Subsea cable startup Emerald Atlantis is pressing ahead with a project to deploy what it says will be the world's first 100 x 100G subsea cable network.
Emerald Atlantis announced it has given subsea cable vendor TE SubCom an instruction to proceed with building the Emerald Express trans-Atlantic cable.
The first stage of the project will involve deploying 5,200km of cable linking the US, Canada, the UK and Iceland. It will now enter the route survey stage in early August, and should enter service late next year.
The cable has been designed to support 100 x 100Gbps across each of its six fiber pairs.
Emerald Atlantis president Greg Varisco said this capacity and a planned 'great circle' routing configuration are needed to “meet the tremendous demand for [low-latency trans-Atlantic] bandwidth driven by cloud services.”
The Emerald Express will be routed through branching stations off Newfoundland and Ireland to enable future expansion to more countries.
Emerald Atlantis was created to address a perceived demand for trans-Atlantic bandwidth from Fortune 1,000 companies. Its founder and institutional investor is the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation to support biomedical research.