Alcatel-Lucent was selected to upgrade the landing stations of Southern Cross’ 28,900 km submarine cable network.
The upgrade will provide further route diversity and capacity in the Australasian region. Specifically, Alcatel-Lucent will upgrade the network’s ten landing stations, which are located close to the major international hubs of Sydney (Australia), Auckland (New Zealand), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Honolulu (the U.S.) for ease of access.
Alcatel-Lucent described two phases for the project. The first phase will consist in upgrading the existing 480 Gbps capacity up to 660 Gbps by the end of the first quarter 2008 and the second phase will bring it up to 860 Gbps by the end of 2008. The network will support future upgrades up to 2.4 Tbps.
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 advanced dynamic networking based on Automatically Switched Optical Network (ASON)/Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) intelligent control plane for improvement of network availability, strengthening of traffic protection and enabling accelerated optical connection provisioning.
This new award 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 fully protected direct link to the U.S. mainland.
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com
http://www.southerncrosscables.com/
