CIENA NETWORKS THE OCEAN FLOOR
Southern Cross is an independent company that provides capacity, mostly undersea, to network operators and their ISPs in Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region. Shareholders include New Zealand's Spark provider, Australia's Singtel Optus, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and Telstra. One of Southern Cross's key projects was his just-announced NEXT cable. It operates between Sydney, Auckland and Los Angeles, with fiber optic connections to the islands of Tokelau, Kiribati and Fiji. NEXT took two years to complete and is one of three cable systems that will form the Southern Cross ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region. Ciena networks , a leading optical networking company, provided the underwater switching technology that forms the basis of NEXT. The switch implemented was a WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e) model with coherent optics, a laser designed to transmit large amounts of data over long distances. WL5e connections operate at speeds of up to 800 Gbps and are used in t...
