Major New Transatlantic Fibre

http://irelandoffline.org/2011/12/major-new-transatlantic-fibre/

IrelandOffline, a leading consumer advocacy group in telecommunications warmly welcomes the announcement that a major transatlantic fibre will be landing at Belmullet in County Mayo. The cable is low latency (sub 60ms) and is a huge increase in the inter-connectivity into Ireland. The route this cable takes is only 5200Kms which is the shortest route across the Atlantic. The fibre consists of 100 x 100 Gbps per Fiber Pair (60Tbit Total Design Capacity and is Future Proofed)
Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said : “This is a great day for Ireland as this fibre cable will bring much needed international transatlantic traffic to Ireland. The cable will be a low latency cable and follows the “Great Circle route” which is the shortest transatlantic route by far. This is the optimal route across the Atlantic and cables should follow this route in future. Low latency is a key driver in international e-commerce and financial trading between major financial centres. This shows the importance of the west coast of Ireland as a landing point for trans-Atlantic fibre transit. We in IrelandOffline look forward to more fibres making landfall in this region and to the region becoming a hotspot for international connectivity”

Wallace continued : “The landing of this fibre outlines how Ireland is now well served for international traffic, we now have two new cables between Dublin and Wales coming online which will allows for cheap and rapid transit across the Irish Sea. The Welsh regional authorities have installed a fibre to connect these to the UK core fibre network. This will allow very fast transit across the UK to London and Europe”

Wallace went on to say : “Now all we need to do to utilize this fantastic interconnectivity available to us is to improve the dark fibre provision throughout the State. Building a National Dark Fibre network will help access in the local access network (the network that connects homes to local POPs and the MANs). This is now an urgent priority for Ireland Inc if we want to advance into the digital age and to benefit all the hard-pressed consumers of Ireland. Limited fibre rollouts (to a few isolated towns) and building stranded MAN networks with no backhaul is not a proper solution. How is Ireland to benefit from this new digital age if the New Era (and Labours equivalent) are to be left on the shelf and ignored? If we do not do this we risk falling behind, the likes of China(1) and Brazil(2) are building Next Generation Networks so should we.”

Minister Rabbitte is to present the results of his ‘New Era’ discussions with a very small list of stakeholders in the Irish Telecommunications sphere this December. Levelling out access between regions and to Dublin through the removal of barriers to market entry must be the starting point otherwise this latest talking shop in the DCENR will go the way of most of its predecessor deliberations, i.e. into oblivion and sit on a shelf somewhere.

(1) http://www.telecoms.com/30287/alcatel-lucent-selected-for-broadband-china-fibre-cities-project/
(2) http://itdecs.com/2011/07/brazil-tech-the-national-broadband-plan/