Southern Cross Chooses Alcatel-Lucent's Submarine Solution

Wireless News
08-26-2007
Southern Cross Chooses Alcatel-Lucent's Submarine Solution

WIRELESS NEWS-August 26, 2007-Southern Cross Chooses Alcatel- Lucent's Submarine Solution (C)2007 10Meters - http:// www.10meters.com

Alcatel-Lucent has further strengthened its cooperation with Southern Cross by signing a new contract to upgrade the landing stations of Southern Cross' 28,900 km submarine cable network.
The 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.

The network upgrade will provide further route diversity and capacity in the Australasian region to maximize the benefits of broadband services to both residential and business users. 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.

The project will be rolled-out in two phases. The first phase will consist in upgrading the existing 480 Gbit/s capacity up to 660 Gbit/s by the end of the first quarter 2008 and the second phase will bring it up to 860 Gbit/s by the end of 2008. The high scalability offered by Alcatel-Lucent's optical technology will also facilitate future upgrades up to 2.4 Tbit/s.

"By doubling the existing network capacity, this upgrade project will help Southern Cross support the increased traffic generated by the rapid adoption of ADSL2+ services and Ethernet-based applications with enhanced flexibility and reliability," said Ross Pfeffer, Director of Sales and Marketing at Southern Cross. "Alcatel- Lucent's advanced optical technology will assist us in taking a new significant step in addressing our end-user needs and further protect our network to ensure maximum reliability."

"The cooperation between Southern Cross and Alcatel-Lucent has proven successful in several projects," said Jean Godeluck, President of Alcatel-Lucent's submarine network activity. "Through our recognized expertise in managing and deploying submarine cable networks, coupled with a top quality and service support, we are well positioned to answer all our customer needs."

The Alcatel-Lucent solution will be based on both submarine and terrestrial equipment. 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.

Southern Cross Cable Network provides secure international bandwidth from Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii to the heart of the Internet in the USA. Commissioned in 2000 and 2001 as two diverse submarine cables to the US, the Southern Cross Network has been engineered until 2025 to provide for the rapidly expanding capacity needs of high-speed broadband. In 2001 total installed capacity was 80 Gbps; in January 2003 the total network was expanded to 480 Gbps; by end-2008 total installed capacity will be 860 Gbps. Southern Cross can easily expand to 2.4 Tbps of transmission capability by installing more of the equipment that is being used for its current capacity upgrade. With new technology continually improving potential transmission speeds, the ultimate size of the Southern Cross Cable Network is likely to considerably exceed 2.4 Tbps. Southern Cross Cable Network is owned by Telecom NZ (50 percent), Singtel-Optus (40 percent) and Verizon Business (10 percent). The company has offices in Bermuda, Sydney, Auckland and Wellington.

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(Copyright M2 Communications Ltd. 26, 2007)