By Richard Martin

PTC, Honolulu — Joining forces to satisfy growing carrier demand for long-haul IP transport, XO Communications and trans-Atlantic high connectivity provider Hibernia Atlantic said they will partner to expand their high-bandwidth connections across multiple cities throughout the United States and across the Atlantic.

The “collaboration,” as the companies are calling it, gives Hibernia added capacity in the states, via XO’s U.S. network, and adds high-speed trans-Atlantic capacity to XO’s European network. XO recently doubled the capacity of its nationwide long-haul network, which provides speeds of up to 1.6 terabytes per second between cities.

In August 2009, Hibernia became the first carrier to offer a 40G network across the Atlantic. A U.S. subsidiary of Columbia Ventures Corp., Hibernia Atlantic has more than 70 POPS across the U.S., Canada and Europe, and operates a 24,000-kilometer network, both submarine and terrestrial. The company has sought new partnerships in order to respond to explosive bandwidth demand from North American users, fueled by next-gen services like Web conferencing, streaming video, and multimedia.

The partnership with XO is a natural fit, said Eric Gutshall, EVP of sales and marketing for Hibernia Atlantic, in a statement. “Over the past two years, XO has made substantial investments to enhance its long-haul and metropolitan infrastructure,” Gutshall added, “by expanding its network coverage and offering efficient connectivity with services such as its award-winning Ethernet hub.”

The announcement was made at the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference in Honolulu, which has seen a number of new partnerships and interconnection agreements as carriers and competitive service providers add new capacity outside their home countries.

Also at PTC, international wholesaler iBasis and Sparkle, the international wholesale arm of Telecom Italia Group, said they have migrated their bilateral voice traffic to IP. The companies said they are the first carriers to fully migrate their bilateral international voice traffic to IP.