Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena to increase SEA-ME-WE 4 cable system capacity with 40G/100G technologies

FEBRUARY 1, 2011 -- Co-owners of the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) have selected Alcatel-Lucent and Ciena Corp. for their network expansion project. Alcatel-Lucent will upgrade all the submarine segments to 40Gbps (Gigabits per second) transmission. Ciena will supply optical switching equipment for all 16 cable landing sites, as well as for 100G transport for an upgrade of the terrestrial link connecting Alexandria to Suez in Egypt.

The deployment will begin in the first quarter of 2011, and is expected to provide a substantial capacity increase to the existing cable system, with an ultimate capacity of 2.4 Terabit per second per fiber pair. The upgrade supports the delivery of high-speed Internet and broadband services along the approximately 20,000-km route connecting Europe to the Middle East and South East Asia.

Alcatel-Lucent will deploy its 1620 Light Manager upgraded to 40G with coherent technology, and also upgrade part of the already installed 1678 Metro Core Connect on the terrestrial SDH side.

Ciena will deploy its multi-terabit ActivFlex 5430 Reconfigurable Switching System at cable landing stations and ActivFlex 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, equipped with coherent 100G optics, for the upgrade to 100G of the terrestrial link in Egypt and part of the terrestrial SDH.