Pressure on terrestrial fibre networks 

The connectivity part poses challenges. As more hyperscalers and neoscalers invest in Southern Norway, pressure is starting to build on terrestrial fibre networks. Finding fast, resilient and uncongested backhaul routes is getting harder. Hiring specialists to connect and manage those routes takes time that AI companies can't afford to lose. 

Route diversity challenges for AI companies in southern Norway

When customers demand and expect uninterrupted uptime, these risks must be mitigated. A second fibre route might once have been an adequate safeguard, but for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), it's not enough. Triversity (three routes) and quadversity (four routes) are now the key to eliminating downtime risk. 

For AI companies investing in southern Norway, this creates three challenges

1. Finding fully diverse fibre routes with the right capacity, speed and resilience

2. Meeting aggressive timelines to get campuses and AI factories connected 

3. Managing a complex portfolio of high-capacity fibre routes on a day-to-day basis

Norfest: fully diverse fibre backhaul for AI data centres

Tampnet offers a solution to all three challenges. Our Norfest system is a 100% diverse route connecting 11+ key locations in Norway and Sweden, including Stavanger, Egersund, Kristiansand and Oslo - with full diversity in the Oslo metro area. 

Buried in a deep natural trench lying a short distance offshore, Norfest combines the speed, capacity and latency of terrestrial fibre with the physical resilience of subsea. 

Capacity for today, scalability for tomorrow

Norfest has the capacity for today's AI services and the scalability for tomorrow's. Designed to meet the stringent requirements of AI and HPC providers, it offers AI-scale capacity, state-of-the-art photonics, multi-layered resilience for maximum protection, industry-leading SLAs and a 25-year cable guarantee. 

AI-scale capacity 

The Norfest system was designed to meet the soaring capacity needs of hyperscalers, neoscalers and other HPC services providers. Features that enable scalable capacity include:

• Unrepeated subsea fibre: Amplifiers and other electronics are located onshore, with the subsea cable comprising passive, unrepeated fibre. This enables easy access to electronics, significantly boosting uptime and reliability while significantly reducing maintenance costs. 
• Next-generation photonics: Lit Norfest fibre pairs employ state-of-the-art electronics, including Ciena WaveLogic transponders, which currently deliver 27 Tbps throughput while optimising energy consumption and cost per bit. 
• 11+ local Points of Presence: Norfest comes ashore at nine intermediate locations between Stavanger and Oslo, creating local points of presence at some of Norway's most in-demand data hubs. The route offers the potential for additional landings by adding branching units to the existing unrepeated fibre. 
• Global interconnect: Norfest is integrated with Tampnet Carrier's redundant, super-fast subsea and terrestrial network infrastructure, providing direct links to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London and beyond. Our open-access approach means the system is designed to interconnect with other operations in key locations along the route. 

Future-proof scalability 

In an industry where needs evolve fast and innovation moves even faster, Norfest is ready for whatever's next in AI, HPC and GPU-as-a-service. Future-proofing benefits include:

• Scalable capacity: Norfest's high fibre count means that there's almost infinite rooms to scale. Start with one FP and add more as your needs grow. 
• Open system access: With all electronics housed on land, dark fibre customers can install, manage, maintain and upgrade their choices of network equipment at any time during the entire life of the system. 
• 25-year minimum cable guarantee: Manufactured by Nexans to withstand subsea pressures, corrosion and environmental conditions, the Norfest cable is guaranteed to deliver peak performance over a lifespan of more than 25 years. 

Multi-layered resilience 

Norfest exploits a natural trench just off the coast of southern Norway to offer advanced protection against damage from sabotage and environmental disturbances. A multi-layered approach to resilience includes:

• Deep-water trench: Water depth in the Norwegian trench varies between 300-600 m, helping to protect the cable from trawling, anchors and malicious interference. 
• <1,5m burial depth: The Norfest cable is buried to a depth of up to 1,5 meters, offering further protection against accidental or malicious disruption. 
• Micro-routing: Precision installation equipment allowed the cable to be laid along a micro-planned route that avoids potential high-risk zones (such as known bottom-trawler areas), further reducing the risk of disturbances. 
• Physical threat detection: Tampnet technolgies for state of polarisation (SoP) detection and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) provide early warning of potential and actual fibre incursions, reducing downtime risk and mean time to repair (MTTR). 
• Coast Guard monitoring: The Norfest system lies entirely within Norwegian territorial waters monitored by the Norwegian Coast Guard. 
• Sustainable build techniques: The use of horizontal directional drilling (HDD) to bring the Norfest cable ashore has preserved the natural environment at landfall sites. 

Designed-in reliability 

Business models rooted in real-time, high-performance computing need ultra-reliable providers. Norfest has reliability designed into every layer, protecting your workloads, your business and your reputation. 

• Secure colo-huts: Built to a secure design, our Tampnet-owned colo-huts house essential electronics with uninterruptible power supplies, creating a stable and monitored environment that strengthens security and uptime. 
• Rapid repair: Norfest offers a highly competitive mean time to repair (MTTR), since all electronics are housed onshore, enabling ready access for maintenance and repair. Underwater cable break repair times are minimised through continuous SoP and DAS monitoring, which promptly detects and localises disruptions. 
• SLA: Norfest is backed by an SLA with availability and uptime guarantee. Wavelengths and MOFN services are managed by the Tampnet Network Operations Centre (NOC), combining deep optical expertise with regional knowledge and experience of working with hyperscalers and neoscalers. 

