Ciena Provides Optical Mesh for Lower Indian Ocean Network Cable

The LION (Lower Indian Ocean Network) submarine cable system has deployed Ciena’s CoreDirector FS Multiservice Optical Switch in all five landing stations of the cable system (both LION and LION2). The LION2 cable system is a 2,700 km extension of the 2009-launched LION regional cable system, connecting two new submarine stations in Mombasa on the Kenyan coast and on the French island of Mayotte to existing stations in Madagascar, La Réunion and Mauritius.

The CoreDirector FS offers intelligent mesh protection in the risk-prone submarine environment.

Specifically, the CoreDirector FS nodes are meshed together and used as intelligent SDH Interconnection Equipment (SIE) aggregating local traffic into 10 Gbps submarine wavelengths. The solution allows for efficient and granular distribution of the submarine network bandwidth to all members of the LION2 consortium, ensuring that the parties involved can maximize their investment in the project.

In addition, Ciena’s OneConnect Intelligent Optical Control Plane enables a self-healing capability by dynamically rerouting services around failures caused by natural disaster or unexpected fiber cuts.

The LION2 consortium includes France Telecom and three partners of the Orange Group – Mauritius Telecom, Orange Madagascar and Telkom Kenya – as well as the African carrier Emtel Ltd. and Société Réunionnaise du Radiotéléphone, a subsidiary of the French telecommunications group SFR. http://www.ciena.com