Aqua Comms Boosts Subsea Fibre Capacity Between the USA, Ireland and UK

Connectivity Services provider Aqua Comms has announced that they’ve boosted their network capacity by lighting a new fibre pair on their AEC-1 system, which is a subsea fibre-optic network that provides connectivity between New York (USA), Dublin (Ireland) and London (UK). The link is also being upgraded to support Ciena’s latest technology.

The privately owned AEC-1 (AEConnect-1) subsea cable, which is 5,536km long, first went live in 2016 and is designed to handled 130 x 100Gbps (Gigabits per second) wavelengths or 13Tbps (Terabits per second) per fibre pair. The cable is said to comprise six fibre pairs (some reports put the figure at only four) and supports diverse backhaul fibre routes to additional Points of Presence (PoPs) in the USA, Ireland and UK.

Cables like this often increase their capacity over time, both as industry demands and as fibre optic data and broadband technologies improve. The new fibre pair has thus been brought into service to address the growing bandwidth demands of Aqua Comms’ customers, which means more data flowing between the three countries.

In addition, Aqua Comms will, in the “coming months“, begin upgrading the system from Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme submarine network solution, powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e) coherent optics, to harness the latest WaveLogic 6 Extreme technologies. This is both much more energy efficient and capable of handling wavelength capacity of up to 1.6Tbps.

Aqua Comms CCO, Nick Barton, said:

“From a sustainability perspective, this new fibre pair has given us an opportunity to really analyse the entire system and supplier network to make significant energy savings. Through use of new technology, we will be able to generate more capacity per fibre pair leading to better performance on power draw per Tb and therefore a significantly more sustainable system. The system will also reduce regen requirements at our different cable landing stations and simplify backhauls to create a greener path.”

Aqua Comms also operates and helps to run several other subsea fibre cables under the Atlantic ocean, such as AEC-2 and AEC-3. Not to mention several smaller subsea links, like the recently completed CC-2 (Celtix-Connect 2) cable that runs between Ireland (Dublin), the Isle of Man and England (Blackpool) – featuring 15-fibre pairs.