CANTAT-3 was the third Canadiantransatlantic telecommunications cable, in operation from 1994 to 2010, initially carrying 3 x 2.5 Gbit/s between Canada and Europe. It branches to both Iceland and the Faroe Islands. On December 17, 2006, CANTAT-3 services were disrupted due to damage to the submarine cable, resulting in degradation of service to hundreds of thousands of users connecting via internet and media providers. The country was however backed up by the second submarine cable, FARICE-1 The most notable effect of the event was a temporary shut-down of data communications by Iceland's universities and hospitals, which relied exclusively on CANTAT-3's services. Although it was predicted that a full recovery of the cable would take ten days, starting from midnight on January 13, 2007, it actually took until July 29, 2007 before service was fully restored. During that time, the Icelandic universities and hospitals in Akureyri and Reykjavík relied on emergency connectivity obtained via local internet providersSíminn and Vodafone. The Icelandic government decided not to buy extra bandwidth for the university network through the functioning FARICE-1 cable, despite being a large shareholder in FARICE-1. Landing points are:
CANTAT-3 was operated by India's Teleglobe. CANTAT-3 was the only NL-16 laser regenerative 2.5 Gig/s submarine system built in the world. Part of this huge system was built at STC Submarine Networks, Portland, Oregon, USA, from 1993-1994. STC Submarine Networks in Southampton, Hampshire, UK. made the rest of the system. The Canadian portion was laid offNova Scotia by the Teleglobe cable ship CS John Cabot. The main-lay portion was deployed off Nova Scotia towards the Faroes on board the AT&T ship Global Mariner. Other cable ships were involved in the completion of this system. This was the northern most cable system ever deployed at the time. Given that CANTAT-3 suffered multiple interruptions, the alternative cables FARICE-1, DANICE and Greenland Connect were established and/or expanded to ensure cabled telecommunication connectivity in Iceland. CANTAT-3 also had too little capacity by 2007 for domestic Internet usage and became outdated as soon as the DANICE cable came into operation by 2009. The Iceland, Denmark and Germany portion of CANTAT-3 is still in use and is powered from Iceland and connected to Sylt in Germany and Blaabjerg in Denmark. This portion of the cable is now connected to several oil platforms in the North Sea and that is the primary function of CANTAT-3. The current owner of CANTAT-3 is the Farose Telecom. The transatlantic portion is no longer in operation and has not been replaced.
