A team of top submarine cable consultants, engineers and marine management groups are currently hard at work to install an all new, high speed, fibre optic undersea cable onto the bed of the Atlantic Sea, which is believed to boost trading and help financial traders to beat their competition; but do it at some price.
The super submarine cable is known as the Hibernian Express and production of this extraordinary new 3,741 miles (6,021km) undersea cable is already underway off the East coast of the United States.
The submarine cable project will cost an approximated £300m and is aimed at providing financial centres with a faster service and faster trading times. When completed the new marine management project will be the first submarine cable to cross the Atlantic in more than 10 years.
Undersea cable consultants claim that the new submarine cable will shave 6 milliseconds off the current leading cable provider’s time. That might not sound like a great deal of time but it is claimed that even a one millisecond advantage could be worth up to £63m ($100m) a year to the bottom line of a large hedge fund; which makes the production of this all new undersea line, very significant.
A new route has been plotted for the new submarine cable, shorter than its competitors. It will attempt to follow the path taken by flights from London to New York and marine management experts believe it could cut the distance by 310 miles (498km). This, in turn, could cut execution times by about 8%.
Once in operation the company responsible for the all new undersea cable could charge as much as 50 times more than their competitors for use of the line.