Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Farice lights Iceland-Ireland subsea cable with Ciena

Farice has deployed Ciena's GeoMesh Extreme submarine network solution to support its recently launched IRIS cable system connecting southwest Iceland to Galway, Ireland, with onward connectivity to the UK, Denmark, and the Nordics.

 The IRIS cable system, which went live on March 1, is a six-fiber pair trunk delivering 22Tb/s per fiber pair, for a total capacity of 132Tb/s, at 500Gb/s line rates. The 1,700km submarine cable is the third to connect Iceland to Europe, providing a diverse, high-capacity pathway for traffic flowing between the regions. 

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 optimization—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. Route diversity and green energy capabilities will help make Iceland highly attractive to data center operators, cloud providers, and other businesses that require high-performance networking," states Thomas Soerensen, VP, Global Submarine Solutions, Ciena.