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 re