Mauritius-based submarine cable network operator SEACOM has selected Ciena Corporation’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and OneControl Unified Management System for the upgrade of its undersea fibre network across the Southern and Eastern African coastlines, in a project aimed at meeting growing capacity demands and helping to enable affordable internet access to East Africa. The upgrade includes key countries in SEACOM’s 17,000km undersea network, including India, Egypt, Dijbouti, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. The deployment will initially use Ciena’s 40G coherent transport technology, with ultra-long distance 100G wavelengths planned for future upgrades.
Also this week, Reliance Globalcom, the submarine cable division of India’s Reliance Communications (RCOM), has chosen Ciena’s GeoMesh system to upgrade its trans-Atlantic FA-1 South submarine network, with the aim of addressing global bandwidth demand for cloud computing, video and other bandwidth-intensive services. The GeoMesh system will allow Globalcom to provide 100GbE services between continental PoPs, while as in the SEACOM upgrade, Ciena will also provide Reliance with its OneControl system to enable streamlined service activation, fault management and performance monitoring.
Ed McCormack, general manager of submarine systems at Ciena, said: ‘In the last couple of years, bandwidth penetration in several African countries has increased tenfold with the support of SEACOM’s submarine network. Ciena’s coherent technology will enable SEACOM to evolve and grow its network cost-effectively. It will lay the foundations for a unified terrestrial and submarine network and evolution path to a GeoMesh network architecture.’