Tata Communications (news, filings) has taken the 100G plunge beneath the Atlantic Ocean, unveiling an upgrade to its TGN-Atlantic cable system. The 13,000km system between London and New York will have its 100G ready for service during the first half of this year, meaning probably June. Just how big that makes the cable in terms of overall theoretical capacity was not mentioned.
Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) is providing the gear behind Tata’s 100G upgrade, with its Geomesh solution built off its familiar 6500 Packet-Optical solution and coherent technology. It’s a big win for Ciena, especially since Tata has a whole lot more subsea route miles to follow up with, as they last year finished their owned fiber network link all the way around the globe and boasts some 210,000 route kilometers.
Tata most recently upgraded this cable to 40G just a little over a year ago, which was of course powered by the same gear with this upgrade in mind already. Just how much longer that extra capacity will hold them before they start looking for the next boost is unclear, but it’s probably not more than a couple years. I’ve always thought that Tata might be the next to decide to put money into a new transatlantic cable system, and since the process for such a thing takes a few years perhaps there are already plans in the works.
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Categories: Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables
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With so many independent interests in building trans-Atlantic cables, I suspect someone’s going to combine causes here somewhere. Otherwise there will be a crash and someone else picks it up for pennies on the dollar.
It seems like anytime there’s a big building boom like this, it all crashes down and few that were initially involved make it through. Atlantic cable systems available on the cheap in 2016?