What’s next for NEXT? Ciena and Southern Cross team up for new transpacific cable

Back in October 2019, Southern Cross Cable Network (SCCN) announced that its NEXT subsea cable had been green-lit and would be aiming for completion by January 2022.

 

The transpacific cable will link Los Angeles on the west coast of the USA to Sydney, Australia, as well as Auckland, New Zealand, Fiji, Tokelau, Samoa, and Kiribati. The 13,494 kilometre-long submarine cable route, once complete, will be the lowest latency path between Australia and New Zealand to the US.

 

The NEXT cable will consist of four fibre pairs, each cable of delivering 18 Tbps, for a total of 72 Tbps. 

 

Now, SCCN has announced a new partnership with Ciena, with plans to introduce various Ciena solutions to improve the network. The GeoMesh Extreme solution will be used to integrate the multiple terabits of traffic across the network; the Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) will be used for operational service management and network planning; the network analysis optimiser Insights Service will be incorporated; and Blue Planet Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) will help support service flexibility and meet the company’s sustainability goals.

 

“Today’s work from home mandates and the sudden dramatic influx of remote digital requirements have generated major traffic spikes and required our customers to deliver increased capacity in extremely short time frames, a trend we expect to see for years to come,” said Southern Cross Cables president and CEO Laurie Miller.

 

“In seeking the optimal solution for our NEXT system, we engaged an external global consultancy to independently review and evaluate the various leading industry solutions and after a thorough process, the Ciena WaveLogic 5 Extreme was identified as the ideal choice.”

 

This cable should provide unprecedented and much needed connectivity to all its points of presence, but especially to the smaller Pacific islands which are too often left behind when it comes to connectivity. 

 

Furthermore, SCCN recently reached an agreement to work with SES Networks to ensure that SES’s O3b constellation of medium earth orbit satellites could connect to remote stations on the NEXT cable system’s network. This will allow these remote locations access fibre-like connectivity  via a rapidly-deployed satellite terminal.