Cinia Lays New Subsea Cable to Link Finland and Germany

Cinia Group began laying the new submarine Sea Lion data cable in Helsinki, Finland.

The new fiber optic subsea cable will provide a direct, low latency and cyber secure Internet backbone connection between Finland and Germany.

“The sea cable initiative builds the future of Finland based on our existing strengths,” said Eero Heliövaara, Director General at the Prime Minister’s Office. “A direct data connection between Finland and Central Europe is an important enabler of both domestic economic growth and international investments. Data traffic is expected to grow manifold within the next years, and the sea cable initiative opens up an opportunity for Finland to claim its position among the leading countries in the area of Industrial Internet.”

Cinia Group leads the Sea Lion initiative as the developer and builder of the submarine cable, and later as an open access network operator. The Finnish Government is an enabler and investor of the initiative together with institutional investors OP-Pohjola and Ilmarinen. Investments with equity and debt financing will total at approximately 100 million Euros. The sea cable initiative is designed to meet the commercial terms and moderate profitability as long term infrastructure investment, bringing also significant direct and indirect economic benefits such as decisions by international data center operators and data intensive organizations to locate their operations in Finland, the company explained.

“We expect the sea cable to help in bringing 2 to 3 billion Euros worth of private data center investments in Finland within the next 10 years,” said Ari-Jussi Knaapila, CEO at Cinia Group. “Even more important for the Finnish national economy is the opportunity to boost our own strong digital ecosystems.”

“With the sea cable, Cinia contributes to the Digital Single Market for Europe,” continued Knaapila. “We challenge all Finnish companies and new ventures in the planning stage to generate new wealth through global digitalization, based on this new world class data network connection.”

The Sea Lion submarine data network cable consisting of eight paired fiber optic cables was manufactured by Alcatel-Lucent in Calais, France.

Totaling 1,170 kilometers in length and 3,355 tons in weight, the cable was shipped in Finland in the cargo hold of cable laying ship Ile de Brehat. The vessel will make its way from Helsinki, Finland to Rostock, Germany by the end of 2015.

The new data connection is planned to be in operation during the spring 2016.

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