The transaction, first announced on 2 September 2025, and cleared by the relevant regulatory authorities, aligns with BT International’s strategy to become a global leader in secure multi-cloud connectivity through sharpened focus on core products and services.

Launched over 20 years ago, Radianz provides financial information exchange networks and connects a global community of brokers, institutions, exchanges and clearing and settlement houses to the thousands of applications and services they need for the everyday running of the world’s capital markets.

TNS is a global provider of ultra-low latency trading infrastructure, connectivity and market data services.

Bas Burger, CEO of BT International, said: “Today’s announcement is another key milestone in focusing our international business on what it does best: providing secure multi-cloud connectivity to large organisations globally. Our Radianz business unit will enter a new era with TNS and we are confident that TNS will continue to deliver exceptional service to customers.” 

Evercore served as financial advisers to TNS and Jones Day served as legal advisers to TNS. Citi served as financial advisers to BT and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner served as legal advisers to BT.

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It comes as our customers face unprecedented disruption across their markets driven by geopolitics, regulation and technology — with AI catalysing change faster than ever. We have designed BT International specifically to help our customers meet these challenges head on and anticipate future opportunities to thrive.

The way we do this centres on two highly scalable telco platforms designed for the age of multi-cloud and AI: Global Voice and Global Fabric, with security built in by design. We’ve channelled our investments into these cloud-centric global platforms and concentrated our expert teams where customers need them most.

From asset-light to platform-rich

We have evolved our ‘asset-light’ strategy for several years, designing our platforms to reflect the trends we see in customer traffic crossing our networks — from data flows to and between the big cloud providers to the emergence of hybrid cloud as a preferred model for many businesses. We see that AI has unpredictable impacts on our customers’ networks — from the lumpy, bulky training workloads of large language models (LLMs) powering GenAI to the low latency demands of conversational AI and augmented reality. These trends are set against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving cyber security threat landscape and a fast-moving regulatory environment.

Telecoms gets its voice back

Our Global Voice platform enables businesses, governments and the people they engage with to communicate with each other effortlessly. We’re already world leading in the global voice services market, managing over 16 billion calls to customer call centres in over 70 countries every year. We’ve migrated these services onto a new SIP-powered, cloud focussed platform enabling voice to be carried across data networks. SIP has been around for a while but the fact that Global Managed Voice is both SIP-powered and cloud-focused means that it’s perfectly poised to unlock the full potential of integrating voice with AI.  

Indeed, Gartner predicts that 30 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will offer customer service through only a single, AI-enabled channel by 2028. I believe our Global Voice platform is strongly positioned to enable this, backed by our experts who have delivered over 5,000 contact centres to over 2,000 customers around the world.

Wrapping the world in Global Fabric

Next, we have Global Fabric, our brand-new, AI-ready, cloud-centric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform. This offers customers instant, secure and resilient connectivity to practically every app or digital service they want, including the world’s top cloud and software-as-a-service  (SaaS) providers. It launched to live customer traffic earlier this year and it is the platform that will help us achieve our goal to be the world’s number one provider of secure multi-cloud connectivity.

Global Fabric could have hardly arrived at a better time. We were one of the first telcos off the starting blocks with a truly greenfield international platform to eliminate the drag that the previous generation of networks had on customer innovation. With traditional networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity for a new or existing app, including AI, could take days or weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant.

Now think of the increasingly complex international regulatory environment. Technology and data have become geopolitical pawns. That means customers must double down on sovereignty, ensuring the right data stays within the right jurisdiction while enabling them to unlock its value to the business. With Global Fabric, customers can choose both the cloud destinations their data goes to and the route it takes along the way. This means regulated data never leaves the designated national borders and helps customers stay compliant.

Sharing a platform for success

Looking to the future of our industry, we believe international networks will gravitate towards fewer, larger, telco platforms able to manage the demand generated by increased cloud and AI services. We invite other service providers to work with BT International, as we build out our ecosystem of partners, including our recently announced partnership with Google Cloud, and scale fast so we can, as an industry, offer the best value to customers across the globe. 

We’re at a pivotal moment as an industry. It is an opportunity to move away from fragmented legacy international networks to a platform designed with the reality of AI, cyber and cloud at its core, reflecting customers’ expectations of speed, security, sustainability, sovereignty and naturally the skills to support future growth and prosperity.

BT and Equinix today announced an expansion of their partnership to help multinational organisations transform interconnectivity across their digital value chain. The move will help customers boost innovation and accelerate business outcomes.

