VIDEO: Transatlantic cable brings job hopes with it

An ultra-fast super-capacity data cable has been brought ashore on the south coast linking Ireland to one of the world’s fastest transatlantic fibre-optic sub-sea cables.

Global networks operator Hibernia Networks landed the ‘spur’ off its €200m 100-gigabit-per-second Project Express cable, which is being laid between Canada and Europe, on Garrettstown beach near Kinsale, Co Cork, early yesterday morning.

A cable-laying vessel, CS Resolute, helped bring the cable ashore, where technicians using special drilling equipment brought the cable under the beach and road to a connecting station.

The Irish link, which is estimated to cost up to €14m, will open up vital high-capacity, or Tier 1, fibre connectivity from Cork direct to the US and Britain.

Most of the heavy data flow leaving Ireland today is what the industry calls “back-hauled” to Dublin — the national hub of data connectivity.

Dublin’s data connectivity has helped attract data rich and data dependent businesses such as Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, as well as large data storage facility operators, in to and around the capital.

The new cable will transfer data five milliseconds faster than current transatlantic cables — a fraction of time that can mean millions to stock traders in New York or London who use computer algorithms to buy and sell stock in microseconds.

It is hoped the critical piece of telecommunications infrastructure could help deliver hundreds of hi-tech jobs for the southern region in Ireland’s growing cloud computing and data sectors.

As well as delivering a new data access point for the country, it is understood that the spur will have enough super-capacity to meet the data requirements of the entire southern region for several years.

Hibernia Networks, a US company, owns and operates a global communications network connecting 89 markets in 25 countries. It provides wholesale, finance, media, and high-bandwidth clients with secure and high-speed internet connections.

It announced its Project Express cable project in 2011. It is spending about $250m laying the highly advanced 4,600km underwater cable between Nova Scotia and Somerset in England.