Southern Cross and Ciena launch 400GbE services on NEXT cable

Southern Cross and Ciena launch 400GbE services on NEXT cable

Southern Cross Cables Limited (‘Southern Cross’), Australasia’s specialist international capacity provider, has announced the availability of commercial 400GbE services on its Southern Cross NEXT (‘NEXT’) cable, between Australia, New Zealand and the US.

Laurie Miller, CEO of Southern Cross, said the introduction of what is believed to be Australasia’s first international 400GbE services and the current world’s longest single system data centre to data centre 400GbE services, is a game-changer for customers.

“With the Southern Cross NEXT cable system, the new technology and capability has been designed to support the rising demand for bandwidth driven by cloud adoption and digitisation. We are now thrilled to be able to offer 400GbE Layer 1 services as the first of several planned innovations taking advantage of the Southern Cross ecosystem and the new NEXT cable.”

“The availability of 400GbE services will allow customers hyperscale low-latency connectivity directly between data centres in Sydney and Los Angeles, and with a new Auckland DC PoP due for implementation in 2023. Demand for 100G+ high-capacity links has been booming in recent years particularly for data centre to data centre GCN connectivity, where extremely large and resilient volumes of data are required to traverse core network infrastructure for data replication, data storage connectivity and Disaster Recovery.”

Southern Cross’ 400GbE service runs on Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics and is managed by the Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller. To accommodate increasing and changing network traffic demands, Southern Cross’ ecosystem also incorporates Ciena’s 5400 and 8700 platforms, providing the ability to deploy services from 100Mbs now up to 400GbE connectivity over applicable wavelengths.

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