Ciena Augments Innovations in Driving Network Capacity, Resiliency for Southern Cross

Working closely with Ciena, Southern Cross Cable Network has completed its latest upgrade adding 900Gbs to all segments of the Network, bringing total Network lit capacity to 5.8Tbs.

President & CEO, Anthony Briscoe, commented that Southern Cross continues to work closely with Ciena to continually innovate and take advantage of technology advances to augment capacity in the Network.

“Following on from our successes in 2015, we continue to assess our network and service offerings to determine better ways to provide our customers with access to major data centres, resiliency and self-healing, and to satisfy the increasing demand of cloud and web based services.”

“With the growing demand for services such as Lightbox, Vimeo, Netflix, AWS and Azure, the need is not just about capacity but about scalability and flexibility to meet potential demand and provide the maximum value proposition to our customers.”

“To meet these demands, we are critically focused on product and service innovation and taking advantage of technology advances as they support this long term strategy. Capacity is of course critical to meet growing demand, but in this latest augment we have also managed to achieve a number of regional, and potentially world first touch downs.”

“While we have augmented our transmission by 900Gbs per segment, we have also upgraded our key Ciena 5430 nodes to 15Tbs OTN switching capability, a first for the region and a world first for a submarine cable operator as far as we are aware. Southern Cross’ key switching nodes are now capable of switching over 100 times Southern Cross’ original segment capacity.”

“Our latest expansion has also deployed Ciena’s 200Gbs per wavelength technology across our Hawaiian inter-Island network in another world first in technology activation, as well as continuing to leverage Ciena’s flexible grid, GeoMesh and 8D-2QAM technologies to maximise capacity and resiliency within our Network while ensuring operational simplicity, scalability and evolution toward software defined networking (SDN).“

Mr Briscoe repeated the point made previously that with a current transmission potential of 14Tbs, further improvements likely in the future and the recent extension of the system life to 2030, capacity and tenure are not an issue for Southern Cross.

“With the changing nature of the industry, and the growing importance of the Ethernet and content based solutions, the challenge for Southern Cross is to continue to focus on how we can grow and adapt to provide reliable and innovative products and solutions to meet the changing needs of our customers.”

“As part of this we are also turning our minds to the future and looking at the requirements that our customers and the general market will require from the next decade, 2020 and on.” he concluded.