Southern Cross Cable has connected the world’s first transpacific 1 Tb/s single-carrier wavelength across its 13,500km live production network with Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) coherent optics.
This connectivity milestone witnessed WL6e perform effortlessly at 1 Tb/s over the world’s longest single optical submarine cable segment and demonstrates the adaptive nature of Southern Cross’ network.
With WL6e, Southern Cross continues to enhance its network eco-system to be more scalable, intelligent and ideally positioned to deliver high-capacity digital pathways between Australia, New Zealand and the USA.
Implementing Ciena’s technology enables Southern Cross to enhance the reliability and resilience of connectivity throughout the Oceania region. This will support Southern Cross in meeting the evolving needs of end users that require increasing bandwidth to support projected demand for AI, content, video and cloud applications.
The new channel speed ran error-free at 1 Tb/s on Southern Cross’ live production network between Sydney and Los Angeles demonstrating record-breaking capabilities and spectral efficiencies. Southern Cross will begin volume deployment of WL6e in the first calendar quarter of 2025 across various segments of its network, including its Southern Cross NEXT cable supporting the lowest latency connectivity between Sydney/Auckland and Los Angeles.
Southern Cross owns and operates three diverse Trans-Pacific submarine cables connecting Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii to the mainland United States, along with the Pacific Islands of Nukunonu, Tokelau and Kiritimati, Kiribati. The network has around 45,000 kilometres of submarine and 4,300 kilometres of terrestrial fibre optic cables providing over 100 Tb/s of digital inter-connectivity capability providing secure, resilient and reliable connectivity across the Pacific.
Southern Cross connected two key centres via Ciena’s WL6e, marking the industry’s first 1 Tb/s implementation across the Pacific, including Southern Cross’ NEXT network. Utilising WL6e’s leading-edge coherent optical technology, Southern Cross will be able to provide an end-to-end connectivity solution across higher capacity wavelengths, using less space and power, and delivering capability in support of 400GbE and future 800GbE client services.
Southern Cross is also using Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme solution, which includes the 6500 Packet-Optical Platform powered by WL6e, to upgrade capacity by more than 100 times the original design potential, utilising the same infrastructure that was originally designed to transport 2.5 Gb/s wavelengths.
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