Altibox Carrier has just completed an important upgrade of the Norwegian fibre backbone: A new path from Rennesøy and Green Mountain data centre in Stavanger in the shortest possible route to Bulk and Ulven Stack EMEA in Oslo. – The new path will provide new diversity and significantly lower latency distributing data between Norway and Europe.
– This has been a large and complex project, and we are very satisfied that we have completed it both on time and on budget, says CEO of Altibox Carrier Svein Arild Ims. He describes the landscape as ‘challenging’.
– Let’s just say that there are a lot of rocks in the Norwegian mountains. The cable crosses three mountain ranges and is buried the whole 485 kilometres.
20 subcontractors
– Luckily, we have experienced subcontractors. We cooperate with the very best, and it has all gone very smoothly, Ims adds. – The complexity in the project becomes very apparent by the fact that we have had more than 20 subcontractors during the two years it has taken to lay the cable, he says.
The trenches have been partially dug, partially trenched. On roads and rock ground, the trenches for the tubes have been cut with diamond blades.
Lots and lots of capacity
A single cable currently holds 4300 terabits/s, and plenty of space to add more. Altibox Carrier can increase the capacity to 4 cables which in total gives more than 17 petabits/s, representing a major upgrade to the capacity of the Norwegian fibre backbone, Ims says. The network is powered by Ciena’s Waveserver 5 interconnect platform—equipped with WaveLogic 5 Extreme 800G coherent optics—and is scalable to higher capacities including 1.6Tb/s wavelengths in the future.
– In addition, the Stavanger–Oslo link will significantly reduce latency. To minimize latency, five Inline amplifiers have been added, and each cable stretch is six kilometres long between each splice. The whole stretch has less than 90 splices. – That makes for a very fast line, probably the fastest possible for a stretch of that length, says Ims.
New data highway
The Oslo–Stavanger–Newcastle – Dublin/London network lowers the latency to continental Europe substantially.
– On the path from Oslo to Stavanger, there are no forks, just a clean stretch, so this is the fastest route now. With this new path, we are bringing Europe much closer, says Ims.
Gateway to Norwegian possibilities
Altibox Carrier is one of Norway’s leading builders, owner, and operator of fibre infrastructure between continental Europe and Norway, currently operating two submarine cables, from Hirtshals to Larvik and Newcastle to Stavanger. With the new stretch between Stavanger and Oslo, the on-land capacity has seen a major upgrade that further places Norway on the map for customers.
– Up until now, the Norwegian terrestrial backbone has been somewhat of a bottle neck, even though the submarine cables are of great quality, says Ims. – Altibox Carrier is dedicated to being the gateway to Norway’s many advantages for customers, with lots of available green energy, lower cost, and a stable business environment – especially now that FLAP is being congested. Norway is really a haven for data centre activity. The possibilities are enormous, and with the Stavanger–Oslo link in place, it just got even better, says Svein Arild Ims.
CEO in Green Mountain Data centres, Svein Atle Hagaseth, agrees.
– New updated infrastructure allows for new possibilities in digitalization of ever more tasks – and Altibox Carrier’s backbone fibre network is very important in that context, both within Norway and out of Norway. The new cable between Oslo and Stavanger means that even larger parts of Norway come closer to Europe and the rest of the world. That is very important, and it is crucial that we keep developing and building infrastructure to bring Europe closer, he says.
Contacts:
Press contact: Andreas Veggeland – andreas.veggeland@altibox.no
Fibre and capacity inquiries: Svein Arild Ims – svein.arild.ims@altibox.no
