IOEMA: The New 48 Fibre Pair Repeatered Subsea Nordic Cable

Type of Cable System: Repeated Two-Core Fibre Pairs With Coherent Optics 
Consortium Members: Independent Operator.
Construction Status: Design and Fund Raising Stage. 
Number of Fibre Pairs: 48. 
Number of Cores Per Fibre: 2.
Estimated RFS: 1st or 2nd quarter 2027.
Day One Aggregate Throughput: 13 Pbps. 
Salient Features: 48 Pair repeatered cable directly linking UK, Norway, Demark, Germany, and Netherlands. Every fibre optic path is direct and involves no third country transit. Each fibre pair strand has two optical cores instead of the standard one. 
Supplier: NEC. Only NEC offers multicore fibre strands and 48 pair repeaters. 

I interviewed today one of the project's founders, Eckhard Bruckshen. The IOEMA cable is designed to reduce the dependence of European telecommunications traffic on the Denmark bottleneck as the map below illustrates. Today Denmark is the primary telecom bridge between the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland (also the Baltic States) and the rest of Europe. An early attempt at diversifying away from this bottleneck is the Finnish government's C-Lion project which connects Helsinki to Frankfurt via a a subsea cable traversing the Baltic Sea with a landing at Rostock, Germany. The IEOMA cable is designed to go further by directly connecting the key countries of Northwest Europe, namely the UK, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Germany via a high fibre count cable with branching units. The cable will use fibre pair switching at the branching units to allow point-to-point optical circuits between any of the countries in which it lands. 

What is amazing about this project is that it is a repeatered 48 pair cable. This would be the largest fibre pair count repeatered project ever undertaken. Eckhard estimates that the subsea amplification would enable 27 to 29 terabits per pair. Assume the low end of the range. That implies a 13 petabit per second cable! The reason amplication is doable for 48 pairs is simply the short distances involved. NEC is currently the only subsea system provider that manufactures 48 pair optical amplifiers for subsea cables. Because the distances are short the power budget is not busted. 

The map below is an early version of the cable layout. The current design calls for two UK landings for resiliency and low latency to Northern and Southern UK. There will also be two Dutch landings, one to reach the two large Google data centers in Eemshaven and Middenmeer as well the third one being built in Groningen. Undoubtedly, the other landing target is data centre rich Amsterdam home. Two German landings are also planned. 

IEOAM subsea cable connects UK, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Norway

Originally the idea was to sell fibre pairs on the system, but the most recent incarnation of the business plan calls for selling lit Layer 1 capacity to carriers. 









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Burying Fibre Optic Subsea Cables In Shallow Waters: The How And Why

Image
It is standard practice to bury subsea cables in shallow waters. This generally means the ocean or sea lying above the continental shelf. The shelf is really just that part of the continent that is submerged under water during the warm periods between the earth's recurring ice ages. During interglacial periods like now the shelves remain submerged and during each ice age the shelves become dry land as the sea levels fall due to less precipitation. Precipitation declines as the earth becomes colder and water is locked up in snow, ice, and glaciers on dry land. Indeed, during the last ice age the oceans were about 130 meters lower than today's levels and the continental shelves were dry land. In general, the continental shelves range from 100 to 200 meters below the water surface. At the continental shelf's edge the depths plunge down a steep slope to the bottom of the ocean. The purpose of burying is to protect a fibre optic cable from its most ferocious predators and enemi
Read more

The Best Subsea Cable Across The English Channel: Scylla

Image
The English Channel has been a sore spot for the wholesale telecommunications industry. The key problem is the abundance of freight and fishing vessels. Ships are the number one global cause of subsea cable outages. They drop their anchors to come to a halt and also drag them to maintain stability in rough seas. For example, last autumn a Chinese freight ship called the New New Polar Bear dragged its anchor through the Baltic Sea knocking out a gas pipeline as well as the fibre optic cable attached to it. This Spring a Houthi missile hit the Rubymar cargo ship in the Red Sea; consequently, the crew abandoned ship. To do so, they dropped the anchor to halt the vessel so the crew could safely depart in the life boats. Afterwards, the Rubymar drifted 31 kilometers and its anchor severed 3 major subsea arteries of European/Asian traffic, namely the AAE1, EIG, and jointly owned Seacom/Tata cables. It took five months to get those three cables fixed due to the ongoing Houthi rebel conflict.
Read more

How To Calculate An IRU Price For a 100G Wavelength

The IRU price should reflect your forecast of future lease revenes. If the current MRC is high and prices have been stable and are expected to remain so, then the opportunity cost of selling an IRU is high. You are sacrificing a lot of lease revenue if you sell that capacity. In this case the upfront IRU price should equal the three year MRC multipled by 4 to 6 years. So if the three year Faster cable MRC is $17K, then 48x to 72x times that number is fair value. So 48*$17K=$816K. Plus a standard 4% annual fee to cover the wavelength's share of maintenance and operations.. So strong markets and tight capacity mean that leasing is more attractive than IRUs to the supplier. Vice versa, the buyers will be desperate to lower their long term costs via an IRU. In my example, $816K divided by 15 years equates to $4500 per month excluding O&M. Bad for the seller. Good for the buyer. That's why so many of you are looking for IRU capacity to resell to your clients, but finding few se
Read more