The 1,700 km submarine cable is the third to connect Iceland to Europe, providing a diverse, high-capacity pathway for traffic flowing between the regions. The redundancy offered by IRIS and the other Farice submarine systems—FARICE-1 and DANICE—significantly increases network service availability, a critical requirement in today's increasingly interconnected society.
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Iceland's unique geological composition has helped the country become a world leader in clean energy and a pioneer in geothermal technology, attracting multinational companies, Tier 1 and Tier 2 service providers, and data center operators alike due to low electricity costs and renewable energy sources.
The IRIS cable system, which went live on March 1, is a six-pair fiber backbone providing 22 Tbps per fiber pair, with a total capacity of 132 Tbps, at line speeds of 500 Gbps.
For IRIS, Farice deployed Ciena's 6500 packet optical platform, equipped with WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics, and the Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller. Ciena services provided consulting, systems integration, training, and optimization, and will perform maintenance services to ensure the network continues to operate at peak performance.
- In addition, Ciena helped Farice with the upgrade of ground routes in Iceland for IRIS and DANICE to a protected ring system with rapid restoration using a ROADM-based GeoMesh Extreme architecture; DANICE was also upgraded to WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics.
