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Southern Cross gets brighter

by Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 01 April 2008
! Capacity on the Southern Cross Cable Network has been increased with the lighting of another 260Gbps of capacity - 130Gbps on each of its two cables that connect Australia and New Zealand to the US mainland. Related stories How unlucky can you get? Optus loses both Sydney - Brisbane fibre links Pipe's submarine cable: it's all good news A ten fold increase in submarine cable capacity? Basslink bites back: plans to be a wholesale carrier India to get first direct cable link to the UK Plans for the upgrade were announced last August. According to director of sales and marketing Ross Pfeffer, "when completed later this year the current upgrade will take our total installed capacity to 860Gbps." Pfeffer said "The current upgrade allows each fibre pair to provide ten times more capacity, lowers capacity cost, enhances the Networks resilience and increases the range of services we can provide...High speed broadband requires both capacity cost to reduce and capacity supply to each subscriber to increase considerably. Our upgrades make this possible and the impact is already evident with existing and new customers recently making substantial capacity purchases from Southern Cross to support the high speed broadband services they provide." He added: "The current upgrade allows the Southern Cross Cable Network to keep ahead of demand for just a short time and we are already planning additional upgrades during the remaining 16 years of the Network's engineering design life that will continue to take advantage of ongoing technological improvements in transmission technology. Southern Cross opened in 2001 total with installed capacity of 80Gbps. In January 2003 total network was expanded to 480 Gbps and by end-2008 will be 860Gbps. At present it is the only direct link between Australia/New Zealand the US mainland - The AJC, Se-Me-We-3 and Jasaurus cables go via Asia - but it will soon face competition from Telstra's planned link from Sydney to Hawaii where it will interconnect with other cables providing direct access to mainland USA in which Telstra already owns capacity and from Pipe Networks' link to Guam. Southern Cross says that, "With new technology continually improving potential transmission speeds, the ultimate size of the Southern Cross Cable Network is likely to considerably exceed the current limit of 2.4Tbps." The Southern Cross Cable Network is owned by Telecom NZ (50 percent), SingTel-Optus (40 percent) and Verizon Business (10 percent). Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment! Tags See All Tags Stuart Corner Submarine cable networks Telstra Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now