Orange, infrastructure investor Equitix and Irish subsea developer MDM have formed a joint venture to build Pisces, a 3,125-kilometre subsea cable linking Ireland to continental Europe.

The system will run from Galway to four landing points. They are Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on France's Atlantic coast, Sopelana in Spain's Basque Country — where Orange builds a new landing station — and Carcavelos near Lisbon. The corridor runs under the Celtic Sea and the Bay of Biscay.

The partners have appointed Carine Romanetti, a recognised subsea expert, as chief executive of the venture. The EU's Connecting Europe Facility, the bloc's infrastructure grant instrument, will partially fund the project; the same mechanism has previously backed systems such as EllaLink.

Why does a second Ireland-to-Europe cable matter?

Ireland hosts the European operations of every US hyperscaler and an outsized share of European AI training workloads, the partners said. Most international traffic out of the country today relies on existing systems that overwhelmingly land in the United Kingdom. A direct link into France and Spain gives hyperscalers a redundant route that does not cross British infrastructure. Any single-cable failure on those legacy UK-routed systems now exposes Irish and Northern European traffic to longer detours; the Pisces corridor through Sopelana and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez offers operators a wholly new physical path between Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula and the French Atlantic.

Vodafone Business adds 15-day 100G and 400G delivery

Vodafone Business has launched Express Capacity, a service that delivers either 100-Gbps or 400-Gbps transport links to large enterprises within 15 days of order. The offer draws on Vodafone's European backbone and initially covers routes between London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Marseille and Milan — six of the bloc's busiest cloud hubs. For enterprises that have historically waited months for similar cross-border circuits, 15-day delivery is a measurable compression on the typical window.

Du claims a world-first 6GHz commercial uplink

Emirates operator Du says it has switched on commercial 6-GHz uplink on its live 5G network. Du describes the band as one regulators worldwide are weighing between licensed mobile, unlicensed Wi-Fi and a split allocation. The operator positions the deployment as paving the way for the eventual introduction of 6G.

Starlink throttling alleged during Russian missile strike

Ukrainian military bloggers and an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky have accused SpaceX of deliberately restricting Starlink satellite terminals as Russia fired a salvo of ballistic missiles at Ukraine on Tuesday evening. Adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov said: "Our armed forces did not receive a warning about these restrictions and this led to the failure of a number of missions." He added: "It's clear that this action cannot be a coincidence and is connected to the current political situation." A Guardian report linked the throttling to a request from US President-elect Donald Trump. The United States has for years provided Kyiv with advance warning of Russian strikes.

Other EMEA moves in brief

• KPN has joined ABN AMRO, Achmea, ASN Bank, Deloitte and Rabobank in the Dutch MyCheck digital-ID consortium. The operator says MyCheck will offer a domestic alternative to identity services from large international technology companies. EU rules require every member state to field such a system by end-2026.
• Creditors filed suit against Patrick Drahi's Altice International in the New York Supreme Court on Tuesday, alleging the group illegally shifted assets worth billions of dollars beyond lender reach and escalating a long-running dispute over its telecom subsidiaries.
• Netflix has secured Spanish rights to the 2030 men's football World Cup, with all Spain fixtures plus the semi-finals and the final to be broadcast free-to-air by a national broadcaster, because Spain is co-hosting the tournament with Morocco and Portugal.
• A1 Group and Antik Telecom have renewed their partnership agreements with Eutelsat to distribute satellite-TV services into Slovakia and the Czech Republic from the operator's 16° East orbital position.

Romanetti's next steps are to finalise supplier contracts, secure landing-station permits in each market and complete the EU co-financing process. The Pisces construction start date and the EU funding decision are the next concrete milestones worth tracking.