Indefeasible Right of Use

The effective long-term lease (temporary ownership) of a portion of the capacity of an international cable. IRUs are specified in terms of a certain number of channels of a given bandwidth. IRU is granted by the company or consortium of companies that built the (usually optical fiber) cable. Some IRU legal agreements forbid resale of the capacity ownership. For at least one major international cable owner, an IRU ownership period is granted for 25 years. An IRU gives a large-scale Internet service provider (ISP) the ability to assure its own customers of international service on a long-term basis.