Filings with Ireland’s Maritime Area Regulatory Authority reveal that Amazon wants to run a cable stretching from County Cork in the south of Ireland to an unconfirmed US site.
Amazon’s maritime usage licence application requests that the company conduct geophysical surveys in Castlefreke, Long Strand, and Ireland’s exclusive economic zone, which extends some 200 miles from the coast.
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The filings state that Amazon plans to conduct the initial surveys “as soon as feasible” in 2025, and the investigations are expected to take less than four months.
The total size of the proposed maritime area for the cable would be 16,880 km2; however, the filings published few concrete details on the proposed cable system.
The application was filed in June 2024 but surfaced this week in a post on Roderick Beck’s Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure blog.
The proposed cable would join Exa’s Express cable as the only subsea system to land on Ireland’s southern coast, with the majority of cables instead landing in Dublin or west coast sites like Galway and Mayo.
Beck suggests the proposed cable would be physically diverse on the terrestrial side of the Irish Sea and the systems would speed up connections to its cloud data centres in the country, adding: “I can never emphasise enough how much money Amazon loses if it cannot serve its customers for even just a few seconds.”
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