EXA Express

Overview

EXA Express is a transatlantic submarine cable system spanning approximately 4,600 km across the North Atlantic. It connects Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, serving the corridor between North America and Western Europe. The cable is owned and operated by EXA Infrastructure.

Route and Landings

In Canada, EXA Express lands at Halifax, Nova Scotia. On the eastern side of the Atlantic, the cable reaches Cork in Ireland. In the United Kingdom, the system comes ashore at Brean. These three landing points anchor the cable across its transatlantic route.

Ownership and Operators

EXA Express is wholly owned by EXA Infrastructure, a company focused on digital infrastructure across the North Atlantic region. As the sole owner, EXA Infrastructure manages both the operation and maintenance of the system.

Status and Timeline

EXA Express entered service in 2015 and has been operational for approximately 11 years. It currently carries live traffic across its three landing points in Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Regional Context

The North Atlantic corridor served by EXA Express is among the most active submarine cable corridors in the world, with 42 cables landing in the United Kingdom, 18 in Canada, and 14 in Ireland. At 4,600 km, EXA Express is longer than 79% of the 47 other cables touching the same combination of countries, placing it among the more substantial systems in its corridor. Regional peers include EXA North and South, Apollo, Atlantic Crossing-1, and others — most of which are considerably longer systems spanning broader geographic ranges. EXA Express, by contrast, maintains a focused three-point topology between Halifax, Cork, and Brean.

Measured performance over the past 60 days, based on 29 ping tests, records an average round-trip latency of 90.8 ms, with a best observed result of 89.7 ms — consistent with the cable's transatlantic distance.

Strategic Role

EXA Express provides a direct link between eastern Canada and two significant landing hubs on opposite sides of the British Isles — Cork on Ireland's southern coast and Brean on the southwest coast of England. This configuration gives the cable reach into both the Irish and UK markets from a single Canadian origin point, offering a compact but geographically distributed footprint within the North Atlantic cable landscape.