29 September 2015

Nova Broadband today announced its delight at being one of the first providers on-board to connect customers all over Ireland to the new ultra-high speed Hibernia Express subsea cable system. Hibernia Express is a new direct link from Cork to London and New York, which is being switched on this month.

The announcement follows the breaking news at the start of the summer that Cork will become a global IP switching centre routing high speed Internet traffic to and from USA, UK, Europe and Asia through Hibernia Express, Arctic Fibre and Ireland-France Subsea Cable.

Nova Broadband will provide the essential "middle-mile" and "last-mile" links necessary to connect Irish businesses and consumers to this international network, thereby bridging the gap from the Garrettstown beach landing to the homes and businesses throughout Ireland who need the capacity. The network will have an initial capacity of 53 Terrabits, or 53,000 Gigabits, enough capacity to carry the traffic of over 100 million fibre broadband customers at current usage levels.

Speaking about the announcement, MD of Nova Broadband Dave McDonald said “We look forward to being involved in this major connectivity step for Cork and Ireland as a whole. Nova's large-scale Irish network will have the benefit of having its main interconnection to the US, UK and onwards to the EU located at the Cork Internet Exchange (CIX), the first point of connection in the state to this new high-speed subsea cable, rather than in the Dublin datacentres, which is fantastic. For Irish traffic, Nova will continue to utilise INEX, the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange through its partnership with CIX. This major connectivity infrastructure will undoubtedly attract a number of data centres and further position the Cork region and other regional centres outside Dublin for foreign direct investment.”

Nova is building a major new broadband network using both fibre and wireless technology to cover huge areas of the country. This network will be connected to the Hibernia Express subsea cable, giving Nova customers the shortest possible path to the major internet exchanges in New York, London and mainland Europe. This follows a €180,000 deal to connect to the Hibernia Express network through the Cork Internet exchange (CIX). Hibernia Express is expected to attract major industry to more parts of Ireland. It will ‘decentralise’ internet infrastructure, helping to better balance development between Dublin and the regions.

CIX will become the closest datacentre in the EU to the US, with the absolute lowest latency, key for financial trading and beneficial for multinational internet traffic generally. Express uniquely provides the shortest route, by far between the UK, Ireland and the US, keeping latency to a minimum.