Int’l Roundup: Telstra, Sparkle, SEACOM, SJC, Tata

With ITW underway in Chicago, there is lots of news out there from the international telecommunications industry.  Here is a quick look at some of the interesting expansions, upgrades, and trials going on:

Telstra Global reached deeper into Europe with a little help from GTS. The Australian-based and central/eastern European network operators have established a new NNI agreement, through which Telstra gains access to PoPs in Prague, Bucharest, Warsaw, Budapest, and a couple dozen others. DT’s planned purchase of GTS is still in the works of course.

TI Sparkle is also expanding its backbone’s reach, but on a different continent. They’ve added new PoPs in Fortaleza, Brazil, and in Panama City, Panama to boost their overall presence in South and Central America. They’ve also upgraded their internet backbone to 100G, giving the them capacity to continue to meet demand in the region’s rapidly growing bandwidth markets.

SEACOM has also been busy on the upgrade front. They’ve tapped Infinera’s DTN-X for those 500Gbps superchannels and the overall converged platform on the terrestrial portions of their network. SEACOM has been adding fiber on land via partnerships to complement the subsea cable along the East African coastline they started with.

Upgrade was also the word of the day for the Southeast Asia-Japan cable system. TE Subcom and the SJC Consortium announced an upgrade of the 8986km undersea system with an additional 6.5Tbps via 100G technology. SJC hasn’t even been in service a year yet, but needs a big capacity boost due to dramatic increases in regional demand.

And last week, Tata, Huawei, and Huawei Marine teamed up to trial 400G under the waves. The two trialed the Huawei’s version of the future over a 6,000km span using DC-PDM-QPSK (can these acronyms get any nastier?), SD-FEC, FTN compensation, and a variety of other new technologies. Hmmm, an Indian conglomerate working side by side with a Chinese equipment maker despite the regional rivalries, I suppose we can thank Snowden a bit for that too.

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Categories: Internet Backbones · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables