en.Wedoany.com Reported - On April 15, 2026, Altibox Carrier confirmed that the Verena subsea cable project between the UK and Denmark has entered the delivery phase, with the contract officially taking effect. The system is designed with a capacity of 512 Tbps and will serve as a significant new high-capacity route across the North Sea, strengthening connectivity between the UK and the Nordic region. The Verena cable will span approximately 630 kilometers, connecting Scarborough on the east coast of England to Esbjerg in Denmark. The system is equipped with 16 fiber pairs and is scheduled to enter service in the fourth quarter of 2028.
Svein Arild Ims, CEO of Altibox Carrier, stated that international connectivity into the Nordics is entering a new growth phase, and Verena will play a key role in supporting this demand by providing a high-capacity, resilient route between Denmark and the UK. Altibox Carrier pointed out that the project aims to enhance network resilience and route diversity for international traffic flows into Scandinavia, a region experiencing sustained growth in demand for cloud, AI infrastructure, and data center interconnection capacity. The activation of this contract marks the transition of the Verena project from preliminary planning to substantive construction and deployment phases.
A project partner alliance has been fully assembled to jointly support the deployment efforts. JTD Associates is responsible for overseeing project management, Xtera is providing the subsea engineering solution, Cecon Contracting is leading the marine installation using the Cecon Vigor vessel, and Pelagian is handling route engineering and survey operations. Early engineering work and route studies have been completed, with marine survey activities expected to follow in the coming months. Altibox Carrier, jointly owned by Lyse and HitecVision, already operates the NO-UK Norway to UK subsea cable and the Skagen Fiber West Norway to Denmark system, and has business points in major European hub cities including London (UK), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Germany's Frankfurt, and Brussels (Belgium).
The landing of the Verena cable in Scarborough is notable as the location previously had no major subsea systems terminating there. Currently, only one subsea cable operates between the UK and Denmark: the Havhingsten/North Sea Connect system deployed in 2022 by a consortium of Aqua Comms, Bulk Infrastructure, and Meta, connecting Newcastle and Houstrup. The addition of Verena will significantly increase the available bandwidth between the UK and the Nordics, reduce reliance on traditional routes, and enhance network redundancy and traffic congestion resistance. The design of 16 fiber pairs and 512 Tbps aligns with current subsea system architectures optimized for space-division multiplexing, offering a substantial increase in single-cable capacity compared to earlier North Sea systems.
The current subsea cable market is experiencing a surge in demand driven by AI workloads. Hyperscale cloud service providers are reshaping the approximately $4 billion subsea cable market. The global subsea system market is projected to expand by about $4 billion over the next four years due to the surge in cloud adoption, expansion of hyperscale data centers, and growing bandwidth demands from AI workloads. Verena's high-capacity design aligns with this trend, providing route diversity and capacity assurance for cloud service providers, hyperscale customers, and digital infrastructure operators.
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