JUPITER 400-Gbps ROADM submarine network to connect Japan, U.S., Philippines

A consortium of NTT Communications Corp. (NTT Com, the ICT solutions and international communications business within the NTT Group; TOKYO:9432), SoftBank, Facebook, Amazon, PLDT of the Philippines, and PCCW Global has signed an agreement to launch a new transpacific submarine network. The JUPITER undersea cable system will feature 400-Gbps wavelengths and a ROADM-based architecture that will enable flexible connectivity among branching units.

The 14,000-km submarine cable network will feature two landing stations in Japan (the Shima Landing Station in Mie Prefecture and an extension to the Maruyama Landing Station in Chiba Prefecture) and single landings in the Philippines (the Daet Cable Landing Station) and the United States (Los Angeles). The system will connect with three other NTT Com submarine networks -- Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE), Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) and Pacific Crossing-1 (PC-1) – for redundancy and route diversity.

The group members anticipate JUPITER will be ready for service in early 2020 with an initial design capacity of 60 Tbps, with a path toward future upgrades.

NTT Com says it will build the Maruyama Landing Station extension in Minamiboso, Chiba Prefecture. The service provider says it will offer connections to other submarine networks as well as nearby data centers via the Minamiboso and Shima landing stations.

"The demand for bandwidth in the Pacific region continues to grow at a remarkable rate, and is accompanied by the rise of capacity-dependent applications like live video, augmented and virtual reality, and 4k/8k video," said Koji Ishii of SoftBank, co-chairperson of JUPITER consortium. "JUPITER will provide the necessary diversity of connections and the highest capacity available to meet the needs of the evolving marketplace."

The consortium has selected TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company, to build the submarine network. TE Subcom says the wavelength-selective switch (WSS) ROADMs will enable gridless, flexible, and in-service bandwidth reconfiguration capability on a per wavelength basis. The ROADM nodes will feature a telemetry channel to enable access to undersea spectral performance information.

"TE SubCom has been deploying progressively more advanced optical add/drop multiplexing technology in various undersea applications since 2009," said Mark Enright, vice president of customer solutions at TE SubCom. "The ROADM nodes in the JUPITER design are our most advanced form of this technology to date, providing unprecedented bandwidth reconfiguration flexibility in an undersea network."

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