13 August 2002 -- City of Stockholm-owned dark fibre provider AB Stokab and Stockholm-based telecoms carrier Foco 16 AB are to deploy almost 50,000km of Corning Inc's SMF-28e, Vascade L1000 and LEAF fibre in a new network forming a high-capacity link between Sweden and Latvia. It will be the first major installation of Vascade L1000 cabled fibre in an undersea link and the largest deployment of SMF-28e cabled fibre in Europe. Ericsson will provide the high-capacity submarine cable.
The link will span the Baltic Sea to connect the Northern European hub of Stockholm, Sweden, to the Baltic port of Ventspils, Latvia. In the first phase of the build, Stokab will link Stockholm to the Swedish island of Gotland in the mid-Baltic Sea and expand its festoon architecture within the Stockholm archipelago. In the second phase, Foco 16 will link Gotland to Ventspils to complete the network. Netherlands-based Dutch Sea Cable BV will install the cable for both phases.
"The extension of our network to Gotland will be an important step to create a more open and competitive market between Stockholm and Gotland," said AB Stokab's vice managing director Ulf Richenberg. "The Foco 16 deployment will enhance Stockholm's position as a telecommunications center."
Corning says that its SMF-28e fibre has low attenuation in the water peak region, opens a new operating window for transmission, and allows installation of higher-capacity, low-cost unamplified networks. Vascade L1000 is a single-mode fibre for short-haul undersea networks operating at higher data rates, including 10Gbit/s. LEAF non-zero dispersion-shifted fibre (NZ-DSF) has a larger effective area to allow higher levels of power to be transmitted than standard NZ-DSFs, minimizing the non-linear effects that degrade system performance.
Foco 16 AB is a joint venture between Swedish, Dutch and Russian industrial interests to build the Gotland-Ventspils link. One of the equity partners is FTA Sweden AB, a subsidiary of the Cyprus-based company FTA Baltic Holdings Ltd, which is planning to build a trans-Euro-Asian fibre-optic network directly connecting Europe to the Far East through China.