Telstra to quadruple capacity on Sydney-Melbourne fibre

Stuart Corner
Monday, 13 July 2009 13:28

IT Industry - Strategy

As predicted by iTWire a year ago, Telstra has announced plans to upgrade the capacity on its Melbourne-Sydney optical fibre link by quadrupling from 10Gpbs to 40Gbps the data throughput on each optical wavelength in the fibre.

Telstra has implemented the increase using upgrades to the Ericsson (formerly Marconi) MHL 3000 dense wavelength division multiplexing technology. Tony Malligeorgos, VP, marketing and business development at Ericsson Australia, said: "The Marconi MHL 3000 WDM platform is today capable of delivering 80 channels at 40Gbps per channel over a single fibre pair, with an upgrade path to 100Gbps per channel once the standards for the technology are ratified.'

Telstra has indicated that it will apply the upgrade to all wavelengths. Michael Rocca, group managing director Telstra Networks & Services, said: "Upon completion in March 2010, we expect these will be the fastest and highest capacity transmission links available in Australia, providing four times the capacity available today and helping keep Telstra customers head and shoulders ahead above the rest for many years to come."

He added: "In the past five years, IP traffic on the inter-capital routes has grown tenfold and while this is not having any detrimental impact on our customers, it is imperative that we keep ahead of the surge in demand for the carriage of voice, data and video."

The upgrade announcement comes two years after Ericsson announced that it had trialled the technology on Telstra's Sydney-Melbourne fibre, in what it claimed was a world first and 12 months after Ericsson announced commercial deployment of the technology in Deutsche Telekom's network, which led iTWire to predict that a similar announcement in regard to Telstra's network would not be long in coming.