How Gcore Built a Global Private Backbone Across Three Continents

Gcore's CDN, cloud, and AI services increasingly need to move traffic between regions, sometimes across continents. For customers, those journeys should be largely invisible: applications need predictable connectivity whether traffic is moving between Singapore and Europe or across the Atlantic.

To give its network team more control over those journeys, Gcore is building a private backbone: a dedicated transport network connecting Gcore regions across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. Instead of relying entirely on third-party transit for long-distance connectivity, Gcore can plan capacity and routes across infrastructure it controls directly.

Gcore's peering network, which connects with more than 14,000 partners worldwide, remains central to delivering traffic close to users. The private backbone serves a different purpose. It connects Gcore's own regions over long distances, giving the network team greater control over how traffic moves between them.

Connecting three continents

The backbone links Singapore to Marseille over a subsea route. From Marseille it runs through major European locations, including Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Luxembourg. It then continues across the Atlantic to New York, Virginia, and Miami. Singapore, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Virginia serve as core hubs.

These routes run on dedicated 100G and 400G wavelengths, with multiple paths between key locations. The primary benefit for customers is that these routes provide a more predictable foundation for services that span regions. Because Gcore operates more of the journey between those regions, its network team can plan capacity, engineer long-haul routes, move demand away from congested paths, and redirect traffic when network conditions change.

For customers running AI platforms, video services, or cloud applications, that transport layer should remain largely invisible: applications work across regions, while Gcore handles the network complexity underneath.

Using multiple routes more efficiently

The Singapore-Amsterdam route provides one example of how Gcore uses that additional control.

As traffic between Singapore and Amsterdam grew, the most direct path began carrying a disproportionate share, while a longer route through Europe still had capacity available. Conventional routing selects the best path according to its routing metrics, even when another available route has more spare capacity.

However, to make better use of the available capacity, Gcore uses Segment Routing Traffic Engineering (SR-TE). SR-TE allows Gcore to define multiple paths between two points and control how traffic is distributed between them, rather than relying only on the path selected by conventional routing.

On the Singapore-Amsterdam route, traffic now uses both the direct path and the path through Europe, easing pressure on the corridor that was carrying most of the traffic. SR-TE also responds to changes in network topology: if a link in a defined path goes down, that path is withdrawn automatically so traffic is not sent toward an unavailable link.

Ultimately, SR-TE gives Gcore finer control over how the backbone's available routes are used as traffic patterns and demand change over time.

What's next

The backbone keeps growing. Gcore is building a denser mesh across Europe, reaching further into the Nordics via Stockholm and Oslo and into Eastern Europe through Warsaw, along with more route diversity between Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and London. Capacity on key European corridors is increasing too, including an upgrade between Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

Each new route gives the network more options: traffic can be distributed across more paths, dependence on individual corridors is reduced, and Gcore gains more direct control over how traffic moves between regions and products. For customers, that means a more predictable network foundation as their services operate across Gcore regions.

Learn how Gcore can support your global traffic requirements