Vodafone Iceland Signs Up With Emerald Express

Well, it took a bit more than the expected 45 days, but Vodafone has indeed signed on the dotted line for capacity on the Emerald Express cable system. The anticipated deal between Emerald Networks and Vodafone Iceland was first announced almost six months ago, and was signed on August 9 in the Harpa Concert and Conference Center in Reykjavik. 

While there hasn’t been a lot of news to follow on it, Emerald Networks is still apparently on target for a Q3/2014 launch of its system connecting North America and Europe with a big branch up to Iceland. Built for 100G from the beginning, the NYC-Ireland connection will have an initial theoretical capacity of 40Tbps, while connectivity from both continents to Iceland will be some 10Tbps.

Vodafone Iceland, which is the second largest service provider in Iceland, is the first local operator to sign a contract on the system, and foresees it being a big piece of its infrastructure in the North Atlantic over the next 15 years of expected demand growth. There has been a multi-year effort by Icelandic partisans and their financial allies to bring big bandwidth and massive data centers together with Iceland’s geothermal energy reserves. We won’t know just how successful they’ve been until this cable system actually gets built though.

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Categories: Undersea cables