Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Iceland's New Audur Subsea Cable Farice is building a new 16 to 24 fibre pair cable named after an Icelandic matriarch, Audur The Deep Minded, who sailed from Scotland to Iceland in the 9th century during the first wave of migration to the island. The cable lands in Southeast Iceland and in Scotland near Glasgow. The Icelandic backhaul will be fibre, but the British side is most likely spectrum. Farice views Audur as a replacement for the 22 year old FARICE-1. The ship survey will take place in the summer of 2027 with RFS planned for 2030. Audur falls into the monster capacity cable category. Sixteen fibre pairs can easily achieve 320 Tbps with 24 fibre pairs almost reaching a half petabit per second. What is really striking about this is Iceland's population, which although rapidly increasing due to immigration, is just shy of 400K. Undoubtedly, this reflects Farice's bullish assessment of data center demand driven by cheap hydro power and modest cooling needs. Although Ic...

The two fibre pair Greenland Connect system links Greenland to Iceland and Canada's Newfoundland province. Photos of the cable landing stations below. The first photo is the Icelandic facility with the one below it being the Greenland counterpart. Greenland Connects lands South of Reykjavik and uses the same landing station as the DANICE cable. In Greenland it lands in Nuuk, the country's capital, and also in Qaqortoq. Although the cable began with 2x 10G waves in operation, it has been upgraded to 12.8 Tbps by Alcatel and Hauwei Marine.  Greenland Connect went live on March 23, 2009. It brought the first terrestrial Internet connectivity to Greenland and slashed RTDs to content delivery points by over 500 milliseconds. Up to that point Greenland had relied solely on geostationary satellites. I strongly believe that the Far North, which includes Siberia, Arctic Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and the Far Northern parts of the Nordic countries, will experience massive migration and ...