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.
“Aqua Comms is delighted to be investing as a part of the consortium for the HAVFRUE cable system connecting the US, Ireland, and Denmark,” said Nigel Bayliff, chief executive officer of Aqua Comms.
“The demand for hyperscale capacity and connectivity linking North America with Northern Europe cannot be overestimated, and the combination of AEC-1 / AEC-2 subsea cable systems, facilitated by the construction of HAVFRUE will deliver reliability and resilience at an auspicious time, especially in view of the meteoric rise of the digital economy taking place in Scandinavia.”
Aqua Comms will market and sell services on its portion of the HAVFRUE under the brand name America Europe Connect-2 (AEC-2) as complementary to its existing transatlantic cable, America Europe Connect-1 (AEC-1), running between New York and Killala in County Mayo, Ireland.
The company is also concluding a new cable route to Denmark through the UK, developing CeltixConnect-2, which connects Dublin to Manchester, as well as the North Sea Connect cable that will link Stellium’s data centre in Newcastle, UK, to Esbjerg, Denmark, where the system will more than double fibre connectivity to Denmark, increasing the diversity and reliability of the internet to the region.
“Invest in Denmark is proud to welcome Aqua Comms and the other consortium companies into the country with this fantastic addition to our internet infrastructure,” added Steen Hommel, director of Invest in Denmark.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs couldn’t be happier about this investment. Landing a brand new, top-of-the-line fibre cable on the west coast of Jutland will further cement Denmark’s connectivity to North America.”
The HAVFRUE / AEC-2 infrastructure network services will be delivered to and from modern, high-reliability, carrier-neutral interconnection points at NJFX, in Wall, New Jersey, and 1025Connect in Long Island, New York, with a resilient network connection in between, offering a Manhattan bypass route increasing diversity and resiliency in the region.
TE SubCom, which has been selected as supplier for the system on which route survey operations have begun, 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. 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.
Norwegian fibre and data centre company Bulk Infrastructure will be the owner and landing party for the Norwegian branch options and has turned to Epsilon to provide access to cloud services around the world.
The projected ready-for-service (RFS) date for the HAVFRUE subsea cable is Q4 2019.
