Asia-Pac cable network receives 40Gb/s upgrade

Friday, 09 July 2010 12:42  |  James Barton

One of the largest submarine cable networks in the Asia-Pacific region, the APCN2 (Asia Pacific Cable Network 2), is set to receive a major overhaul. Following an agreement between the infrastructure provider NEC Corporation and a purchasing consortium of 14 major telecom operators in the Asia-Pacific region, the APCN2 will receive a 40Gb/s dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) capacity upgrade.

The existing APCN2 (Asia Pacific Cable Network 2), which features over 19,000km of cable that connects 10 landing stations in the Asia Pacific region, was originally supplied by NEC in 2001 with a 10Gb/s DWDM system design. The 40Gb/s DWDM upgrade is the first of its kind to augment an existing large scale submarine cable network.

NEC’s new 40Gb/s DWDM technology will provide a dramatic enhancement and expansion to the capacity of the network in response to the region’s rising transmission demands. By adding 40Gb/s wavelengths, NEC estimates that the cable’s capacity can be increased by as much as 4 times its original design capacity of 2.56Tb/s.

The fourteen purchasing consortium members are AT&T, China Telecom, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom, C&W, KDDI, KT, NTTCom, PLDT, Reach, SingTel, Softbank Telecom, StarHub and TM.

The upgrade is scheduled to be completed by 2Q of 2011.