Southern Cross NEXT Launches

Southern Cross and Ciena achieve world's longest single-span submarine 400GbE service. #pressrelease

July 7, 2022

2 Min Read

SYDNEY – Southern Cross Cables Limited ("Southern Cross") today announced the launch of its Southern Cross NEXT ("NEXT") cable, along with the implementation and testing of 400GbE services across the 15,840km network.

In what is believed to be another world first for the longest single span 400GbE services yet achieved on a submarine cable network, Southern Cross in collaboration with Ciena were able to successfully commission and test the services error-free as part of the NEXT commissioning processes, paving the way for the introduction of 400GbE services between Sydney, Auckland and Los Angeles.

The NEXT cable will support Southern Cross' continuing mission to enable reliable connectivity between the people and communities of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands to the rest of the world. The NEXT cable will provide the first international submarine fibre connections to Tokelau and Kiribati and reinforce Fiji's growing role as a digital hub for the Pacific Islands.

The NEXT cable has taken just over two years to complete during the global pandemic and will become the third route in the Southern Cross network eco-system between Australasia and the USA. The NEXT system will boost the capacity of the ecosystem by approximately 500 per cent, to around 100 Terabits/second, effectively more than doubling Australia and New Zealand's direct international connectivity capability to the USA. To put this in perspective, this would allow the transfer of the half petabyte of data generated from the approximate 7,500 F1 2022 car wind-tunnel model tests in 111 seconds, or just over 300 seconds to transfer the estimated 10 billion photos on Facebook.

Southern Cross NEXT leverages Ciena's (NYSE: CIEN) GeoMesh Extreme, powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e) coherent optical technology, to seamlessly mesh the new system into the current Southern Cross eco-system network fabric. Ciena's WL5e technology also helps underpin Southern Cross' sustainable upgrade path by reducing power costs and inefficiencies by more than 600% on a per bit basis.

Consisting of three diverse submarine cable routes, more than 20 access points, and over 43,000km, the Southern Cross ecosystem will support high capacity and low latency routes between Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tokelau, Kiribati, Hawaii, and the United States West Coast.

Read the full press release here.

Ciena

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