Digital motorway reaches northern Sweden
One of Sweden’s largest digital infrastructure investments ever has now reached Luleå, a technology hub famous for being home to server farms operated by Meta, owner of several popular on-line services. Described as a digital motorway — and known locally as the Digital E4, for its co-location with a major Swedish autoroute — the fibre-optic cable begins in Berlin and will eventually span 2,500km, ending in Harparanda, Sweden, on the border with Finland.
In recent years, Sweden and the Nordic countries have become popular locations for some of the world’s largest tech companies to place their server farms, due to a combination of cool climate, access to renewable energy, reliable infrastructur and a well-educated work force. The cable, being installed at a cost of 500 million kronor (€46 million) is expected to meet the demands of existing, as well as new, commercial outfits in the region as it seeks to expand its role a node for data passing between between North America and Asia. Typically, communications traffic between these two regions has passed through the Middle East, but with cables there at capacity, and with little appetite to invest there, network operators have begun building out northern routes.
The cable has a capacity of 3 Petabits (or 3 million Gigabits) per second. That is quite a bit faster than the than the 100 Megabits per second the EU has set as its goal for household internet connections. Extending north from Germany, the cable crosses the Baltic Sea via the islands of Bornholm, Öland and Gotland. After making land close to Stockholm it makes its way further north to Luleå.
Announced back in 2021, the Digital E4 is “the largest digital infrastructure project we’ve seen in the Nordics in recent years”, according to Regina Donato Dahlström, the managing director of Global Connect Carrier, which installing the cable at the behest of unnamed major internet-related firms.
The Digital E4 will give traffic carried on Global Connect Carrier’s network an alternate route between the server farms in central and northern Sweden and continental Europe that will allow it to avoid making a loop into mainland Denmark and provide server-farm operators with multiple routes data can travel on.
Kevin McGwin, PolarJournal
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