The IRIS system connects southwest Iceland to Galway, Ireland, with onward connectivity to the UK, Denmark, and the Nordics.
“Our new IRIS submarine cable system provides a critical ‘digital bridge’ between Iceland and Ireland, the heart of trans-Atlantic connectivity and an important data center hub," said Örn Orrason, vice president of sales and business development, Farice.
"Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme submarine network solution allows us to support the continued growth of Iceland’s international business presence with resilient, high-speed, low cost-per-bit connectivity to mainland Europe.”
The 1,700km IRIS cable is the third to connect Iceland to Europe, with levels of redundancy offered by IRIS and Farice’s other subsea systems FARICE-1 and DANICE, which in turn significantly increases network service availability.
The IRIS cable system, which went live on March 1, is a six-fibre pair trunk delivering 22Tbps per fiber pair, for a total capacity of 132Tbps, at 500Gbps line rates.
For IRIS, Farice deployed Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics, and Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller. Ciena Services provided consulting, systems integration, training, and optimisation—and will perform maintenance services to ensure the network continues to operate at peak performance.
Additionally, Ciena assisted Farice with upgrading terrestrial routes in Iceland for IRIS and DANICE to a protected ring system with a fast restoration using a ROADM-based GeoMesh Extreme architecture; DANICE was also updated to WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics.
“By deploying a third submarine network cable in Iceland, Farice has dramatically increased the redundancy and resiliency of connectivity in the northwest Atlantic," said Thomas Soerensen, VP of global submarine solutions, Ciena.
"Route diversity and green energy capabilities will help make Iceland highly attractive to data centre operators, cloud providers, and other businesses that require high-performance networking.”
