Apparently so, since NEC and Pacnet today announced the signing of a contract to do just that to EAC Pacific, which is Pacnet’s two fibers on the five fiber Unity Cable System connecting Japan with Los Angeles. EAC Pacific only went online last spring – a few weeks shy of one year ago. An upgrade this early surely wasn’t part of the original idea, but citing ‘aggressive traffic growth’ have accelerated their plans. Unanticipated demand is obviously a good problem to have though when traffic is your business.
NEC will be putting in the latest 40G technology in support of an additional 300Gbps now and the doubling of the cable’s design capacity. Since the design capacity had been 1.92Tbps, I guess the upgrade will take it to 3.84Tbps. The work will be done in several phases, with phase 1 to be ready by this summer.
Pacnet always seems to be finding new ways to spend money, what with this upgrade, their data landing stations, and various other projects like that Pacific Fibre concept for a direct US-NZ connection- I wonder what state that is in these days.
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Categories: Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables
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Unity was designed to be extensible up to 7.68 Tbps. See early release that highlighted Google’s role in the planning process:
Google Joins Global Consortium Planning New Pacific Cable System [named Unity]
http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=24345676