Southern Cross Cable Limited awarded a contract to Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) to supply the Southern Cross NEXT submarine cable, based on an Open Cable architecture. The Southern Cross NEXT submarine cable is a state-of-the-art 4 fibre pair undersea route utilising an open cable design and enhancing the existing Southern Cross eco-system. The system will also provide full fibre connectivity to Auckland, New Zealand, and will incorporate Branching Units (BU) and OADM technology for connections to Fiji, Tokelau and Kiribati.
The US$350 million Southern Cross NEXT project will be the largest capacity, lowest latency link between the U.S. West coast and Sydney and Auckland, providing Australia and New Zealand, the largest capacity markets in the South Pacific region, with a powerful solution.
The solution includes ASN’s submarine WSS ROADM units, the latest generation of repeaters and will offer high performance and powering resilience, enabling over 72 Tbps transmission capacity. The Open Cable system is also designed to be compatible with future generations of submarine line terminal equipped with Probabilistic Shaping technology.
Laurie Miller, President and CEO of Southern Cross Cables, said the contract is an important milestone for the project which will be completed in 2021.
“Since the initial phases in 2016, interest in the project has grown significantly,” he said. “The Southern Cross team has worked tirelessly alongside ASN to design a high capacity system on the optimum marine route between Sydney and Los Angeles, and this contract shows that the hard work has paid off.”
“A number of critical milestones have already been achieved prior to contract signing, with the Marine Survey completed in 2017, the completion of the Sydney BMH and bore landing facilities in 2018, along with landing arrangements in Los Angeles, and Auckland,” said Miller. “These milestones and the efforts of the SX and ASN teams have us on track to target completion of the system in the second half of 2021.”
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Existing stakeholders in SCCN include Spark NZ (50%), Singtel-Optus (40%) and Verizon Business (10%).
SCCN owns and operates the trans-Pacific Southern Cross Cable and has initiated work on the Southern Cross NEXT cable, which will be a high capacity express route, providing data-centre connectivity between Sydney, Auckland, and Los Angeles and is scheduled for completion by end-2020. Southern Cross NEXT is expected to cost around US$300 million and is designed to carry 72 Terabits of traffic.
https://www.southerncrosscables.com