Innovating for resilience: polarisation fibre-sensing on Norfest

A quiet fibre can be assumed to be a safe fibre. Our polarization fibre-sensing technology will spot any vibrations or physical impact along the fibrepath that could indicate imminent disturbance. When installation personnel are present in a node room working near or handling patch cables, their activity appears in the polarisation sensing activity plot and triggers alarms for NOC personnel, even when not impacting the service performance. This ensures that any unplanned or unauthorised work is promptly detected. 

Tampnet offers three technical solutions for Norfest, with flexible commercial models to meet your current and future business needs.  Handle everything in-house with dark fibre, get the managed capacity you need with wavelengths, or choose a fully-managed optical fibre network (MOFN) built and operated to your specification. 

Dark fibre: Your fibre, managed by you

For companies with frequency license, capex budget and the expertise to light and manage a backhaul fibre route, our dark fibre offering can get you the capacity you need at a PoP that's at or close to your southern Norway campus. All Norfest electronics are housed onshore, so you can choose to light your fibre, and access and upgrade your electronics whenever needed. 

Wavelengths: The capacity you need, managed by Tampnet 

Get the capacity you need on one or more fibre pairs, managed by Tampnet experts and with next-generation photonics from Ciena. Norfest offers wavelengths of 400G and 800G with flexibility to scale, while current-generation Ciena WaveLogic 6 transponders deliver 27 Tbps throughput with optimised power draw and low cost per bit transported. 

MOFN: Fastest time to market, built and operated to your specs 

For AI infrastructure companies moving into Norway and/or under significant time pressure, a managed optical fibre network is the fastest and easiest way to get connected. Tampnet will connect, configure and manage your Norfest fibre route to your technical specifications, delivering it all as a managed service backed with a stringent SLA. Under a MOFN agreement, Tampnet deploys, operates and manages the network on your behalf - including last-mile connectivity from our nearest PoP in your data centre if required. With no need to apply for licenses, negotiate permissions, build our your fibre or hire an in-region team of optical networking specialists, it's the fastest way to get connected. Costs will wary according to requirements, but will typically include upfront deployment costs, recurring (operate and maintain) costs, and any capacity upgrades. You maintain control throughout the lifetime of the contract. We build the network to your specification and observe your choice of maintenance windows. We also provide access to real-time network performance data to monitor SLA adherence. 

Like the hyperscalers and neoscalers in Norway today, in 2021 Tampnet was searching for new, diverse routes for our carrer business. 

With terrestrial routes increasingly congested, we took inspiration from our work in the oil and gas industry - where our high-capacity subsea fibre network delivers always-on connectivity to platforms and vessels in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Physical interference on our subsea assets was compellingly low compared to terrestrial routes. As Norway's key data hubs are located around the coast, a subsea route seemed a compelling solution. 

A near-shore trench offering advanced protection 

It was then that we spotted a unique opportunity. Just off the coast of southern Norway lies a relatively deep trench offering a high degree of protection from fishing activity, anchors and malicious interference. It also lies within the 12nm of national waters monitored by the Norwegian Coast Guard, providing an added layer of protection. Even better, the natural characteristics of of the trench meant we would be able to bury all 749 km of the cable, providing added protection against physical disturbance. 

The best of subsea with the best of terrestrial 

This natural, near-shore trench would allow us to combine key benefits of subsea, like low risk of disturbance and high protection from the weather, with key benefits of terrestrial, like short distances between points of presence (PoPs). It also meant we could use a festoon topology to connect 11+ key hubs along the route - with all electronics hosted on land, leaving the cable as low-maintenance passive fibre. The trench meant we could offer customers a fully diverse, future-proofed route with no reliance on third-party host infrastructure. We even identified a unique north-south route into central Oslo, avoiding the east-west routes used by existing fibre infrastructure serving the Oslo metro area. 

Connecting southern Norway to the globe 

The business case was compelling, and the new system, dubbed Norfest (for NORdic FESToon), was swiftly signed off by Tampnet investors. The first branch was laid from Egersun on 27 June 2023 with the final landing made at Capri, Sweden on 6 December. Norfes has since proven its resilience across a wide range of weather and tidal conditions and maritime activity - and is now successfully connecting southern Norway's AI and HPC data hubs to the globe. 

What is NORFEST?
NORFEST is a subsea fibre optic cable system built and operated by Tampnet, providing a 100% diverse backhaul route connecting 11+ locations in southern Norway and Sweden.

Who operates NORFEST?
NORFEST is owned and operated by Tampnet, an offshore telecommunications company.

What is NORFEST used for?
NORFEST is designed to provide diverse, high-capacity fibre backhaul connectivity for AI data centres, hyperscalers, neoscalers, and high-performance computing providers in southern Norway.

Which locations does NORFEST connect?
NORFEST connects 11+ locations including Stavanger, Egersund, Kristiansand, and Oslo, with full diversity within the Oslo metro area, landing finally at Capri, Sweden.

How much capacity does NORFEST offer?
NORFEST fibre pairs, lit with Ciena WaveLogic transponders, currently deliver up to 27 Tbps throughput, with wavelength services available at 400G and 800G and room to scale further.

How is NORFEST protected from physical damage?
The cable is buried up to 1.5 meters deep in a natural trench 300-600 meters underwater, monitored continuously using State of Polarisation (SOP) and Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) technology, within Norwegian Coast Guard-patrolled waters.

What commercial models does Tampnet offer for NORFEST?
Tampnet offers three models: dark fibre for customer-managed operation, wavelengths for Tampnet-managed capacity, and MOFN, a fully managed optical fibre network built to the customer's specification.

When was NORFEST built?
The first cable branch was laid from Egersund on 27 June 2023, with the final landing completed at Capri, Sweden on 6 December 2023.

What is the cable guarantee for NORFEST?
The NORFEST cable, manufactured by Nexans, carries a minimum 25-year guarantee.