Southern Cross to use Ciena GeoMesh Extreme on NEXT submarine cable system

Submarine networks operator Southern Cross Cable Ltd. will use elements of Ciena’s (NYSE: CIEN) GeoMesh Extreme submarine technology portfolio on the new 13,494-km Southern Cross NEXT submarine cable system, according to the communications technology provider. Ciena will provide its 6500 submarine line terminating equipment (SLTE), which leverages the company’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics engine.

Scheduled for completion early next year, the NEXT submarine cable will add a third geographically diverse route to Southern Cross’s Pacific undersea network ecosystem leveraging four fiber pairs (see “Construction of Southern Cross NEXT submarine cable set to begin”) to enable more than 72 Tbps of capacity. The submarine cable system will land at Hermosa Beach, CA, on the U.S. side; from there it will connect to the company’s data center locations in Los Angeles (Equinix LA1 and CoreSite LA1) and Silicon Valley (Equinix SV1, Equinix SV8, and CoreSite SV1). To the west, the NEXT cable will land at Coogee Beach in Sydney, Australia, and Takapuna Beach in Auckland, New Zealand. It also will provide connections to Fiji, Tokelau, and Kiribati.

Like other submarine networks in the Southern Cross ecosystem, NEXT will use GeoMesh Extreme SLTEs. The infrastructure also will benefit from Ciena’s Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) software platform for network planning and operational management of services; the Insights Service for network analysis; and Blue Planet Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) for service flexibility.

“Today’s work from home mandates and the sudden dramatic influx of remote digital requirements have generated major traffic spikes and required our customers to deliver increased capacity in extremely short time frames, a trend we expect to see for years to come,” said Mr. Laurie Miller, president and CEO of Southern Cross Cables. “In seeking the optimal solution for our NEXT system, we engaged an external global consultancy to independently review and evaluate the various leading industry solutions and after a thorough process, the Ciena WaveLogic 5 Extreme was identified as the ideal choice.”

As mentioned, Southern Cross has a long history of using Ciena’s equipment in its submarine networks (see, for example, “Southern Cross Cables upgrades submarine network with Ciena GeoMesh Extreme,” “Southern Cross to add 1-Tbps submarine network capacity,” and “Southern Cross submarine fiber network jumps to 100G”).

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