Project Express will provide connectivity between New York and London using 40G technology with further upgrades to 100G planned in the future. The system will use a minimum of four fibre pairs in a repeatered submarine cable.
Huawei Marine recently completed the first phase of the project’s marine survey work and is now manufacturing the necessary cables and wet paint.
The construction will begin with the laying of 4600km of cable from Brean in Somerset, UK, to Halifax, Canada. The cable will then be connected to Hibernia Atlantic’s low latency cable system, which runs from Halifax to New York. Five branching units will be included for further connectivity to the US, continental Europe and Ireland. Project Express is scheduled to be ready for service during the summer of 2013.
The companies claim that the cable will offer the lowest latency route from New York to London, with less than a 60 millisecond round trip.
Bjarni Thorvardarson, CEO, Hibernia Atlantic, said: “Project Express has taken another huge leap forward in the process of deploying the fastest transatlantic connectivity available to our GFN customer base. While we have been working to advance this project through marine surveys and letter agreements, this final closure of the full agreement is a major milestone in delivering this momentous project.”
Hibernia Atlantic’s GFN is aimed at uniting global banks and financial exchanges with a single connection. It is targeted specifically at the financial community and is designed to meet the high performance and reliability demands of the financial sector.
