NORDUnet, the Nordic Gateway for Research & Education, has signed a Letter of Intent expressing interest in a dedicated fiber pair of Far North Fiber's Arctic subsea cable.
Far North Fiber (FNF) is an international consortium of companies who formed a joint corporation to work towards development of a submarine fiber optic system connecting Asia and Europe through the Arctic. FNF brings together Finland’s Cinia Oy, Alaska’s Far North Digital and Japan’s ARTERIA Networks Corporation. The team will promote a system that aims to realize a faster and more secure route directly connecting Japan, North America, and Ireland and Scandinavia. The 14,500 km planned route will greatly reduce the optical distance between Japan and Western Europe, relative to all other combinations of terrestrial and oceanic fiber plant available today. The route minimizes signal latency to an unrivaled 142 millisecond Round-Trip Delay (RTD).
National research and education networks
NORDUnet operates a network supplying connectivity between the national research and education networks (NRENs) of the five Nordic countries. Connecting more than 400 research and education institutions in the Nordics, with over 1.2 mil users. It has its own fibres, DWDM equipment, OTN, IP routers, switches, hosting, video-conferences, and more.
Acquiring a fibre pair on FNF will be part of the realization of the NORDUnet and the Nordic NREN Vision 2030 to promote the arctic and sub-arctic as a key area for the digital transition of Europe and the world, creating gravity north for digital resources and enterprise as well as research. Creating polar connectivity to Asia and North America, offering the Nordic countries and all of Europe new, high-capacity, low-latency links, is an underpinning of Vision 2030.
Boosting Nordic regional development
The Nordics are in a unique position to pioneer a fiber pair for Nordic and European Research and Education, on a completely new route. This project, once realized, will enhance the collaboration landscape between R&E partners in the Nordics, Europe, North America and Japan. In addition, it will boost Nordic regional development and significantly enhance European digital sovereignty, says NORDUnet CEO Valter Nordh.
This fiber pair in the FNF cable system will be among the first intercontinental fiber pairs in history owned and managed by the research and education communities. The ownership will contribute to securing connectivity in an age where the ability to transmit large data sets and conduct distance learning and conferencing is absolutely imperative. On top of that, R&E users in all of Europe will experience further benefits in terms of lower cost, access to larger bandwidths, improved latencies and increased resilience.
