Southern Cross, a trans-Pacific network of telecommunications cables, has announced it now offers commercial 400 Gigabit Ethernet (400GbE) services on its new Southern Cross NEXT submarine cable. It claims that the service it is providing is the longest single-system data-center-to-data-center service available globally and the first international 400GbE service in Australasia.
The availability follows the completion of successful 400GbE tests on the NEXT system, which links Australia, New Zealand, and the US, in July of last year. The services are offered by Southern Cross and its cooperating partners via the resale channel.
According to Southern Cross, the Southern Cross NEXT cable system’s innovative technology and capacity are intended to meet the growing bandwidth demand brought on by the use of the cloud and digitization.
“We are now thrilled to be able to offer 400GbE Layer 1 services as the first of several planned innovations taking advantage of the Southern Cross ecosystem, and the new NEXT cable,” commented Laurie Miller, CEO of Southern Cross.
Miller continued that the availability of 400GbE services will give clients access to hyperscale, low-latency connectivity between Sydney and Los Angeles data centers as well as a new Auckland DC PoP that will be operational in 2023.
Recently, there has been a huge increase in the demand for 100G+ high-capacity links, especially for data-center-to-data-center GCN connectivity, where extremely large and resilient volumes of data must pass through core network infrastructure for data replication, data storage connectivity, and disaster recovery – an application where the Southern Cross multi-path ecosystem excels.
Southern Cross NEXT leverages Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme-enabled 6500 Packet-Optical Platform. Additionally, the operator of the submarine cable system manages, controls, and plans its network using a domain controller from Ciena. In the Southern Cross communications ecosystem, Ciena’s 5400 and 8700 platforms are also present.
