A new underwater cable to North America will mean faster broadband speeds for large areas of Ireland. The major cross-border project has been initiated by the Republic’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the North’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment.
The two government departments have awarded Hibernia Atlantic Ltd the contract to link Northern Ireland to an underwater transatlantic communications cable for the first time.
Thanks to the new cable, communications between Ireland and North America will be routed directly instead of having to use external networks such as going through London.
The €32-million project will provide faster, cheaper broadband and direct international telecoms connectivity for cities and towns such as Belfast, Derry, Coleraine and Armagh in the North, and Letterkenny, Monaghan, Castleblayney, Drogheda and Dundalk in the South.
“Project Kelvin” will involve connecting a new submarine cable to an existing transatlantic cable 22 miles off the north coast of Ireland.
The new cable will come ashore in Co Derry, and Hibernia Atlantic aims to complete the work by March 2010.
Cable pioneer
The project takes its name from the Belfast-born scientist William Thomson (1824-1907), Lord Kelvin. The physicist and engineer is best known for developing the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature measurement.
He was also an electric telegraph engineer and inventor, and provided scientific advice for the company that laid the first commercially viable transatlantic telegraph cable, linking Europe and North America.
The project had many false starts, but in 1866 the cable finally connected Valentia Island, off the south coast of Kerry, and Newfoundland.
The transatlantic cable was described at the time as the “eighth wonder of the world”, and the peninsula in Ireland became one of the most important areas in the world for cable history.
Besides being the starting point of many Atlantic telegraph cables, from the first attempts in 1857 and 1858 and the first successful cables of 1866, it was a key centre during the rapid expansion on the route from 1870-1900.
Transatlantic telegraph cables operated from Valentia Island for 100 years, until Western Union International terminated its cable operations in 1966.
Learn more
Find out more about how the first transatlantic cable linked Ireland with America
Read a newspaper article from the Illustrated London News at the time about the laying of the cable
Check out some video interviews on Hibernia Atlantic’s website with its scientists and technologists (warning – this page is bandwidth intensive!)
