A few weeks ago, eStruxture met with the kind folks at Arelion, a global connectivity leader, and esteemed customer. We had a short but enlightening discussion. We touched on their extensive history, what sets them apart from their competition, their vision for the future, their relationship with eStruxture, and more. For over 30 years, they’ve expanded their network across the world. We’re proud to consider these kinds of people and businesses our customers. We look forward to further developing a mutually beneficial relationship with them that lasts.
Describe Arelion as a company
From humble beginnings in the early 1990s, we have become connectivity partner of choice to the world’s largest content providers, operators and enterprises. In the past, our network laid the very foundations of the Internet revolution and today it’s enabling digitalization throughout business and society.
Arelion is owned by Polhem Infra, a Swedish investment company backed by some of the largest Swedish public pension funds. We started building our network in 1993, when our Autonomous System, AS1299, was allocated, and we’ve grown organically ever since. Our network now stretches 70,000 kms across Europe, North America and Asia and lets you connect directly to more than 2,500 wholesale customers in more than 125 countries. With more than 450 local access partners around the world, we are the backbone of your business, wherever you are.
With our IP services, we provide unlimited access to the global Internet network. On top of that, our suite of enterprise, networking and mobile data solutions connects business-critical content and applications to media-hungry audiences everywhere. Why? Because content needs an audience and businesses a cloud - our job is to bring them together.
What makes Arelion different from your competitors?
Arelion operates the world’s #1 ranked best connected global internet network (AS1299). Over 65% of global internet routes are directly connected to AS1299. This means you are directly connected to the largest broadband operators and content, application and cloud providers, and have an excellent service experience with low latency and no congestion.
Arelion also offers private network connectivity services with Wavelength services at 10/100/400Gbs and leverages open line systems to be able to use the latest generation of transponder and pluggable coherent optics. This means customers get scalable capacity, with fast delivery intervals and a competitive price.
Our Ethernet services offer a significant scale advantage over competition with up to 40G virtual circuits delivered on 100G ports available globally with network protection and automatically optimized latency technology.
Our Cloud Connect solution provides organizations with a private, dedicated connection between their on-premises IT infrastructure and cloud computing services. We have direct, fully resilient, physical interconnects in place with major Cloud Service Providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud – throughout Europe, The Americas, and Asia, ensuring quick implementation of private Cloud Connectivity. We can connect our customers to multiple clouds at Layer 2 using protected Ethernet connectivity from single or multiple locations, enabling multi-cloud access. These customers can leverage the connectivity infrastructure we put in place for the hyperscale companies at terabit scale.
What are some of your short-term and long-term goals? Where is Arelion headed?
As a company Arelion is focused on supporting the global connectivity needs of our customers, so that will remain our focus in the future. We will not lose focus on a multitude of new products but instead listen to our customers to see how we can better meet their needs.
This includes adding product features to improve the security capabilities we offer today based on our position as being a large part of the core of the internet. We will utilize software and analytics to enhance automation, shorten delivery times, improve availability, and simplify our customers journey making services easy to order and manage using our portals and APIs.
We will also continue to grow our network organically and provide additional route diversity, and connect new markets, and new data center campuses at scale as our customers continue to drive demand.
What are some of the challenges you're facing as you grow your business?
With power prices going up globally, but especially in Europe, it makes sense to evaluate and re-engineer the network by removing and replacing legacy power-hungry gear. Five years ago, carriers expected to use a box as long as you could because it was considered sunk capital. Now, the power consumption of that equipment might make it very inefficient.
As a player in a very competitive market, we look to proactively be a leader in testing and putting new technologies into service. The development of coherent optics (400ZR and ZR+) and routed optical systems is extremely interesting for us, making it possible to run an IP network in a completely different way. That is going to provide benefits to our customers with competitive pricing and more agile and scalable solutions with faster delivery.
Why did you choose eStruxture as a partner and what problem were you trying to solve with our services?
Arelion was looking to provide our services at scale in the Vancouver market and provide affordable and fast connectivity to our customers in the market with diversity to our other points of presence.
eStruxture provided a good solution to reach the well-developed customer ecosystem at the Harbour Center facility, with sufficient power, physical security, and connectivity within the building to meet our needs.
What more could we do in the future in order to better support the growth of Arelion?
We look to collaborate in our new markets to help build and develop the connectivity ecosystem, drive the growth of bandwidth, and support our customers to deliver innovative new services and applications to the end users and businesses in the market. We look to work together to spread awareness of our capabilities and the services we can offer to the local marketplace to make that happen.
How can customers contact you?
For more information Contact sales and see more about our Our Global Fiber Network, AS1299 and Explore our Products & Services.