CeltixConnect fibre gateway goes live

20 Feb 2012

The cable ship on the horizon that laid the CeltixConnect fibre gateway that connects Ireland and Wales

The CeltixConnect fibre gateway that connects Dublin to London and Manchester has just gone live. The 144-fibre network rolled out by Sea Fibre Networks is aiming to be a game changer, more than doubling the existing data capacity between Ireland and the UK and helping to support the online media explosion.

And the financial services industry in Ireland is also set to benefit from the network, enabling traders to transmit millions of orders at much faster speeds.

The CeltixConnect fibre gateway landed at Porth Darfarch in Wales on 1 February.

Just fewer than 3m photos can be uploaded per second on each fibre pair and the network can carry the equivalent of 173 days worth of uploading pictures online in one second.

The CEO of Sea Fibre Networks Diane Hodnett said CeltixConnect will aim to satisfy extreme demands for capacity and low latency that are driven by the digital and financial services industries in Ireland.

She said CeltixConnect going live signals a new era for communications between Ireland and the rest of the world, adding that the fibre network would open new opportunities for government, financial institutions and businesses across the country.

Vamping up online financial trading

That’s where the IFSC comes into play. Because online financial trading requires a high-speed, high-capacity and low-latency connection. Sea Fibre Networks said CeltixConnect will enable high-frequency traders to transmit millions of orders at “lightning speed”.

The company indicated that powerful algorithms, or ‘algos’ as they are known in industry parlance, execute millions of orders a second and have the capacity to scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously.

Sea Fibre Networks said a five-millisecond delay transmitting an automatic trade can cost a broker up to 1pc of its flow, up to US$4m per millisecond.

It said CeltixConnect will be reinforcing and replacing existing aged networks in the Irish Sea as internet capacity doubles every year.

“We are delighted to be the first company in over a decade to provide this super-fast network to financial hubs like the IFSC and support the growth of our economy. Ultimately, Sea Fibre Networks’ success will be linked to the changes that take place in the financial services industry in Ireland over the coming years,” said Hodnett.

Sea Fibre Networks CEO Diane Hodnett will be a panelist at the Digital Ireland Forum on 23 March in Dublin.

Carmel Doyle was a long-time reporter with Silicon Republic

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