BT’s AI-ready, Global Fabric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform is now deployed in over 30 Equinix data-centres, growing to over 40 in the next year. This will span the world’s top 30 business locations covering 95 per cent of the world’s cloud interconnection traffic.

It will add to Global Fabric’s international footprint, which BT believes will be one of the largest of any NaaS platform. When fully built-out, Global Fabric will be available to customers internationally via 140 points-of-presence (PoPs) hosted in the world’s top cloud locations across 40 countries. It will offer 74 per cent direct coverage of hyperscaler clouds and pre-provisioned high-bandwidth connectivity to over 700 data-centres.

Global Fabric connects multinational organisations securely, flexibly and reliably. It transforms the ease at which they can deploy and scale interconnectivity with third parties such as customers and suppliers across their full digital value chain.

It provides visibility and control of both access and core networks. This allows organisations to achieve the best end-to-end network performance for their workloads, from users and devices in offices, factories and other operational sites, to the multi-cloud core, which interconnects apps and digital services such as AI. It is built on a fully resilient architecture and offered with a range of management options. With legacy networks, setting up or changing connectivity could take weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant.

Equinix’s global platform interconnects multiple clouds hosting the apps, solutions and marketplaces underpinning the digital economy. It provides access to approximately 2,000 network services, approximately 3,000 cloud and IT services, over 400 content and digital media services, and more than 4,800 enterprises.

The agreement expands BT’s ability to offer its customers a comprehensive choice of the best locations for their business to digitally interconnect with partners, suppliers, customers and other stakeholders across their full value chain.

It builds on BT Group’s quantum secure communications relationship with Equinix following the joint achievement of the UK’s first data centre to data centre connection using the technology.

According to Equinix’s Global Interconnection Index, digital ecosystems are growing exponentially. Eighty per cent of business-to-business sales interactions are expected to occur in digital channels by the end of 2025. By integrating industry value chains, leading businesses are innovating at a rate 25 per cent higher than their peers.

Arun Dev, Global Interconnections, Equinix, said: “Our partnership enables BT to offer its customers interconnectivity with the full Equinix global digital ecosystem of cloud and IT services, as well as hundreds of content and digital media services, and over 4,800 enterprises hosted at our datacentres globally.” 

​Matt Swinden, director, digital connectivity, Business, BT, said: "The BT-Equinix partnership is a terrific example of our strategy to build the strongest digital foundations for our customers. Global Fabric combined with Equinix’s global ecosystem of infrastructure, cloud and digital service widens the choice we offer to customers of the best locations to interconnect their full business value chain. It will help make trading, partnering and operating a multinational business, better on BT.” 

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About Equinix

Equinix (Nasdaq: EQIX) is the world's digital infrastructure company^®. Digital leaders harness Equinix's trusted platform to bring together and interconnect foundational infrastructure at software speed. Equinix enables organizations to access all the right places, partners and possibilities to scale with agility, speed the launch of digital services, deliver world-class experiences and multiply their value, while supporting their sustainability goals.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from expectations discussed in such forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause such differences include, but are not limited to, risks to our business and operating results related to the current inflationary environment; foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations; stock price fluctuations; increased costs to procure power and the general volatility in the global energy market; the challenges of acquiring, operating and constructing IBX^® and xScale^® data centers and developing, deploying and delivering Equinix products and solutions; unanticipated costs or difficulties relating to the integration of companies we have acquired or will acquire into Equinix; a failure to receive significant revenues from customers in recently built out or acquired data centers; failure to complete any financing arrangements contemplated from time to time; competition from existing and new competitors; the ability to generate sufficient cash flow or otherwise obtain funds to repay new or outstanding indebtedness; the loss or decline in business from our key customers; risks related to our taxation as a REIT; risks related to regulatory inquiries or litigation and other risks described from time to time in Equinix filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, see recent and upcoming Equinix quarterly and annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, copies of which are available upon request from Equinix. Equinix does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this press release.

BT today announced it has switched on Global Fabric, its new, transformative, network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform and has been carrying out extensive live testing over the past two months. The first Global Fabric services will launch in early 2025.

Global Fabric will make it easier and quicker for businesses to securely connect employees, customers and devices to apps and digital services — including artificial intelligence (AI) — that are hosted across multiple clouds.

Customers will benefit from scalable, secure, high-capacity and resilient connectivity, ready to meet the growing and complex demands of breakthrough AI technologies. Global Fabric’s flexibility will be unprecedented. With legacy networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity services can take weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant, helping businesses manage unpredictable, AI-driven spikes in data traffic.

