Southern Cross Cable upgrade to add 1 Tbps of capacity

Southern Cross Cable Network has contracted Ciena to add an extra terabit per second of capacity to its subsea cable network.

The companies are adding 500 Gbps of capacity to each of the two cables in the Southern Cross Cable (SXC) network, taking the system’s total lit capacity up to 3.6 Tbps.

The upgrade will increase SXC’s total potential capacity to 12 Tbps.

Southern Cross president and CEO Fiona Beck said the company will use the additional capacity to introduce 100 GbE services in 2014, and to help fully integrate the system’s key data centre access points in Australia and the US.

The upgrade will “cement the Southern Cross position as the only single system provider of highly resilient international capacity solutions between key data locations in Australia, New Zealand and the USA,” she said.

The two SXC cables form a fibre ring between Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Hawaiian islands and the US. The cables were commissioned in 2000. Back then each cable had an initial capacity of just 160 Gbps.

Southern Cross upgraded to 40G technology using Ciena equipment in 2011, and then to 100G in mid-2013.