LONDON -- Azea Networks will unveil its pioneering next-generation upgrade solutions for undersea communications systems with a public launch at SubOptic 2004, the major international submarine telecommunications convention in Monaco.

Azea’s turnkey solution is targeted at carriers with submarine routes that, while built to last 25 years, are fast nearing the ‘glass ceiling’ of their original design capacity limits. The carriers’ dilemma is that while capacity demand continues to grow, the investment needed to replace their existing infrastructure with new, higher capacity systems is often prohibitive.

“Azea’s upgrade approach is highly attractive to cable operators because it allows them to dramatically increase capacity with no change to their existing wet plant,” said Scott White, CEO, Azea Networks. “Moreover, since upgrades have significantly shorter lead times than new build, Azea can deliver the industry’s utopia: just-in-time bandwidth delivery via incremental investments targeted at specific pinch-points in the network.”

Cable systems deployed in the mid to late 1990s were designed for relatively low bandwidth – typically between one and eight wavelengths at 2.5 Gbit/s per channel, yielding no more than 20 Gbit/s total capacity per fibre pair. Since these cables employ no electrical regeneration, in principle higher capacities can be achieved by using more sophisticated terminal equipment. In practice, however, the legacy wet plant imposes significant transmission penalties when compared with state-of-the-art multi-terabit cables.

Azea overcomes these limitations to deliver multiple 10 Gbit/s channels over existing cables and is able to achieve upgrade capacities more than 10 times the original design. Azea’s solution comprises the following elements:

“Azea has combined several advanced electronic and optical technologies, such as forward error correction and dispersion management, to design new compact terminals for upgrading the capacity on previously installed cable systems. This approach can offer significant cost savings compared with deploying new cable systems as an option for increasing the bandwidth capacity on many routes as older cables become filled,” said Richard Mack, Vice President & General Manager KMI Research.

Azea Networks Ltd.