BT has already installed Global Fabric ‘points of presence’ (PoPs) in over 45 of the world’s major cloud data centres with the number increasing to 140. This offers customers a choice of locations from which to access Global Fabric services to suit their operational, market and regulatory needs. 

Customers that do not have network connections into the cloud data centres hosting Global Fabric PoPs will be able to order new links from BT, ensuring they are ready for the launch of live services in early 2025. 

BT is also rolling out a demo of Global Fabric’s digital management portal. By November, this will allow customers’ IT teams to learn how to set up and optimise their multi-cloud network configurations and experiment with application programmable interfaces (APIs). APIs will help customers integrate Global Fabric connectivity into other digital business platforms and apps to boost innovation and growth.  

“BT’s Global Fabric will help customers hit the cloud running,” said Colin Bannon, chief technology officer, BT Business. “It will give them a choice of the world’s best cloud locations to interconnect with their customers, partners and suppliers, making them easier to do business with not just today but tomorrow too. With the achievement of our latest Global Fabric delivery milestones, we take another step closer to a new age of AI-ready, digital interconnectivity.”

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Connecting to Global Fabric PoPs

Global Fabric’s core network hardware is installed in the world’s major carrier neutral facilities (CNFs) — large datacentres where cloud providers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and network operators provide access to their services.

Global Fabric hardware locations are known as ‘points of presence’ (PoPs). BT makes it easy for customers to connect their sites to their business partners, and to their applications and workloads hosted in the multi-cloud, using our PoPs as global connectivity gateways.

BT today announced it is rolling out its transformational Global Fabric network-as-a-service (NaaS) in strategic Digital Realty carrier neutral facilities (CNFs) around the world. This will enable customers to unlock the full value of their data by making it easier for employees to access it securely and compliantly across the business. It will provide IT leaders with instant, centralised control of connectivity for the best performance and user experience, reduce total costs and help ensure compliance.

Global Fabric is BT’s brand-new NaaS with a footprint spanning the world’s top cloud locations. It is designed to be flexible, scalable and resilient, and offer near-instant control with a choice of connectivity on a pay-as-you-use basis.

Digital Realty operates over 300 CNFs across six continents, in more than 25 countries and over 50 metros. These bring together the world’s leading cloud and software-as-a-service providers in a single location to offer customers a data-centre platform that can act as a digital hub for their business, bringing together technology and data to create the intelligence that drives their digital transformation.

By offering Global Fabric connectivity within and between CNFs, the partners will enable customers to choose and instantly create the right type of connections for their applications and data and layer on security services to make it easier to share across the business. This includes choosing the routes workloads take as they cross the network to give the best user experience to employees wherever they are.

With this control, customers can achieve the best applications performance and costs while addressing growing cyber security threats and future regulations on data in transit. It builds on BT’s existing ability to offer customers Digital Realty hosting and co-location services, which will be available through the Global Fabric marketplace.

Harm Joosse, Global Head of Strategy & Business Development, Service Providers, Digital Realty, said: “By integrating into Digital Realty’s global data centre platform, PlatformDIGITAL®, customers address data gravity challenges by bringing users and clouds to the data with BT’s Global Fabric connectivity, controls, and policy management.

Joosse continued: “BT’s innovative network-as-a-service solution, combined with Digital Realty’s orchestration platform, ServiceFabric™, empowers enterprises with on-demand, personalized experiences, ultimately revolutionizing the way networks are used and managed.”

Colin Bannon, CTO, Business, BT, said: “Businesses deploying cloud services locally benefit from proximity to customers and suppliers. For large organisations, more value can be unlocked if local data can be brought together centrally in a secure and compliant way to create new insights. With data volumes surging, CIOs need greater control of data flows. The combination of Global Fabric and Digital Realty can help customers unlock value from data by stopping local data hubs becoming digital black holes.”

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About Digital Realty

Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company’s global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx®) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 25+ countries on six continents. To learn more about Digital Realty, please visit digitalrealty.com or follow us on LinkedIn and X.

BT today announced a brand-new international network, enabling business customers to innovate at pace. The new network connects the multiple clouds businesses use for their applications and data with users, such as customers and employees, and will allow them to take advantage of the new wave of digital automation and AI.

Global Fabric, as the new network will be known, represents a generational shift in technology, based on a network-as-a-service (NaaS) technical and commercial model. Like the cloud itself, it is designed to be flexible, scalable and resilient both in the quality of connectivity and the convenience of pay-as-you-use. By combining the power of cloud and networks, customers can optimise application performance, user experience and cost.

