Just a bit over a month after formally launching its transatlantic cable plans, AquaComms has its funding in hand. Yesterday they closed the financing for AEConnect and brought into force the contract with TE SubCom to build the cable system. With plans for a December 2015 ready-for-service date, they certainly aren’t wasting any time.
The $300M cable system between Long Island and Killala in northwest Ireland will stretch some 5,400km and feature 130x100Gbps per fiber pair. From the Irish shore, it will hook up via a terrestrial link to the CeltixConnect system in Dublin to reach London. Microsoft is an announced foundation customer, and from what I hear Facebook has a piece of it as well.
Is there a new cable in the North Atlantic right now that isn’t landing somewhere along the Irish coast? For an island that got almost completely bypassed in the dot-com bubble and continued to be an afterthought for another decade beyond that, the shift in fortunes has been quite dramatic.
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Categories: Undersea cables
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This one lands on the US, but with Hibernia, aren’t they able to avoid both the US and the UK? Canada – Ireland. Maybe it’s about regulatory avoidance? Combined with the arctic fiber, they could do a lot of bypass of the intelligence super powers.