Southern Cross upgrades submarine cable with new Alcatel-Lucent deal

Alcatel-Lucent has signed a new contract with Southern Cross Cable Network to upgrade the landing stations of Southern Cross’ 28,900 km submarine cable network.

This follows the contract signed in 2001 for the first upgrade of the Southern Cross network that went into service in November 2000, providing Australasia with a direct link to the US mainland.

The project will be rolled-out in two phases. The first phase will consist in upgrading the existing 480 Gbit/s capacity up to 660 Gbit/s by the end of the first quarter 2008 and the second phase will bring it up to 860 Gbit/s by the end of 2008.

The high scalability offered by Alcatel-Lucent’s optical technology will also facilitate future upgrades up to 2.4 Tbit/s.

Southern Cross’ director of sales and marketing, Ross Pfeffer, said that by doubling the existing network capacity, the upgrade would help Southern Cross support increased traffic generated by the adoption of ADSL2+ services and Ethernet-based applications.

“Alcatel-Lucent’s advanced optical technology will assist us in taking a new significant step in addressing our end-user needs and further protect our network to ensure maximum reliability,” he said.

The Alcatel–Lucent solution will be based on both submarine and terrestrial equipment.

For the submarine section, Alcatel-Lucent will deploy its 1620 Light Manager DWDM submarine line terminal.

The landing stations will also be upgraded with the Alcatel-Lucent 1675 LambdaUnite Multi-Service Switch (MSS), offering intelligent control plane for improvement of network availability, strengthening of traffic protection and enabling accelerated optical connection provisioning.