CONSTRUCTION HAS begun on a €15 million high-capacity telecommunications cable linking Ireland with Britain.
CeltixConnect, which is backed by unnamed telecom entrepreneurs, will lay its cable next summer assuming it receives the necessary permissions from authorities on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Final design of the link is currently being carried out, but Tom McMahon, operations director with CeltixConnect, said it was likely to have 48 fibre pairs as a minimum. Each fibre pair has a capacity of 960 gigabits per second (Gbits/sec) – enough to transmit 420 hours of video per second.
This is significantly more capacity than current high-speed links to Britain, most of which were built in the 1990s.
The route chosen for the cable will run from Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) via the East Point Business Park to connect with Holyhead in Wales.
In Dublin it will interconnect with the T50, the major metropolitan network around the city that links major data centres and business parks.
On the Welsh side it can connect to the Welsh Assembly-funded Fibre Speed network, which runs between Holyhead and Manchester, or with a number of other major fibre-optic networks that connect to London and mainland Europe.
The cable will be operational by October 2010.
CeltixConnect will submit its applications for permits next week, with physical laying of the sub-sea cable likely to happen next August.
The privately owned CeltixConnect cable will be open to all telecoms operators.
The firm also plans to sell “dark fibre” directly to end users, who are likely to include major technology multinationals such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
McMahon says the route to Wales is unique, and CeltixConnect has been working on it for the last 18 months.
“Because the sub-sea route is just 131km long, it is not as capital intensive a project as it could be,” says McMahon.
He said the relatively short length also means that the link will not suffer from “latency” – a noticeable lag as data is transmitted. The cable had also been designed so that there is a relatively short backhaul when the cable lands – just 4km between Clontarf and the IFSC on the Dublin side.
The cable will be buried at between 60cm and 1m below the sand, mud and sandy gravel along the route. It will avoid fishing grounds so the chances of it being cut by a trawler or another vessel are reduced.
McMahon is also a director of McMahon Design and Management, a firm of consulting engineers and project managers which has worked on a number of major projects including the Global Crossing sub-sea cable and the Government’s Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs).
