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Australia's subsea connections see capacity upgrades

Southern Cross Cable plans to boast of 3.6Tbps lit capacity, while the Australia-Japan Cable has stepped up and enabled 500Gbps of lit capacity.
Written by Chris Duckett, Contributor

Australia's submarine cable connections to the rest of the world have received a boost, with the Australia-Japan Cable (AJC) announcing a capacity upgrade, while Southern Cross revealed its upgrade plans for 2014.

AJC has chose Infinera's DTN-X technology to expand its single line capacity to 500Gbps, up from 320Gbps, which enables the company to offer 40 and 100 gigabit Ethernet services. Future upgrades using DTN-X would allow for 1Tbps lines, with the submarine cable able to inch towards its design capacity of 4Tbps.

"The Infinera Intelligent Transport Network provides AJC a mesh network of 500Gbps super channels with soft decision forward error correction," said Andrew Bond Webster, vice president of sales at Infinera. "Ensuring the AJC network delivers increased network resiliency, while delivering the capacity demanded by their customers."

The AJC runs for 12,700km, connects Australia to Japan via Guam, and has dual landings in all three territories. The AJC is jointly owned by Telstra, AT&T, NTT, BT, Verizon, and SoftBank.

Meanwhile, Southern Cross announced overnight that it plans to use Ciena's WaveLogic 3 platform to provide an additional 500Gbps on each of its cables by July. The company installed 100Gbps Ciena equipment in July 2013.

The additional capacity will allow Southern Cable to boast 3.6Tbps of lit capacity, and take the 30,000km network to a potential capacity of 12Tbps.

"The Ciena platform has allowed us to provide sector-leading high-capacity submarine capacity services, such as 10G and 40G OTN, along with the introduction of 40G Ethernet and 100G OTN interfacing," Southern Cross president and CEO Fiona Beck said.

"In 2014, we will introduce 100GbE services, along with the seamless integration of our key internet datacentre access points, such as Equinix in Sydney, CoreSite in San Jose, and the Westin Building in Seattle."

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