RETN wins best pan-European operator award for expansion
Mon, 22nd Jun 2026 (Today)
RETN has been named Best Pan-European Operator of the Year at the Carrier Community Global Awards 2026, recognising the network provider's recent expansion across Europe.
Over the past year, it has expanded into 45 countries and now operates more than 1,000 points of presence. Its backbone spans 142,000km, with recent additions focused on major corridors and interconnection hubs.
The expansion included moves into Greece, Turkey, Croatia and the United Arab Emirates. RETN also added new routes from Milan to Zurich and Padua to Vienna, while upgrading metro networks in Warsaw, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.
These changes were intended to improve route diversity and strengthen resilience for east-west traffic flows. RETN also integrated the Marseille-Milan Medloop and Barcelona-Milan 2Africa subsea systems into its backbone, adding redundancy across Southern Europe.
The network also played a role during disruption on Europe-Asia subsea routes, with traffic rerouted over RETN's terrestrial TRANSKZ corridor. That allowed intercontinental services to continue during the outage.
Security focus
Alongside the build-out, RETN has continued to invest in network security and service integrity. It deployed a distributed denial-of-service mitigation platform across its backbone, increasing scrubbing capacity for IP Transit and dedicated internet access services.
The group also maintained service delivery in Ukraine during wartime conditions. It operates a dedicated DDoS scrubbing centre in Kyiv, supporting continuity in the region.
Other work included route diversity measures, customer visibility tools, and support for open peering and IPv6 adoption. Together, these steps reflect a broader focus on maintaining continuity across a network linking Europe and Asia.
Regional role
RETN describes itself as an independent Eurasian network service provider with infrastructure spanning Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia to the Chinese border and onward into Southeast Asia. Its strategy has centred on expanding land-based routes as operators and customers weigh the risks of concentrated subsea dependencies.
The latest award adds to earlier industry recognition of the operator's position in pan-European and broader Eurasian connectivity. It comes as telecoms infrastructure groups face growing scrutiny over network resilience, route diversity and operational continuity during geopolitical disruption and physical cable faults.
Tony O'Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer of RETN, linked the recognition to the company's network design and operations.
"This recognition reflects the work of our engineering and operations teams in building a network designed with unique routes, true diversity, and resilience at scale. In a more unpredictable world, our focus remains on delivering consistent performance across every route we operate," said O'Sullivan.