Farice and SubCom announced the successful landing of the IRIS Cable System at Thorlakshofn beach in Iceland on Monday May 23rd. The IRIS system connecting Iceland with Ireland will be ready for service in the beginning of 2023.
The IRIS cable system is a new high-speed undersea cable system, spaning approximately 1,700 km in length and connecting south west of Iceland to Ballyloughane Strand in Galway, Ireland. The IRIS cable system is designed as a six-fiber pair trunk with a total system capacity of 108 Tbps with each fiber pair delivering 18Tbs.
Farice, fully owned by the Icelandic Government, will privately own and operate the IRIS cable system, in addtion to another two submarine systems connecting Iceland to Europe, FARICE-1 and DANICE.
The landing event signifies the commencement of the marine installation of the IRIS cable system that Farice has been developing since 2019. During the summer months, SubCom’s CS Durable will lay the cable south from Iceland to Galway, Ireland with final splice and completion of marine work planned for mid-August 2022.
Ready beginning 2023
Marine survey of the entire route was successfully undertaken by Farice in 2020 and 2021. This enabled SubCom to complete final design, preparation work, and manufacturing of the system during 2021-2022. The installation of the cable will progress at approximately 20-200 km per day with burial or surface lay from Iceland to Ireland. The target burial depth of the cable is 1.5 m beneath the seabed in water depth of up to 1,500 m. Work on the terrestrial section of underground duct and a termination station in Galway, Ireland and Thorlakshofn, Iceland has taken place and the sites are ready to connect the submarine cable system.
The IRIS system will be ready for service in the beginning of 2023. It will be the third submarine fibre optic cable system connecting Iceland with Europe, providing further redundancy in telecommunication connection, with low latency connections around 10.5 ms, between Reykjavík and Dublin. The system will be integrated with Farice’s network in Iceland and Europe to enhance the network and provide comprehensive, diverse, and secure connectivity between Farice’s network POPs in Iceland and Europe.
