Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks today said GoTo Networks has selected the 1620 SOFTNODE for the Australia West Express system.
The first direct undersea cable between Australia, the Middle East and Africa will utilize ASN’s 1620 SOFTNODE, an industry-first platform that will enable the transmission of 240 terabit-per second (Tbit/s) on multiple fiber pairs. Operators can benefit from new data services, while extending their reach and creating long-haul economies of scale.
The field trial of 1620 SOFTNODE — conducted over the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) system — demonstrated a transmission of 12.6 Tbit/s of data per fiber pair.
Alcatel-Lucent said the 1620 SOFTNODE platform leverages the 1620LM submarine line terminal equipment, and will provide webscale connectivity between data centers and Points-of-Presence (PoPs) in different continents.
The company claims that 1620 SOFTNODE will optimize the footprint in the landing station as the new terminal equipment dimensions are reduced by as much as ten times, also reducing power consumption by a factor of 2-3 compared to previous generation SLTE technology.
“By evolving the 1620 SLTE architecture to SOFTNODE, new and enhanced node configurations will provide more advantages over traditional submarine cable architectures both at node level and at system level,” said Olivier Gautheron, chief technology officer of Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks.
