Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Microsoft has filed an application to do a geophysical survey for a new subsea fibre optic cable connecting Ireland to the UK. The Irish Maritime authority has blessed the application. Tuskar is the name of an Irish lighthouse located on a rock in the Irish Sea. It was the first Irish facility to be powered by electricity. The cable's tentative design is to land at Kilmore Quay on the Irish side with the British landing at Newgale in Wales. Again, I expect a 96 fibre pair unrepeated cable system.  Some of my readers have expressed skepticism that Microsoft would be building its own cable when there have been several carrier builds across the Irish Sea in the last five years. EUNetwork's Rockabill unrepeatered cable has 96 fibre pairs; it went live in 2019. Aquacomms CeltixConnect-2 cable is an unrepeatered system that went live March 2022. And that's not at all. Zayo has 24 fibre pairs on the power cable Interconnector East-West.  But here's the thing. I don't think...

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 ...