Next-Generation Subsea Route Between South America and Europe

Seaborn Networks ("Seaborn"), the owner-operator of the most direct subsea fiber network between São Paulo and New York, and Aqua Comms DAC ("Aqua Comms"), the operator of Ireland's first dedicated subsea fiber-optic network interconnecting New York, Dublin and London, announces the formation of a strategic alliance to provide a new, next-generation subsea route between South America and Europe.

Seaborn's Seabras-1 subsea cable system now directly interconnects with Aqua Comms' America-Europe Connect-1 (AEConnect) subsea cable network. The offering is available exclusively through Seaborn and Aqua Comms.

Seaborn's Seabras-1 provides the fastest route between the New York-New Jersey metro area and São Paulo. Aqua Comms' AEConnect provides the newest and most direct route between New York and London via Dublin. The two submarine cable systems will interconnect in Secaucus, New Jersey, in the location of Seaborn's primary network operations center. Both Seaborn and Aqua Comms offer geographically diverse backhaul and a variety of Points of Presence (PoP) locations in the metropolitan areas relating to their landing locations.

Customers will have the ability to contract through either Seaborn or Aqua Comms to receive the full benefit of this combined South America to Europe route.

This strategic alliance offers a number of benefits to customers, including:

• consolidated capacity contracts and billing with industry-leading SLAs;
• the newest network architecture with 100Gbps coherent technology on an end-to-end solution;
• Seaborn's proprietary ultra-low latency solutions for financial institutions;
• a direct relationship with the operators who built and operate the submarine cable infrastructure and backhaul routes for their respective systems, providing higher quality of service and improved information access; and
• a route to and from South America that avoids the hurricane-prone areas of Florida, the Caribbean and Bermuda.

"We are extremely pleased to partner with Aqua Comms to offer this precedent-setting Europe to South America route," said Larry Schwartz, CEO, Seaborn Networks. "Our organizations are like-minded operators with a shared view of how to offer best-in-class solutions for telecommunications companies, content providers, ISPs, governments and enterprises."

"Aqua Comms and Seaborn share heritage and a common ethos for efficiently providing innovative, flexible and reliable connectivity solutions to the Atlantic telecommunications market," remarked Nigel Bayliff, CEO, Aqua Comms. "We both specialize in developing, constructing and operating modern, sophisticated submarine cable systems, and partnering will help us provide customers with the benefits of both conjoined networks."

The strategic alliance between Seaborn and Aqua Comms also relates to future systems and branches that either of the parties may subsequently build and operate, thereby offering maximum flexibility to the respective customers of each operator.