Optical transport equipment vendor Xtera Communications Inc. and Kokusai Cable Ship Co. Ltd. (KCS), a subsidiary of Japan’s KDDI, say they have received contracts from AT&T to build the new Guam, Okinawa, Kyushu, Incheon (GOKI) submarine cable system.

Xtera and KCS will partner to build the 4200-km GOKI system by combining approximately 1300 km of redeployed cable with remaining sections of the Transpacific-5 (TPC-5) and a retired regional submarine cable. Xtera will provide project management, system design, system integration, and Nu-Wave XLR regional repeatered submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE). KCS will do the cable work, as well as supply new cable and submerged equipment that will become part of the new system.

TPC-5, an early first generation optically amplified submarine cable system, uses dispersion-shifted fiber and had an original design capacity of two 5-Gbps channels per fiber pair. The retired regional submarine cable system is a second-generation system that uses WDM to offer a maximum original capacity of 35 Gbps (14 x 2.5 Gbps).

With the Nu-wave XLR terminal equipment, the re-engineered system will have a maximum capacity of at least 80 Gbps (8 x 10 Gbps).