LONDON, PARIS and TORONTO — Toronto’s Crosslake Fibre, an international network provider and developer of subsea and terrestrial fibre networks, announced today its newest subsea cable project will extend across the English Channel and is expected to be ready for service in fall 2021.
Connecting Slough, U.K. and Paris, France, the next-generation 550-kilometre cable is the first fibre-optic subsea cable to be built across the English Channel in nearly 20 years, says the news release. The high-fibre-count, non-repeatered system will contain 96 fibre pairs, each providing more than 20 terabits per second of capacity throughput, says the release.
Crosslake Fibre hired U.K.-based EGS to undertake the marine and burial surveys for its CrossChannel Fibre project, and survey activities have now commenced.
“This new fibre infrastructure has been optimized to create the shortest path between the two data hubs, providing users with an enhanced technical solution and materially lowering operating costs. With the continued increase in bandwidth demand further accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, subsea cables have never been more critical to the functioning of the backbone of the Internet,” said Mike Cunningham, CEO for Crosslake Fibre, in the news release.
Crosslake Fibre’s capital partner, London-based Tiger Infrastructure Partners, has invested additional capital into the Crosslake platform to support the CrossChannel Fibre system and advance the growth and development of new projects, says the release.
“Crosslake Fibre has demonstrated its expertise and ability to successfully develop and deploy infrastructure projects globally. With its CrossChannel Fibre project, the company is well-positioned to support the increasing capacity needs of high-growth regions in Europe,” said Emil Henry, CEO and managing partner of Tiger Infrastructure Partners.
