EllaLink says it has finished marine installation of its transatlantic submarine cable of the same name and has progressed to the network lighting stage. The company will use equipment from Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) for lighting both the submarine network and its terrestrial elements, according to an EllaLink source, with an eye toward being ready for service this coming May. Alcatel Submarine Networks performed the maritime installation.
The four-fiber-pair submarine cable will run between Sines, Portugal, and Fortaleza, Brazil. Branching units to Madeira and Cabo Verde are part of the initial deployment, with additional branches to French Guiana, Mauritania, the Canary Islands, and Morocco planned for the future (see "Construction begins on EllaLink Submarine Cable System between Latin America and Europe"). The backbone link has a design capacity of 100 Tbps; the link between Portugal and Madeira will support 30 Tbps over a single fiber pair, while the planned link to Morocco will support 40 Tbps over two fiber pairs, according to Vincent Gatineau, chief marketing and sales officer at privately held EllaLink.
The landing stations in Brazil and Lisbon will be configured to maximize optical efficiency and connectivity to the Equinix data centers on each end, said Gatineau and Geoff Bennett, director of solutions and technology at Infinera. The landing stations will feature ICE6-enabled GX Series Compact Modular Platform that will provide ROADM capabilities instead of the usual electro-optical termination. This will enable better connectivity to the data centers as well as support of spectrum sharing capabilities that Gatineau says EllaLink will market as “virtual fiber” for its infrastructure customers. Service demarcation equipment also will be in place, as some customers will want to leverage the landing site for this purpose as well, Gatineau added.
The Infinera-supported terrestrial links will include routes from Sines to Lisbon and Madrid, with an extension to Marseilles as a follow on. In Brazil, the landing site will link to São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and possibly other locations. A subsea hop to southern Brazil also is possible.
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