Made up of 28 amplifier sites, 6 submarine landing stations, and 12 Point of Presence (PoP) sites, the network comprises a repeated cable connection from the US to Ireland and 2 unrepeated cable links between Ireland and the UK at separate locations.

As Ciena’s main service partner, Linbrooke were selected to provide a full project turnkey delivery, including the project management and resources coordination across all delivery partners and locations. This was accompanied by a detailed project plan to achieve the customers’ Ready for Service (RFS) dates.

Managing all changes to the project scope through the implementation of a Systems of Work (SOW) change request process, we made sure all scope and cost changes were agreed in the required time frames. We documented all critical changes in the deliverables, including activities, timetables, resources, activity prerequisites and interdependencies plus identification of critical path items, status, capture risks, issues and any corrective actions on a project register. Linbrooke were also responsible for the warehousing, logistics and staging of customer supplied equipment.

As part of the equipment installation, commissioning, testing and acceptance, we further provided:

• Installation design package
• Installation of all Ciena materials
• Labelling of all cables, racks and shelves
• Test measurement reports
• In-station commissioning tests
• Fibre characterisation of Ireland undersea segments prior to the Raman amplification
• Segment commissioning and node verification using suitable Bit Error Rate Testing (BERT)
• End to end network testing and confidence trial