Aurora Telecom’s Sean O’Donnell discusses the company’s recent growth, its ongoing fibre-optic projects and what’s coming down the line.

When SiliconRepublic.com recently visited Aurora Telecom, general manager Sean O’Donnell filled us in on how the telecoms company has been doing over the past year.

According to O’Donnell, the past year yielded some considerable milestones for the organisation, with significant network growth and improvements in modernisation and resilience.

“One of our major achievements for the year is actually our continued investment in our national backbone network, which encompasses 1,500km of network connecting 15 counties across the country with high-capacity fibre-optic networks,” he explains.

Aurora Telecom, a division of Gas Networks Ireland, is an Irish backhaul dark fibre service provider.

Dark fibre, also known as unlit fibre, refers to unused optical fibre cables available for use in fibre-optic communication.

O’Donnell says that the demand for dark fibre services in Ireland has particularly increased due to “hyperscale activity, cloud computing and advancement in technology such as 5G”.

“These companies require seamless fibre optics end to end, both nationally and internationally,” he says. “These terrestrial networks complement the subsea cable, and they connect to the subsea cable on the shore, on the coastline, and bring it to the data centre or to a major urban centre, and Aurora Telecom essentially does that function in Ireland.”

The growth in demand is also influenced by the ongoing adoption of a “digital-first strategy” in sectors such as fintech, manufacturing and health. According to O’Donnell, this strategy requires additional fibre and dedicated fibre-optic infrastructure, particularly for the deployment of big data and internet of things applications.

Digital divide

While the company’s network is growing, we asked O’Donnell about what challenges arise in the distribution to underserved or rural areas.

“Our core focus is development of our national backhaul network,” he says. “However, we’re very much aware of the requirement to develop additional internet services and high-speed broadband in underserved and regional areas.

“We leverage these routes by working with Government, enterprise and last-mile providers in order to drive internet services into these areas, and that helps bridge the digital divide.”

O’Donnell also tells us about Aurora’s project to connect Limerick to Dublin with interconnections into Nenagh, Roscrea and Portlaoise.

“This corridor will be similar to all the rest of our infrastructure and our network routes, which will have high-capacity broadband and will mirror and complement a lot of our existing networks,” he explains. “This route will complement our Dublin-to-Galway and our Dublin-to-Cork routes by providing a balanced interconnection between those regions, and this is what’s required for both data centre and for subsea connectivity.”

New tech

Of the numerous tech advancements in fibre optics to choose from, O’Donnell says Aurora is most excited about two specific areas.

The first is fibre sensing technology, which O’Donnell believes will particularly revolutionise “how we monitor all our networks”.

“Essentially, we use optical fibre with sensors to detect temperature, pressure and strain in real time,” he explains. “And this allows us to do four things. One, it’s proactive maintenance. Two, it enhances security. Three, it reduces energy consumption. And four, it optimises our resource allocation.

“Soon Aurora Telecom will be trialling the technology and we’ll be looking forward to publishing all those results.”

The second area is quantum-safe computing.

“It’s where we utilise quantum encryption to protect the network from future and existing cyberthreats,” he says. “Aurora Telecom is involved in another project [and] later on in the year we’ll be announcing the results of that.”

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