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

Breaking Story: Facebook Building Subsea Cable That Will Encompass The World

Image
Several sources have whispered in my ear that META is planning a new 16 fibre pair cable that will encompass the world going from the US East Coast to the US West Coast via the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The most ambitious subsea project ever undertaken. I do not know the exact routing. I know that the cable will launch from the American East Coast and will go down the West African Coast to South Africa and then head straight to Mumbai. It is not clear if Europe will be online or not. From Mumbai it will head straight to Australia and then up to the US West Coast. I speculate that there may be branching units to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But the basic routing is US/South Africa/India/Australia/US. What is not clear is if there will be branching units to add more countries to the cable.  This semi-secret cable reflects META's desire for network resiliency given the four month Red Sea down time that AAE-1 and other subsea cables suffered during the first half
Read more

Facebook's Semi-Secret W Cable

Image
 A few days ago I wrote that Facebook was planning a new subsea cable directly linking the US East Coast to South Africa, then up to India, onward to Australia, and finally to the US West Coast. Clearly resiliency is a big theme. It avoids Lisbon, Marseille, Egypt, the Red Sea, and Singapore. All choke points due to their telecom hub status. Note that the map below shows lots of branching units, but I don't have insider confirmation although they make perfect sense. The cable is 16 fibre pairs.  This cable may be heavily influenced by AI considerations. AI data centres require lots of space and power. The US, South Africa, India, and Australia are good candidates for AI data centres in terms of space. All of them except for South Africa have modern power grids. But South Africa is still the best place on the continent for large scale AI facilities. An AI theme makes particular sense given the cable's high latency. An AI data centre does not directly serve custom
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