Nortel gets 40Gbps per wavelength over 8000km of Southern Cross

Stuart Corner
Friday, 14 August 2009 14:59

IT Industry - Strategy

Nortel has successfully demonstrated its DWDM optical transmission technology that it able to deliver 40Gbps per wavelength over the 8000kms of the Southern Cross Cable system between Auckland and Hawaii.

Southern Cross already has the technology deployed in commercial operation on the US terrestrial portion of its network linking its two US landing stations and, with Nortel, has already trialled 40Gbps transmission over the shorter 4200km link between Hawaii and the US West Coast.

Anthony McLachlan, vice president, carrier networks, Nortel Asia. said: "We did the trial successfully over the Hawaii US link, but that did not seem very useful unless we could do the whole network so we tried in on the longest link we could find, just over 8000km. We figure we can do this we can do it over many other networks."

In practice it would not be possible to upgrade every wavelength on a 10Gbps system to 40Gbps. McLachlan said however that it should be possible to double the capacity of 10Gbps system.

Last year, following the upgrade of its US terrestrial network to 40Gbps, Southern Cross sales director, Ross Pfeffer said that application of the 40G technology throughout the submarine portion of the network would increase the capacity of Southern Cross from 1.2tbps, fully protected, to 4.8tbps, fully protected.

Southern Cross was completed in January 2001 at a cost of $US1.3 billion with total installed capacity of 80Gbps. In January 2003 total protected network was expanded to 240Gbps and at end-2008 to 430Gbps. The network is owned by Optus, Telecom New Zealand and Verizon Business.

Despite the success of the trial Southern Cross has, however opted to stick with 10Gbps technology for its next upgrade as this represents a lower cost option that will give it the capacity to meet immediate demand while it ponders a completely new cable system.

Pfeffer, said: "While we are very encouraged by the additional capacity growth potential that can be implemented with confidence we are sticking with 10Gbps equipment for now. This is to minimise the total cost of the current expansion while we clarify our investment plans to build a New Southern Cross Network. The timing, architecture and footprint of the next Southern Cross Network will be established over the next 18 months and future upgrades to the existing network will be optimised in the context of future decisions on new network construction."

Nortel's trial with Southern Cross used Nortel's OME 6500, billed as "an optical convergence platform that supports transponding, TDM and ethernet switching on a single device, giving service providers a smooth migration to a reliable and scalable ethernet infrastructure while maintaining minimal infrastructure costs."