CenturyLink's fiber build team is flexing its muscles in Madrid, Spain and Marseille, France in order to get closer to its customers.
In addition to building new metro ring networks in Madrid and Marseille, CenturyLink is also connecting an additional 90 data centers to its network, which was formerly part of Level 3's footprint, in six core markets.
In Europe, CenturyLink now connects to more than 400 public and private data centers and more than 2,000 fiber-fed enterprise buildings. Overall, CenturyLink has approximately 450,000 route-miles of fiber, more than 2,200 public and private data center connections and over 150,000 fiber-fed buildings.
"Our new fiber expansions in Europe take CenturyLink's network and technology services deeper and closer to our customers," said Richard Warley, regional president, EMEA, CenturyLink, in a statement. "This puts us where we need to be to meet their growing and evolving digital business needs, as well as enhance their customer experience with new technology solutions. This regional investment reflects CenturyLink's global focus to continue enhancing our significant fiber network for fueling innovation."
In Madrid, CenturyLink built a metro network ring of 40 miles that encompasses major business districts including the city center, financial districts and Madrid's Silicon Alley. The Madrid infrastructure includes five core data centers.
In Marseille, which is one of Europe's largest digital gateways, CenturyLink built out a dense metro fiber footprint, creating a ring that spans major business districts, including multiple enterprise buildings and, initially, three core data centers. The infrastructure will connect landing stations in Marseille, which will provide access to sub-sea cables connecting to the Middle East, Far East and East Africa.
CenturyLink's network foundation will provide enterprise and wholesale customers with direct access to localized transport and IP services in Marseille and route diversity options that will increase network availability while lowering latency times.
CenturyLink has previously said its fiber-based edge compute services include 5 millisecond transport time from its existing locations to the edge, which is ideal for low latency applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (AI.)
Data centers
CenturyLink is connecting 90 additional data centers to its network within the U.K. and Ireland, Benelux, DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), Nordics, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe.
The data centers will offer a mix of virtual network services and applications, as well as deliver on-ramps to leading private and public cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
The network connection of 50 data centers is slated to be complete by the end of this year while the additional 40 data centers are expected to be connected to the network by mid-2020.
RELATED: CenturyLink extends fiber reach in U.S., Europe
Last week, CenturyLink announced it had completed a 33-mile fiber ring in Troy, Michigan. The Troy, Madrid and Marseille announcements build on CenturyLink's announcement earlier this year that it's creating an extensive 4.7-million fiber mile intercity fiber network across the U.S. and parts of Europe.