They will be able to choose the right type of connectivity for their applications and workloads and proactively manage the routes these take as they move across the network. With this control, customers can achieve the best applications performance, manage costs and address growing regulatory requirements for data in transit.

The new high-capacity, fully programmable network is built with state-of-the-art equipment offering improvements in efficiency, sustainability and resilience. BT estimates that when fully rolled out, Global Fabric will use 79 per cent less electricity than its current global networks (see Notes to editors). This means customers on the new network will be able to reduce their Scope 3 carbon emissions.

Its digital orchestration and e-commerce-like interface enable customers to “shop” for connectivity. It will be pre-integrated with more than 630 digital service providers and over 700 datacentres. This covers the world’s largest public cloud providers, private clouds, network, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and secure access service edge (SASE) solutions — all available at the click of a button.

Jan Hein Bakkers, Senior Research Director, IDC, said: “Organisations realise that the network is a critical foundation for their digital-first and cloud-centric strategies. With the launch of Global Fabric, BT addresses their need to transform their networks. IDC research shows that organisations should adopt a secure and sustainable platform that provides the flexibility, manageability, scalability, and cost effectiveness that can support the right end-user experience for each application. Communications service providers that can deliver performant connectivity solutions with these attributes will be well placed to succeed.”

Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Realty, said: “Global Fabric is a great example of how service providers should be innovating and will offer enterprises new options for connecting to Digital Realty, the world’s largest data centre platform. By building a cloud-centric network and locating its PoPs inside our world-leading carrier neutral facilities (CNFs), BT will be able to offer its customers terrific speeds with low latency while helping them minimise their environmental impact.”

Brenden Rawle, Senior Director Business Development EMEA at Equinix said: "We welcome BT’s launch of Global Fabric, which builds on its Connected Cloud Edge solution launched with Equinix last year. We enjoy a great partnership with BT and look forward to working together to connect customers to the doorstep of the cloud with a vast and varied choice of potential partners and other SaaS providers, in the Equinix location of their choice."

Bas Burger, CEO, Business, BT, said: “Global Fabric will future proof customers’ connectivity by providing flexibility to ensure they’re always connected so they can always be productive. They’re facing a new wave of digital revolution with AI, IoT and automation driving demand for simplicity and better multi-cloud connectivity. Customers can achieve better total costs, boost app performance and user experience, all while complying with regulations and mitigating cyber threats. Global Fabric means multi-cloud works better on BT.”

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Notes to editors

Architected for multi-cloud

The location of Global Fabric’s network hardware is key. Global Fabric’s cloud-centric architecture will give it the most direct coverage of hyperscaler clouds of any connectivity provider in the world — almost 50 per cent more than the nearest competitor, based on connectivity information published on hyperscaler websites. Hyperscale clouds include those of AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Running on the new network “underlay” will be an AI-powered digital orchestration layer. Unlike the Internet, Global Fabric will be “deterministic” — customers will be able to trust BT to deliver the predictable application experience they expect by selecting the optimal end-to-end paths for their applications and workloads as they move to and between multiple clouds and end users.

Connectivity options

Options will include a new BT-enhanced Internet service, point-to-point Ethernet, multi-point Ethernet and MPLS and these will be offered in bandwidth increments of 1 Mbps up to 100 Gbps. Connectivity will be interchangeable on the same port, offering flexibility not possible on current networks.

Global Fabric and sustainability – key figures

Using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol ICT Sector Guidance by Gesi, BT has generated the following estimates:

• In use, Global Fabric will consume 8,326 MWh/year versus its existing international networks at 39,890 MWh/year — a 79 per cent reduction.
• Use stage gross carbon including PUE will be 2,964 tonCO2e/year for Global Fabric versus 13,596 tonCO2e/year for BT’s existing international networks — a 78 per cent reduction.
• Global Fabric’s embodied emissions will be 363 tonCO2e/year versus its existing international networks 2,185 tonCO2e/year — an 83 per cent reduction.
• This gives a total carbon in use plus embodied carbon figure of 3,327 for Global Fabric versus its existing international networks at 15,781 tonCO2e/year — a 78 per cent reduction.
• BT estimates the average power consumption of Global Fabric will be 787 Watts per device, versus 2,201 Watts per device for its existing international networks.
• Moreover, Global Fabric will be built using 1,326 devices versus 1,571 devices — a 16 per cent reduction versus its existing international networks.