Telstra to double Endeavour cable capacity

Telstra's Endeavour submarine cable is ready for its first upgrade, shortly after its first birthday.

The cable, which runs 9120 kilometres from Sydney to Hawaii and has a total design capability of 1.28 Terabits per second, would double the cable's "at launch" capacity of 80 Gigabits per second to 160 Gigabits per second by May, 2010.

Carlos Trujillo, director of Telstra international networks told iTnews the cable was forecast to be upgraded shortly after deployment last year.

"What happens is as you see forecasted growth, because there are very significant lead times in doing upgrades, it usually means in this particular case that our supplier, Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks, needed to configure and place equipment at the terminal ends.

"What it means is that they have to do a fair amount of engineering and provisioning of equipment so that we could basically double the day one capability so we would be able to take it up to 160 Gigabits per second."

Trujillo said that there was still "headroom" on the current 80 gigabit per second system and that the upgrade would satisfy Telstra's needs "beyond the envelope that we'll be able to manage in six months".