Led by a consortium of owner/operators including Aqua Comms, Bulk Infrastructure, Facebook and others, the HAFVRUE (taken from the Danish word mermaid) cable, will cross the North Atlantic connecting mainland Northern Europe to the US. The first new cable in the region for almost two decades.
Commenting on the announcement, Sanjay Chowbey, president of TE SubCom, said:“The HAVFRUE cable will provide state-of-the-art connectivity for increasing needs of users, ranging from individual consumers to businesses and the research community. SubCom is proud to be selected as the supplier for this project.”
The system is comprised of a trunk cable connecting New Jersey in the US to the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark with a branch landing in County Mayo, Ireland. With optional branch extensions to Northern and Southern Norway, also included in the design of the new system. Once operational the system will offer cross-sectional cable capacity of 108Tbps which the company says is scalable to higher capacities using future generation SLTE technology.
TE SubCom will integrate its Wavelength Selective Switching Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexer (WSS-ROADM) for flexible wavelength allocation over the system design. Creating an easy upgrade path for future advances in subsea connectivity technology. The company says that the cable will bring modern, high-capacity connectivity to Northern Europe, where data centre construction has been increasing to support the need for cloud services.
Though it is to be built and owned in consortia, Aqua Comms, will serve as the system operator and landing party in US, Ireland and Denmark. While Bulk Infrastructure will be the owner and landing party for the Norwegian branch options.
In November, the TE SubCom responder cable-laying ship arrived in Sydney harbour in Australia to start work on the 15,000km Hawaiki subsea cable. The Hawaiki cable system will connect Australia and New Zealand to Hawaii, and other Pacific islands including American Samoa, to Oregon on the US mainland.
For further reading on submarine cable projects and the latest developments in the region, click here to take a look at the Subsea special report from the Dec/Jan issue of Capacity magazine.