RETN grows Sofia to eight PoPs and signs Neterra for IP Transit

RETN has extended its footprint in Sofia, Bulgaria, adding a new point of presence at Neterra's SDC facility and bringing its total on-net PoP count in the city to eight. The expansion coincides with the signing of Neterra, one of Bulgaria's largest telecoms operators, as a new IP Transit customer, connecting it to RETN's international backbone across Europe and Asia.

For Neterra, the arrangement adds an independent upstream route to its existing mix, giving it an additional path for carrying traffic to and from major European and Eurasian markets. Neterra's own customers, including carriers, ISPs, content providers and enterprises across Southeast Europe, gain added route diversity and resilience as a result.

The deal

Betina Pavlova, Commercial Director at RETN, said: "Sofia is an important connectivity hub for Southeast Europe, and expanding our PoP footprint here strengthens our ability to serve customers across the region. We're pleased to welcome Neterra as a new IP Transit customer and to connect them to RETN's international backbone."

Dean Belev, Senior Product Manager for Connectivity and NetIX at Neterra, added that route diversity is what keeps a network dependable, and that adding RETN as an upstream provider gives the company another independent path to Europe and Asia. Neterra operates more than 220 points of presence worldwide and has won Best Central and Eastern European Connectivity Provider at the Capacity Global Connectivity Awards for three consecutive years, from 2023 to 2025. The company is also an authorised Starlink reseller, a combination that positions it as a broad-based regional access provider rather than a pure wholesale transit play.

RETN did not disclose the financial terms of the IP Transit agreement, nor the committed capacity volumes involved.

Market context

Sofia has emerged as a significant interconnection point in Southeast Europe, sitting at the crossroads of traffic flows between Western Europe, the Western Balkans, Turkey and Central Asia. Its proximity to undersea cable landing points on the Black Sea and overland fibre routes through the region gives it strategic value for operators seeking to diversify away from more congested Western European hubs such as Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

RETN's broader network strategy centres on Eurasian connectivity, linking Western Europe to Central Asia and onward into Southeast Asia over its own DWDM and IP/MPLS infrastructure. The company was awarded Best Pan-European Operator of the Year at the Carrier Community Global Awards 2026 and Asia-Pacific Connectivity Provider of the Year at the Global Connectivity Awards 2026, underscoring its positioning as an independent alternative to the hyperscaler-affiliated and tier-one carrier networks that dominate long-haul IP transit.

Independent network providers operating in this space face sustained pressure from the growing private network buildouts of cloud providers, which increasingly bypass traditional IP transit markets for their own backbone capacity. Against that backdrop, building density in regional hubs like Sofia, where hyperscaler infrastructure remains thinner, is a defensible growth strategy for carriers of RETN's scale.

The Sofia expansion follows a pattern of RETN deepening its footprint in secondary European interconnection cities, where competition from incumbent operators and hyperscalers is less entrenched and where regional ISPs and content providers have fewer upstream options to choose from.