August 9, 2006 Toronto, Canada -- Southern Cross Cables hopes to significantly increase the capability of its U.S. terrestrial optical network with the addition of Nortel optical equipment. Nortel will supply, deploy, and maintain the optical systems on the U.S. West Coast as part of Southern Cross's 30,500-km submarine cable network that acts as the major link for broadband services and Internet traffic from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Hawaii to the U.S.
The deployment will use the Nortel Common Photonic Layer (CPL) and Nortel Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500, to connect access points located in San Jose and Morro Bay, CA, and Hillboro and Nedonna Beach, OR. Using Nortel's Optical Network Manager, the terrestrial network will be fully managed and operated remotely from Southern Cross' network operations center in Auckland, New Zealand.
"As one of the Pacific Rim's leading independent bandwidth wholesalers, Southern Cross provides our Australasian and Hawaiian customers with secure and reliable bandwidth for today, tomorrow, and the next 15 years," said Fiona Beck, CEO, Southern Cross Cables Ltd. "Nortel's optical solutions and the experience of their global services business play an important role in helping Southern Cross to meet the current and future needs of our growing customer base."
"At the heart of Nortel's success in building high-performance all optical networks is a continued commitment to innovation and making complex deployments simple for our customers," said Philippe Morin, president, Metro Ethernet Networks, Nortel. "Our intelligent optical platforms help enable service providers like Southern Cross to increase bandwidth capabilities and flexibility, as well as lower the costs associated with operating a world-class optical network."
Nortel will provide Southern Cross with integration services including network staging, engineering, implementation, and stability testing. Nortel will also provide maintenance services including a Platinum Support Plan for emergency dispatch and recovery, site maintenance and technical support, and operations and maintenance training.
The Southern Cross U.S. terrestrial network is configured with twenty 10-Gbit/sec channels of lit capacity. Using DWDM capabilities in the CPL and OME 6500, this network has the potential to increase to 560 Gbits of capacity when growth requires; with the addition of new 40-Gbit/sec modules on the CPL, future network capacity could be quadrupled to over 2 Tbits/sec.
Southern Cross will also use one of Nortel's innovations on the OME 6500 -- electronic dynamically compensating optics (eDCO) that enable fiber spans of up to 2,000 kilometers without the need for costly inline dispersion compensation modules or regeneration equipment.