Pan American Digital Corridor Key to Emerging Market Growth

As most of the developed world gradually emerges from the long struggle with COVID-19, developing regions, such as Latin America (LATAM), are now awakening as well. Analysts suggest that emerging markets around the world will see significant improvement in growth during the fiscal quarters to come. And much of that growth will be led by digital commerce.

For example, research firm eMarketer recently cited that during 2020 business climate changes started for LATAM retailers and consumers, ”who quickly pivoted toward ecommerce,” with sales soaring 63.3% over the prior year and surpassing the $100 billion mark for the first time.[i]

With these upbeat predictions in mind, a “Pan American Digital Highway” might well be primed for real growth for the remainder of 2021 and beyond. We here at Equinix are committed to helping our service provider partners and their enterprise customers from Canada to Mexico to South America meet the elevated demand for services and resources.

How does Equinix help foster this emerging Pan American digital corridor?

The way that an Equinix data center digital environment works is not unlike a traditional farmer’s market. The role of Equinix is analogous to the physical marketplace itself. In the same way that a physical market plays a structural role as a vessel for commerce, Equinix serves that role in the IT world, providing the building blocks for digital commerce.

Extending the analogy, service providers, resellers and other partners are like market vendors offering a variety of products and services, while a service provider’s client base of enterprise businesses are akin to the customers who visit the farmer’s market. Both types of customers are looking to optimize their experience—and the more options for high-demand products and services are available, the more likely both kinds of customers are to stay and buy what’s offered.

On Platform Equinix®, digital leaders leverage our structural building blocks to create and interconnect foundational digital infrastructure. In addition, we provide reliable global reach and georedundancy and access to an interconnected ecosystem of digital and business partners. We deliver industry leading 99.9999% uptime and class-leading physical security. Furthermore, Platform Equinix enables instant access to all the world’s highest-demand network, cloud and content provider and business ecosystems via the Equinix Fabric™ software-defined interconnection.

We’ve directly experienced how constructing this “marketplace” of products, services and cloud access options has created a climate of growth for our service provider and enterprise customers—enabling substantive advancement of business opportunities around the globe.[ii] At the heart of this global trend has been the adoption of and integration into our global Equinix Internet Exchange® IP peering network and more than 220 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers worldwide by service providers and enterprise customers.

The emerging “digital corridor”—from Canada to South America—has the growth potential to rival any digital development in the world. With the support of terrestrial networks and subsea cables[iii], it is our goal is to help make that route a reality for our customers and their communities.

Why is Equinix Internet Exchange significant?

Our chief objective in building out a worldwide infrastructure of IBX-based Equinix Internet Exchange metro hubs is to encourage innovation and enable development for our service providers and enterprise customer community.

To understand the role of Equinix Internet Exchange, it’s useful to consider it in the context of overall internet traffic transport. Internet exchange (IX) traffic occurs over the highly distributed environment of the web’s networking infrastructure and is suited to data streams of relatively modest throughput requirements. In comparison, private, one-to-one cross-connect, IP-peering solutions support much higher throughput requirements. Important advantages of the Equinix Internet Exchange approach include considerably lower commercial hurdles and shorter time-to-deploy requirements. These advantages are ideally suited to prototyping and market-testing new digital products that require reliable, secure and fast access for comparatively small-bandwidth situations—when compared to cross connect-based deployments.

Equinix supports the growing requirements for emerging markets with the continued placement and enhancement of Equinix Internet Exchange-supporting IBX metro hubs in Mexico, LATAM and Canada. São Paulo, Mexico City and Toronto have been important IX hubs for Equinix and, most recently, we’ve expanded our coverage in Canada[iv] following our purchase of 13 Bell Canada data centers.[v] Enhancing access for these communities will grow business for our customer base and encourage both new business and expanded learning opportunities across these regions.

How does Equinix Internet Exchange contribute to growing these opportunities?

Equinix’s global digital infrastructure of IBX sites offers essential access to a wide and deep ecosystem of service and content providers, with the Equinix Internet Exchange framework providing a critical systematic solution for enterprises of every size to efficiently explore new capabilities and offerings. By allowing a nearly instantaneous ability to enable and disable interconnections and service access, enterprises can collaborate with service providers to test out new virtual approaches and enter new markets with less risk than would be the case for building out physical hardware solutions.

Consider a hypothetical financial institution with operations in Mexico, Brazil and the U.S., that is considering a new strategy for providing network-wide retail financing access across its operational domain. While it’s seen success in U.S. trials, research suggests the new application will have potentially greater acceptance in Mexico and targeted Brazilian markets. The company further believes that certain locales will be more or less suitable for this product based on demographic analysis. By leveraging the Equinix Mexico City and São Paulo metro hubs, this financial institution can target the new digital application to specific areas and apply the flexibility of Equinix Internet Exchange and Equinix Fabric to test operational feasibility with virtual solutions.

In the future, if data traffic, storage and cloud compute requirements expand to a point that challenge the virtual approach, the company can migrate operations to higher-throughput, dedicated cross-connect solutions—after the virtual versions of the new products have been fully vetted. The company can similarly hold or reduce operations for locales in which these new products are less successful. The key is the operational flexibility that Equinix interconnection solutions offer, leading to reduced OPEX, lower CAPEX and nearly instant operational enablement and disablement.

Leverage unrivalled access to digital infrastructure

Equinix is committed to helping foster a seamlessly transformed digital future from Canada to South America. Digital access and enhanced ecommerce opportunities will benefit everyone, from service providers to enterprise business customers to local and federal governments to everyday citizens. We support positive change and opportunity growth by enabling our customers to cost-effectively locate infrastructure close to clouds and networks for optimal hybrid architectures.

We look forward to working with you to build your digital infrastructure on the industry’s most secure, consistent and sustainable platform. You can choose your current vendors, best-of-breed providers, regional specialists or innovative new entrants—they’re all here in the industry’s largest global ecosystem representing more than half of the Fortune 500 and more than one-third of the Forbes Global 2000.

With the most peers, the most markets and the most traffic, Equinix Internet Exchange customers peer more than 16,500 Gbps of IP traffic globally, while Platform Equinix encompasses 63 markets in 26 countries and supports 10,000+ customers.

Learn more about Equinix Internet Exchange.

[i] eMarketer, Insider Intelligence, “Latin America Ecommerce Forecast 2021,” July 14, 2021.

[ii] Equinix, Interconnections, “Equinix Internet Exchange Traffic Sustains Growth Across Regions,” May 27, 2021.

[iii] Equinix, Interconnections, “Equinix Submarine Cable Momentum is Accelerating – Interconnections,” January 15, 2021.

[iv] Equinix, Interconnections, “Equinix Fabric Ushers in Global Expansion to Canada,” June 16, 2021.

[v] Equinix, Interconnections, “Equinix and Bell Canada Partnership Set to Accelerate Digital Business,” October, 1, 2020.