Seabras-1 submarine network operational with Infinera XTS-3300 meshponders

Seaborn Networks has announced that its Seabras-1 submarine network, which links Brazil and New York, is operational. The company also has revealed that it is using XTS-3300 meshponders from Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN) to support the delivery of low-latency, flexible-capacity services.

The 10,600-km, six-fiber-pair Seabras-1 undersea cable system offers direct connectivity between São Paulo, Brazil, and New York City – the only submarine cable to do so, asserts Larry W. Schwartz, chairman and CEO of Seaborn. The subsea system also includes provisions for branching units for connectivity to Virginia Beach, Miami, St. Croix, Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, southern Brazil, and Cape Town. None of these branching units are currently under construction, Schwartz says.

The submarine network targets the connectivity needs of communications service providers, data center operators, the financial community, and others. Schwartz says Seaborn will offer both a "standard" carrier-class service with a round-trip latency of 106.62 msec between São Paulo and Cataret, NJ, as well as a lower-latency service specifically for the financial community. This latter service, called SeaSpeed, offers round trip-latency of 105.16 msec between the trading exchanges of New Jersey and B3/BM&FBovespa in São Paulo.

Schwartz says that Seaborn will provide customers with flexible options for securing capacity. For example, its SeaCloud offering enables customers of the standard service to start with a certain amount of capacity at the start and then grow that capacity incrementally at a predefined pace over the course of the contract period. Schwartz describes SeaCloud as a hybrid approach that combines the best of short-term leases and longer-term indefeasible right of use (IRU) contracts. He explains that financial firms generally have stable capacity requirements, and therefore SeaCloud is not offered as an option with SeaSpeed.

Both this bandwidth delivery flexibility and a service turn-up time of 24 hours or less derive from the use of the XTS-3300 meshponders as well as Infinera's Instant Bandwidth capabilities. Infinera unveiled the XTS-3300 systems, which leverage the company's Infinite Capacity Engine (the ICE4 version), earlier this year (see "Infinera offers SLTE based on Infinite Capacity Engine"). Their use on Seabras-1 is the first publicly announced deployment of the XTS-3300 according to Scott Jackson, vice president of the Subsea Business Group at Infinera.

A salient feature of the ICE4 and its complementary Advanced Coherent Toolkit is the use of Nyquist filtering to pack a high number of subcarriers into a given amount of spectrum. Jackson reports that the technology is working even better than expected on Seabras-1. A press release touting the partnership states that per-fiber capacity on the network can scale to 11.8 Tbps; Seaborn is quoting 72 Tbps as the total system capacity. Infinera also has supplied its XTC and XTM Series platforms to Seaborn for the terrestrial portions of Seaborn's infrastructure in the U.S. and Brazil.

Alcatel Submarine Networks signed in 2012 a contract to deploy Seabras-1 (see "Alcatel-Lucent to build Seabras-1 US-Brazil 100-Gbps submarine cable network"), which Seaborn co-owns with Partners Group, a global private markets investment manager. Seaborn also has partnered with Grupo Werthein on ARBR, a submarine network that will connect Argentina with Brazil (see "Seaborn Networks, Grupo Werthein to connect Argentina and Brazil via submarine cable"). Schwartz says ARBR will link with Seabras-1 to enable connectivity between Argentina and New York. ARBR is slated to be ready for service late next year.

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