RETN has quietly but consistently expanded its European footprint over the past 18 months and has now launched a new Point of Presence in Barcelona, adding direct connectivity to Milan via the 2Africa submarine cable system.

For Milko Ilari, Head of Southern Europe at RETN, the move reflects something more than routine infrastructure buildout.

“Spain represents a key market for RETN, both strategically and technologically,” he says.

“We are excited to expand our network to such an important market with the goal of supporting operators’ local needs with dedicated resources on the ground.”

The Barcelona PoP is the centrepiece of the announcement. The new PoP’s connectivity to Milan runs via the 2Africa submarine cable system rather than through the terrestrial routes that have historically dominated traffic flows across southern Europe.

That distinction matters because it delivers genuine physical path diversity, not simply a different provider running fibre along broadly the same corridor.

The 2Africa cable encircles the African continent, connecting more than 30 countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Its scale and geographic reach make it a fundamentally different type of asset from the shorter Mediterranean cables that have traditionally carried traffic between Spain and Italy.

By anchoring its Barcelona-to-Milan route to 2Africa, RETN is offering customers a path that diverges entirely from the conventional terrestrial network.

Ilari is direct about why this matters commercially.

“By leveraging alternative submarine routes, we are able to offer our customers greater resilience, improved latency, and true route diversity,” he says.

“The launch of our Barcelona PoP and the connectivity to Milan via 2Africa highlights our commitment to delivering differentiated, high-performance network solutions.”

The Barcelona PoP also connects northward to Madrid, though RETN’s chosen path is worth noting: rather than following the conventional highway network, fibre runs through gas pipeline infrastructure — an approach that further reduces the risk of a single incident taking out both the primary and backup terrestrial routes within Spain.

The Iberian Peninsula is one of Europe’s fastest-growing locations for digital infrastructure investment, driven in large part by renewable energy availability. Data centres running on wind and solar power at competitive costs are increasingly attractive to hyperscalers and colocation providers under pressure to meet sustainability commitments, and that demand pull is bringing connectivity requirements with it.

A pattern of geographic ambition

The Barcelona announcement is the latest in a sequence of expansions that sketch out RETN’s intentions across Europe and beyond.

In May 2026, the company launched a new cross-Romania backbone route connecting Bucharest, Iași and Chișinău in Moldova — a single end-to-end path that also adds an alternative corridor into Ukraine and the Balkans without simply retracing existing regional IP transit routes.

For operators in a part of Europe that has historically relied on a limited set of physical paths, that physical independence carries real value.

Earlier in the year, RETN brought online a new backbone segment between Tallinn in Estonia and Cēsis in Latvia, supporting up to 40 Tbps of capacity with additional DWDM spectrum headroom for future growth.

The route was, by RETN’s own account, tested almost immediately under real-world conditions: a fibre break on the primary backbone path during late 2025 commissioning led engineers to reroute more than 40 DWDM channels across the new segment within approximately 60 minutes.

The company has also been active in the Mediterranean more broadly. Its first PoP in Greece, located at the Balkan Gate data centre in Thessaloniki, went live in late 2025 and was designed explicitly to strengthen links to subsea networks across the region.

In Italy, RETN activated a new Milan-to-Zurich route around the same period, reinforcing its position at a critical junction for pan-European backbone traffic.

RETN also completed a full-scale deployment of 400GbE coherent pluggable optics across its Pan-Eurasian IP backbone — a production-scale IP-over-DWDM rollout that the company describes as one of the largest of its kind to date.

The upgrade positions RETN’s backbone to handle the traffic volumes that AI workloads, in particular, are beginning to generate at meaningful scale.

RETN’s trajectory in the region suggests the company is not treating southern Europe as an afterthought.

“This is an important milestone for RETN, and we look forward to continuing our expansion in Spain while supporting the country’s growing digital ecosystem,” Ilari adds.

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