second technology. The cable will have an overall capacity of 40 Terabits per second and less latency than the current undersea cables between Asia and Europe. With an innovative design, AAE-1 will be the first undersea system to connect East Asia and Europe with express fiber paths without stop-over in different intermediate landing stations, thanks to the optical add drop multiplexer (OADM) technology.
"Thanks to Italy's strategic geographic position in the Mediterranean and the know-how developed by Retelit in recent years in the international telecommunications market, we strongly wanted to bring to Italy one of the most important projects of world telecommunications" stated Mauro Tosi, Chairman of the Company's Executive Committee.
"The investment will bring undoubted advantages to our country, to the Retelit Group, and above all to our
Customers who expect high quality international services from us" Mr. Tosi concluded.
Retelit signed the contractual agreements which discipline participation in the project on 16th September
2014 in Bangkok (Thailand) in the presence of members of the consortium. Thus what Retelit announced in its press release of 12 September 2014 has become a reality.
Completion of the project is scheduled within the end of 2016.
With the availability of over 7,600 kilometres of fibre optics, 8 Metropolitan Networks and 18 data centers, Retelit is one of the leading Italian providers of data transmission services and infrastructure for the telecommunications and ICT markets. Since 2013, thanks to significant investment in new technologies, Retelit's product range has widened with new-generation ultra-broadband VPN services, as well as cloud storage and data-centre services providing added value. Since 2000 Retelit has been listed on the on-line market of the Milan stock exchange.
Investor Relations Media Relations
Gabriele Pinosa Tel. 022020451 inv.relations@retelit.it
Lucia Casartelli - Key4media
Tel 02 430019156
Mobile +39 346 21 91 801 l.casartelli@key4media.it
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