Southern Cross Cuts Trans-Pacific Prices with 40/100G Upgrade

The Southern Cross Trans-Pacific submarine cable network, which connects Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii and the west coast of the U.S., is cutting prices by 20% thanks to its 40G & 100G upgrade programme, which is due for completion in February.

Southern Cross said its latest price decline marks the second stage of the eighth major capacity expansion programme since 2001. The current stage is based on Ciena’s 40Gbps transmission equipment and takes total lit capacity on the Southern Cross Network to 2 Tbps.  The third stage of the current expansion programme is being implemented concurrently and is based on Ciena’s 100 Gbps transmission equipment. 100G technology is already installed on some network segments and will take lit capacity to 2.6 Tbps by June 2013.

“We have reduced our capacity prices by another 20%”, said Sales and Marketing Director Ross Pfeffer. “This will be our 10th major price reduction since 2000 and over the period our price decline has averaged more than 22% per year… Our protected circuits continue to provide 100% availability and the performance of the six fibre pairs and 500 repeaters on the diverse cable network is better today than when constructed more than 10 years ago.”

http://www.southerncrosscables.com/News/another-southern-cross-price-drop

• The Southern Cross upgrades use Ciena’s 6500 platforms equipped with 40G and 100G submarine-grade coherent line interfaces on each of Southern Cross’ seven segments. Southern Cross is also using Ciena’s 5430 and 5410 Reconfigurable Switching Systems, which offer 3.6 Tbs) and 1.2 Tbps of OTN-based intelligent control plane-enabled switching capacity for bandwidth aggregation and management.