Hibernia Networks is mmaking progress on the the first modern fiber optic cable connecting North America to Europe in more than 12 years.
It has announce that over 2,000km of armoured cable has been manufactured and loaded onto three cable-laying ships. The ships are now either laying or loading new, fast and high-capacity fiber optic cables. The cable will serve various network operators, including carriers, global financial firms and technology companies, starting in September 2015.
In preparation for the cable-laying process, Hibernia Networks’ partner TE SubCom manufactured over 4,500km of cable with over 60 amplifiers; each amplifier alone weighs in at over 500 pounds. Special loading docks that could manage the weight of this equipment were utilized when bringing the cable system aboard SubCom’s three massive cable ships.
As for the cable itself, Hibernia Express utilizes a 6-fiber-pair submarine cable, with a portion of the fibers optimized for lowest latency and a portion optimized for 100X100 Gpbs design capacity. The total cross-sectional design capacity of the cable will be over 53 Tbps. Hibernia Express will initially launch with 100 Gbps transmission capacity using TE SubCom’s C100 SLTE platform.
Officers, engineers and crew, out to sea for the summer, are aboard three separate ships, laying the fiber along the shortest, pre-determined route to connect the two continents. The first cable ship will travel from Halifax, Nova Scotia to the south east of Newfoundland. The second cable ship begins in Brean, U.K. and travels to the west of the Porcupine Bank off the coast of Ireland. The third cable ship will start from the south east of Newfoundland and will connect to west of the Porcupine Bank and complete the final splice. The first cable ship will continue in transit over the Atlantic and connect the Irish branching unit to Cork, Ireland.
By connecting the UK and North America in the straightest route possible, Hibernia Express expects to improve upon existing cable systems’ latency by at least 5 milliseconds.
“Having the cable laying ships in the Atlantic is a huge milestone for Hibernia Express,” said Bjarni Thorvardarson, CEO of Hibernia Networks. “This historic cable build has been a long time coming, and included arduous planning, financing, land and sea surveying and cable manufacturing. The process has required the hard work and determination of our entire team here at Hibernia Networks, the support of our investors and customers, and our top partners like TE SubCom, to allow us to see this project through to fruition. In a few short months, Hibernia Express will be ready for service and collectively, we will make history for deploying the highest capacity, lowest-latency trans-Atlantic cable connecting North America and the UK. We are excited and proud, not just for Hibernia Networks, but for the much-needed, fast and high-performance capacity we can bring to communications networks around the world.”
