Cable giant Virgin Media UK has used a new optical solution from Nortel to add a 40Gbps (Gigabits per second) capacity enhancement to its existing submarine cable link between the UK and Ireland. Both the terrestrial and submarine portions of VMs network have now been upgraded to quadruple network capacity, which helps to support the ISPs new generation of up to 50Mbps broadband services.

Virgin Media operates a north and south optical fibre cable between the UK and Ireland underneath the Irish Sea. This cable already carries 10Gbps channels between Lytham St. Annes on the west coast of the UK to Dublin. The upgrade also extends the lifespan of Virgin's cable and provides the potential for a future upgrade to 100Gbps.


The upgraded network can now carry up to 12 x 40Gbps wavelengths, providing up to 480Gbps of capacity over a fibre loss of up to 58dB in this deployment through the “unrepeatered wet plant”. We don't know what that last part means but it sounds good :smirk: . Now just imagine what 12 x 100Gbps could do.