Swedish telecommunication provider Arelion (formerly Telia Carrier) has announced the completion of a major expansion of its Baltic network, constructing a fully diverse, high-capacity route between Helsinki and Warsaw, creating a resilient ring for traffic between Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The new terrestrial path reduces latency between the Baltics and Western Europe, increasing diversity in a geopolitically sensitive region and secures future capacity for an underserved EU region.
By combining fibers from regional partners with Arelion’s own infrastructure, the expansion provides enterprises and service providers with scalable, future-ready connectivity amid increased investment in local markets. Finland’s data center market is projected to reach $5.23 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 54.6 percent, underscoring the importance of robust digital infrastructure across the Baltic region. The project, partially funded by the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility 2 (CEF2) program, highlights how strategic investment can advance digital sovereignty in a historically underserved region.
This diverse terrestrial route connects the Baltics to Western Europe via subsea and land systems from Helsinki through the Baltics to Warsaw, bypassing Copenhagen and Stockholm to avoid bottlenecks and ensure high-availability connectivity for customers. Leveraging the latest open optical line systems with 400G coherent pluggable optics and 1.6 Tb/s Waves, the route provides long-term scalability to support the massive data flows of next-generation applications in Europe’s growing AI sectors.
“This new route enhances diversity and bandwidth between the Baltics and Western Europe, delivering the secure, low-latency connectivity our customers need to scale AI and cloud applications,” said Mattias Fridström, Vice President and Chief Evangelist at Arelion. “With support from the EU, we are strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty while ensuring that enterprises and hyperscale operators can rely on resilient infrastructure to power innovation.”
