Southern Cross has announced a new bandwidth-on-demand capability that will allow it to provide on-demand virtual network capabilities that enable its customers to quickly provision network resources whenever they need them.
This will enable enterprise customers to schedule increases in service bandwidth in anticipation of a major event or during peak demand, and then decommission the connection once the event has concluded, only paying for minimal necessary usage.
Southern Cross Cable Network owns and operates a trans-Pacific submarine cable network connecting Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Hawaii to the mainland United States, and has recently announced the start of the Southern Cross NEXT program, adding a third, high capacity, low-latency route, to its existing network eco-system.
Ciena’s Blue Planet V-WAN connects Southern Cross data centres on the US West Coast – Los Angeles, Portland, San Jose and Seattle to those in Sydney, Auckland, Fiji and Hawaii, allowing Southern Cross to offer end-to-end bandwidth-on-demand services to customers requiring short duration connectivity across the Pacific.
Southern Cross can also quickly launch highly differentiated services with customer portals and service delivery control that allow for more revenue streams to be created.
In addition to Blue Planet V-WAN, the Gigaflex service uses Ciena’s 5400 and 8700 Packetwave platforms, as well as its network management solution providing multi-layer network monitoring, rapid and efficient service turn up, and troubleshooting.
Craige Sloots, marketing & strategy director for Southern Cross said: “Our Gigaflex elastic bandwidth-on-demand capability is our first entrance into the SDN arena and in what we believe to be another world first for a pure submarine cable operator, and helps augment Southern Cross’ existing portfolio of lease and IRU capacity products.”
“Ciena’s solutions provide greater control of their network capacity allocation, and the ability to handle demand schedules that require flexibility,” said Anthony McLachlan, Vice President and General Manager of Asia Pacific for Ciena. “For customers who have short-term, high-capacity, and low-latency demands, this flexibility is a must and a key competitive advantage for Southern Cross.”
