Ciena Makes Waves on Australian Submarine Cable
By Mike Robuck, Fierce Telecom
November 4, 2020
SUB.CO, along with its Australian entity APX Partners, has tapped Ciena for an upgrade to its Indigo submarine cable that connects Perth and Sydney to Singapore.
SUB.CO and APX Partners will use Ciena’s Hosted Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) software software by working with Ciena Services. Ciena said the deployment of the Hosted MCP software-as-a-service (SaaS) was the first in the Asia Pacific region. Ciena Services will also be used for site engineering, installation, testing and end-to-end project management.
SUB.CO and APX Partners’ Indigo submarine cable network spans approximately 9,000 kilometers, has two fiber pairs, and features spectrum-sharing technology that allows consortium members to upgrade their networks and increase their capacity on demand.
Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme, which uses Ciena's WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e) coherent optical technology on its 6500 platform, will deliver 500 Gbps single-wavelength channels speeds across the submarine cable network, providing lower latency, greater scale and increased economic efficiencies for businesses across Southeast Asia.
“Looking to where the industry is heading, SUB.CO is focused on building and operating hyperscale and software defined submarine cable capacity by fusing dedicated spectrum/fiber infrastructure ownership economics with optical platforms that will allow us to maximize spectral efficiency, yet be flexible in configuration for all our different customer demands,” said Bevan Slattery, CEO of SUB.CO and APX Partners, in a statement. “Deploying both Ciena’s latest coherent optical solution over a shared spectrum cable and its hosted network management software in the Southeast Asia region is a key piece of our long-term strategy.”