Southern Cross upgrades capacity on US submarine cable

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 23 August 2007 12:37

Business IT - Networking

The Southern Cross cable network, Australia's only direct link to the USA, is to have is installed capacity doubled its resiliency enhanced and its service flexibility increased in a move that ups the ante in the increasingly competitive market for the supply of international bandwidth.

Southern Cross director of operations, Dean Veverka, said: "Each cable is currently equipped at 240Gbps and the current upgrade will increase each cable's capacity in two stages, to 330Gbps by the first quarter of 2008 and to 430Gbps by the fourth quarter of 2008. So our total capacity will be 860Gbps by Q4 2008." The additional capacity will be available from January 2008.

The upgrade requires only the replacement of transmission equipment in each of the 10 cable stations. The new equipment can deliver 400Gbps per fibre pair; a tenfold increase over the equipment it will replace. There is no need to replace any of the 28,500kms of undersea cable or to upgrade any of the 500 undersea repeaters that regenerate optical transmission signals.

Veverka added: "The new transmission equipment will support a wider range of transmission products including SONET and gigabit ethernet interfaces that are more suited to ISPs with large broadband subscriber bases. To augment the restoration that our two cable network already offer we will also be installing equipment in our 2,300km US terrestrial network that will provide automated loop restoration in the event of terrestrial outages."

Southern Cross director of sales and marketing, Ross Pfeffer, said "Recent and rapid adoption of ADSL2+ in Australia and the growth in broadband users in both Australia and New Zealand has been accompanied by higher data entitlements for many residential subscribers. The consequent demand for our capacity has been extremely high so our latest upgrade is just in time."