TE SubCom, a submarine cable technology provider, has been selected to supply the North Atlantic Hafvrue cable system, which will connect mainland Northern Europe to the United States – the first system to do so in almost 20 years.
Owned and operated by a consortium of parties including Aqua Comms, Bulk Infrastructure, and Facebook, Hafvrue is comprised of a trunk cable that connects New Jersey, US to the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark with a branch landing in County Mayo, Ireland.
The cable will bring modern, high-capacity connectivity to Northern Europe. It will be optimised for coherent transmission and offer a cross-sectional cable capacity of 108Tb/s, scalable to higher capacities utilising future generations of submarine line terminal equipment.
The design will also incorporate wavelength-selective switching reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (WSS-ROADM) from TE SubCom for flexible wavelength allocation in the system design. These qualities are designed to ensure an easy upgrade path to accommodate future advances in subsea connectivity technology. Aqua Comms will be the system operator and landing party in U.S.A., Ireland, and Denmark, whilst Bulk Infrastructure of Norway will take this role for the Norwegian branch options.
Commenting on the contract win, Sanjay Chowbey, president of TE SubCom said: ‘The Havfrue cable will provide state-of-the-art connectivity for increasing needs of users, ranging from individual consumers to businesses and the research community. SubCom is proud to be selected as the supplier for this project.’
The announcement comes shortly after TE SubCom announced that the supply contract was in force for the Djibouti Africa Regional Express (DARE) submarine cable system, which is designed to improve communications along the east coast and Horn of Africa (see TE SubCom starts DARE submarine cable system build).
