The operators of the Southern Cross Cable Network, which comprises submarine cable systems that offer international capacity to service providers in Australia and New Zealand, has used Ciena's (NYSE: CIEN) Blue Planet V-WAN as a foundation for its recently introduced Gigaflex elastic bandwidth-on-demand capability, the technology supplier says.
The Southern Cross Cable Network includes trans-Pacific undersea cable infrastructure that links Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Hawaii to the mainland United States. A new program, Southern Cross NEXT, will soon add a third route to the system.
Southern Cross has been a longstanding Ciena customer (see, for example, "Ciena supplies 40G coherent for Southern Cross network" and "Southern Cross to add 1-Tbps submarine network capacity"). Most recently, the submarine network operator has used the Blue Planet V-WAN platform to enable its Gigaflex Elastic service to control capacity to data centers on the U.S. West Coast (in Seattle, Portland, San Jose, and Los Angeles) to those in Sydney, Australia; Fiji; Hawaii; and Auckland, New Zealand. The service offers customers to use virtual network capabilities to adjust the capacity they use on demand.
"At Southern Cross, our goal is to lead the industry by providing innovative, reliable, and fast bandwidth across the Pacific to carriers and internet service providers. By partnering with Ciena, we have achieved another significant industry milestone," asserts Craige Sloots, director of marketing and strategy at Southern Cross. "Our new Gigaflex elastic bandwidth-on-demand capability is our first entrance into the SDN arena in what we believe to be another world first for a pure submarine cable operator, and helps augment Southern Cross' existing portfolio of lease and IRU capacity products."
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