Arelion Widens Spectrum on Amsterdam-London Link With Nokia Optics

Arelion completed a live field trial on its 500-kilometer route from Amsterdam to London, the wholesale carrier said on October 8, using Nokia gear to widen the usable spectrum on the link. The work lifted usable capacity on the route by 21 percent.

The trial paired Nokia’s 1830 Global Express Super C and Super L open line system with CHMQ6 thin transponder modules and ICE-X 400G and 800G ZR+ coherent pluggable optics. Adding the L-band alongside the C-band stretches what a pair of fibres can carry, while the thin transponders and pluggables cut power per bit. Client splitting lets one wavelength serve several customer services, a better fit for wholesale traffic than tying up a full wavelength per circuit.

“This field trial is another milestone in our continuous network investment,” said Dariusz Solowiej, Arelion’s vice president of networks and operations.

The economics have a backdrop. Gartner expects worldwide AI spending to reach $2.59 trillion in 2026, up 47 percent year on year, and carriers selling backbone capacity are competing to pull that traffic onto their routes. TeleGeography counts 2,259 Tbps of international internet bandwidth in service as of September 2026 and reports that new submarine cables are entering service faster than in a typical year.

Arelion sells capacity to telecom operators, hyperscalers and enterprises, and has spent two years scaling 400G and 800G systems across the Nordics and Baltics to reach AI data centres in the region. The Amsterdam-London work extends that onto one of its main European corridors.