Southern Cross NEXT activates 400GbE services

Southern Cross Cables Limited has activated commercial 400GbE services on its Southern Cross NEXT cable, which links Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

“With the Southern Cross NEXT cable system, the new technology and capability has been designed to support the rising demand for bandwidth driven by cloud adoption and digitisation. We are now thrilled to be able to offer 400GbE Layer 1 services as the first of several planned innovations taking advantage of the Southern Cross eco-system, and the new NEXT cable,” stated Mr Laurie Miller, CEO of Southern Cross.

“The availability of 400GbE services will allow customers hyper-scale low-latency connectivity directly between data-centres in Sydney and Los Angeles, and with a new Auckland DC PoP due for implementation in 2023. Demand for 100G+ high-capacity links has been booming in recent years particularly for data-centre to data-centre GCN connectivity, where extremely large and resilient volumes of data are required to traverse core network infrastructure for data replication, data storage connectivity and disaster recovery. An application where the Southern Cross multi-path eco-system excels.”

Southern Cross’ 400GbE service runs on Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics and is managed by the Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller. To accommodate increasing and changing network traffic demands, Southern Cross’s eco-system also incorporates Ciena’s 5400 and 8700 platforms, providing the ability to deploy services from 100Mbs now up to 400GbE connectivity over applicable wavelengths.

Mr Ivan Polizzi, Regional Managing Director, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands for Ciena, said: “With such a flexible and scalable network foundation from Ciena, Southern Cross is able to target the growing demands of today’s networks and provide customers with unrivalled connectivity by way of applications such as 400GbE services. This is important as Ciena and Southern Cross continue to collaborate on future opportunities and innovations to meet changing customer and industry demands”.

• The Southern Cross NEXT system went live in July 2022. The system boasts 72 Tbps of capacity between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. The Southern Cross NEXT system includes 12 cable stations and eight major datacenter hubs in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. The Southern Cross network spans six countries and eight time zones, connected by over 45,000 km (28,000 mile) of cable – greater than the Earth’s circumference. The installation of the submarine cable system was performed by Alcatel Submarine Networks, who additionally designed and manufactured the cable, repeaters, and branching units.