Orange Wholesale opens a new passage to Iberia with dark fiber routes between Paris, Frankfurt and Spain

2026-04-30

Providing much-needed resilience as an alternative to the usual bottlenecks, the new dark fiber routes connect Spain and FLAP (Frankfurt London Amsterdam Paris) for high-capacity, AI-driven needs from operators, hyperscalers, neo-clouds and more.

Two dark fiber routes to avoid Single Point of Failures

To provide an alternative to the narrow Mediterranean and Atlantic corridors and connect Spain with the rest of Europe, Orange Wholesale has almost literally moved mountains. the new dark fiber routes connect Spain with France at the Somport mountain pass, right in the middle of the Pyrenees, with two branches reaching Paris and Frankfurt across the German Border.

“I’d compare the opening of these new high-capacity dark fiber routes with the excavation of a new canal to allow the safe, smooth passage of high traffic on a continental scale”, Maxime Anne-Archard, VP Digital Infrastructure Development at Orange Wholesale International says. “Operators, hyperscalers, neo-clouds will be able to carry a huge amount of data for diversified use-cases between their datacenters on totally new routes. And the critical importance of modern alternatives to single points of failure is something acutely experienced these days”.

A completely new infrastructure setup for ultra-low latency, very-high capacity, secure connectivity

Beyond redundancy and resilience, this route represents an all-new, future-proof superhighway for very-high, AI-ready capacity needs. Data transfer capabilities of this infrastructure, when lit, belong to the petabytes-per second scale - depending on amplifiers installed. For reference, 1 petabyte is 1 million gigabytes. It’s 100,000 Netflix movies of an average 90-minute length, at 4K ultra-high definition and 15 Mbps bitrate – transferred in a second.

Backhauling, datacenter interconnection, resilience, LLM training…the flexibility of dark fiber for today and tomorrow’s needs

Such massive capacity addresses many pain points of diverse bandwidth-hungry use cases for demanding wholesale telecom customers.

Orange Wholesale’s international dark fiber routes provide solutions for such wholesale customers as:

Telco operators to connect customers to their core network and backbone,
MNOs to extend secure backhaul links between mobile sites,
Local government, for trusted connectivity to and between critical sites and utilities, CCTV loops, smart city projects…,
Cloud operators, for secure data center interconnexion with end-to-end control over data transfers and security policies,
Hyperscalers, for large dataset LLM training or AI inference.

Value-added services for a flexible dark fiber offering

With the flexibility of dark fiber, Orange Wholesale can provide the bare, unequipped route, giving maximum control over SLAs and security policies, or deliver a large series of value-added-services, turning dark fiber into a quasi-MOFN (managed optical fiber network):

ILA Housing – hosting of inline amplifiers in highly secured network facilities, with redundant electrical power,
Hands and eyes for equipment maintenance,
Extra point-to-point civil engineering,
Equipment provisioning and servicing,
Security updates and expert intervention any time, any day, thanks to our pool of technicians nationwide and beyond.

What is Dark Fiber and why does it matter now more than ever?

Dark Fiber is optical infrastructure that’s physically installed but unused, bringing many benefits of control and flexibility to operators. As AI-driven needs have dramatically changed the market of dark fiber, new use cases have appeared, and infrastructure players have diversified dark fiber types.

Why the name “dark” fiber?

Dark fiber is optical fiber infrastructure that's installed but still “dark”, that is, not yet "lit" by the laser signals that carry data. Customers who lease dark fiber activate it, bringing their own transmission equipment and managing the network themselves.

What’s the history of dark fiber in telecommunications?

For decades, dark fiber was considered a liability, as telecom operators overbuilt fiber networks in the 1990s.

With the explosion of AI workloads involving massive dataset transfer needs, dark fiber has transformed from liability to opportunity.

What are the benefits of dark fiber?

Key business benefits include:

Extremely high capacity: with multiple fiber pairs, terabytes can be sent and received in seconds,
Maximum control: Customers manage transmission equipment, SLAs, and security policies,
Scalability: Capacity can be upgraded by changing terminal equipment, without renegotiating contracts
Cost efficiency: Customers pay for fixed infrastructure lease and unlimited data transfers, not for capacity
Future-proofing: Infrastructure outlasts technology generations.

What are the different types of dark fiber?

Dark fiber can be sold as “pure”, bare dark fiber (customer manages everything), or as managed optical fiber networks (MOFN) with value-added services (housing, hands & eyes, maintenance). Common use cases span datacenter interconnection, mobile backhaul, government networks, and AI training clusters.