RETN has announced the launch of a new end-to-end backbone route running through Drobeta, Bucharest, Iași and Chișinău, delivered as a single continuous path. The route creates a new physical connectivity option across Romania into Moldova and, crucially, adds an alternative corridor into Ukraine and the Balkans that does not simply retrace established regional IP transit paths.

For operators, ISPs and enterprises that have long relied on a limited set of physical routes through this part of Europe, that distinction is significant. Route diversity in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe has historically been harder to achieve than in more densely fibred western markets, and harder to achieve means more valuable when you can get it.

A regional jigsaw falling into place

The new route does not stand alone. It slots into RETN’s existing Balkans corridor, which already links Budapest, Timișoara and Sofia, connecting that infrastructure to Bucharest and extending it northward to Iași and across the border to Chișinău. The result is a continuous geographical path that threads together markets which have often been served by separate, sometimes overlapping networks with little physical redundancy between them.

The routing logic also enables alternative transit to Ukraine via Moldova, a detail that carries weight beyond the purely commercial. Ukraine’s connectivity requirements have become an acute infrastructure concern since 2022, and the ability to reach the country via a physically diverse path through Moldova and Bulgaria adds a layer of resilience that operators serving the region have increasingly demanded.

Olena Lutsenko, Business Development Director at RETN, was direct about the strategic intent: “By delivering a direct route from Timișoara to Bucharest and onward to Chișinău, we are enabling faster, more scalable access to the region from the Balkans, Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe in general, for operators, ISPs, enterprises and international customers.”

She added: “Bucharest and Iași are rapidly developing hubs for business, education and technology, and demand for resilient, high-capacity infrastructure is rising fast.”

Romania’s fibre moment

Romania has emerged as one of the region’s more compelling connectivity stories, and the numbers bear that out. According to ANCOM, the country had 6.9 million fixed broadband connections by mid-2025, with 37 per cent capable of gigabit-level speeds. Internet adoption sits at around 94 per cent of the population, a figure that would be unremarkable in Scandinavia but represents a notable achievement in a country that, a generation ago, had minimal telecommunications infrastructure to speak of.

Fixed broadband traffic per capita is also rising, which matters to network planners. Headline connection counts tell you about the market; traffic per user tells you about the demand that infrastructure actually has to absorb.

The bigger picture for Eastern Europe

RETN’s expansion reflects a broader infrastructure modernisation wave rolling through Central and Eastern Europe. Hyperscaler investment in data centre capacity, combined with EU-backed digitalisation programmes and growing enterprise demand for cloud connectivity, is pulling long-haul fibre investment into markets that were, until recently, considered peripheral.

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