Submarine cable trial lights path to greater capacity for global networks

Nokia Siemens Networks has tested its Submarine Line Terminal Equipment (SLTE), demonstrating the longest 100GDWDM transmission result yet achieved over installed undersea cable. Global operators, including privately owned submarine cable network players, can now achieve a cost-efficient, ten-fold increase over the original design capacity of their cables.

The trial was performed over a submarine segment between Florida and Puerto Rico for a major SAm-1 submarine cable network. As part of the demonstration, Nokia Siemens Networks achieved 40G DWDM transmission over a distance of 9000 km.

“Our global customers are faced with a continuous need to expand their installed network capacity to keep up with the tremendous increase in traffic requirements,” says Pathmal Gunawardana, head of Transport Networks business unit, North America, Nokia Siemens Networks. “As we support them in terrestrial network expansions, it made perfect sense to do the same for their global networks as well, which often include submarine cable links. While terrestrial networks increase capacity, these submarine cable links often remain a bottleneck.”

“Capacity upgrades using Nokia Siemens Networks’ SLTE solution extends the economic life of our customer’s existing submarine cable assets by delaying the capital expenditure outflow that is needed to build a new and enormously costly cable,” said Gunawardana.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ SLTE based on its hiT 7300 platform increases the capacity of the already deployed undersea cable links by adding 40G and 100G DWDM channel and bandwidth management capabilities to support current and future network requirements, says a representative. The upgrade can reduce the bottleneck in the submarine part of the network as well as integrate it smoothly into the terrestrial network through the use of new technology at a network management and operations level.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ SLTE system with new transmission capacities of 40G and 100G will be commercially available this year.