The upgrade has been made in partnership with Ciena and the company will deploy the 6500 packet-optical platform that has 40G/100G coherent technology capability. The second phase of the deployment will bring the 40G capability to Ashburn, Virginia and the rest of Europe.
TGN Atlantic becomes Tata’s first subsea cable with 40G capability and the company confirmed there are plans to implement the technology to its other routes.
“This is our first upgrade with this particular generation of technology,” said Matthew Ma, VP, Ethernet and transmissions engineering at Tata. “We are in the process of planning to deploy the technology on other segments of our subsea network at a distance of transatlantic or less, for example our subsea connection between Singapore and India which could be announced within the year.”
Tata’s total global network consists of 200,000km of terrestrial network fibres and over 500,000km of subsea cables.
Philippe Morin, senior VP global field organisation, Ciena added, “As the seven billion people across our planet become more interconnected, we are seeing rapid growth in subsea communications. Leading operators like Tata Communications are increasingly relying on Ciena’s 6500 packet-optical platform to expand their network capacity without the large expense and delay of deploying new subsea fibre optic cables.”
Ciena’s technology enables upgrades of 40G and 100G to existing submarine networks with the addition of new terminal equipment.
