Southern Cross Cables announced the launch of its Southern Cross NEXT cable and the implementation and testing of 400GbE services over a 15,840km network.
The NEXT cable will support Southern Cross' mission to enable reliable connectivity between the people and communities of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and the rest of the world. It will provide submarine fiber connectivity to Tokelau and Kiribati, and enhance Fiji's growing role as a digital hub for the Pacific Islands.
The cable took just over two years to complete during the global pandemic and will become the third route between Australasia and the United States in the Southern Cross network ecosystem. It aims to increase the capacity of the ecosystem by about 500% to about 100 Tb/sec. To put this in perspective, this will allow the transfer of half a petabyte of data generated by wind tunnel model testing of approximately 7,500 F1 2022 cars in 111 seconds, or an estimated 10 billion photos on Facebook in just over 300 seconds.
As part of the NEXT commissioning process, Southern Cross worked with Ciena to successfully commission and test the service error-free, paving the way for the introduction of 400GbE services between Sydney, Auckland and Los Angeles. to integrate the new system with the current Southern Cross Ecosystem network architecture.
The Southern Cross NEXT cable system is up and running with new technologies and capabilities that will support the hyperscale bandwidth demands driven by cloud adoption and digitization, as well as the evolving needs of our customers," said Laurie Miller, CEO of Southern Cross Cable Network. and industry. As part of our future strategy, NEXT is not only the first replacement cable for our existing system when it is retired in 2030, it completes the trifecta for us. Southern Cross, currently the provider of the lowest latency routes between Sydney and Auckland and between Auckland and Los Angeles, will now add the lowest latency routes between Sydney and Los Angeles to our portfolio.
As end-user digital adoption continues to proliferate, cable operators such as Southern Cross need adaptive networks that can respond to growing capacity demands and remain reliable over long distances," said Matthew Vesperman, managing director of Ciena Australia and New Zealand. As the first cable based on an open submarine cable model, the Southern Cross NEXT cable takes the latest advances in submarine network performance and builds on the available real-time capabilities offered by Ciena's GeoMesh Extreme.
