Southern Cross selects Alcatel-Lucent submarine gear

AUGUST 23, 2007 -- Alcatel-Lucent (search for Alcatel-Lucent) says it has signed a new contract to upgrade the landing stations of Southern Cross's (search for Southern Cross) 28,900-km submarine cable network. This new award follows the contract signed in 2001 for the first upgrade of the Southern Cross network that went into service in November 2000, providing Australasia with a fully protected direct link to the U.S. mainland.

The network upgrade will provide further route diversity and capacity in the Australasian region. Alcatel-Lucent will upgrade the network's 10 landing stations, which are located close to the major international hubs of Sydney, Auckland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Honolulu for ease of access.

The project will be rolled-out in two phases. The first phase will consist in upgrading the existing 480-Gbit/sec capacity up to 660 Gbits/sec by the end of the first quarter 2008 and the second phase will bring it up to 860 Gbits/sec by the end of 2008. The network equipment will also facilitate future upgrades up to 2.4 Tbits/sec.

"By doubling the existing network capacity, this upgrade project will help Southern Cross support the increased traffic generated by the rapid adoption of ADSL2+ services and Ethernet-based applications with enhanced flexibility and reliability," stated Ross Pfeffer, director of sales and marketing at Southern Cross.

Alcatel�Lucent will deliver both submarine and terrestrial equipment. For the submarine section, Alcatel-Lucent will deploy its 1620 Light Manager DWDM submarine line terminal. The landing stations will also be upgraded with the Alcatel-Lucent 1675 LambdaUnite Multi-Service Switch (MSS).

The Southern Cross Cable Network provides international bandwidth from Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii to the USA mainland. Commissioned in 2000 and 2001 as two diverse submarine cables to the US, the Southern Cross Network has been engineered to provide for the rapidly expanding capacity needs of high speed broadband until 2025. The network is owned by Telecom NZ (50%), Singtel-Optus (40%), and Verizon Business (10%).

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