Southern Cross taps Ciena to power Gigaflex bandwidth-on-demand

southern cross

Southern Cross Cable Network has revealed that its recently introduced Gigaflex Elastic bandwidth-on-demand capability is powered by Ciena’s Blue Planet V-WAN solution to makes trans-Pacific connectivity more accessible for its customers.

Gigaflex allows Southern Cross to flexibly and dynamically provide on-demand virtual network capabilities that enable its customers to quickly provision high-speed, high-capacity network resources whenever they need them.

For example, a large enterprise customer can schedule an increase in service bandwidth in anticipation of a major event or during peak demand, and then decommission the connection once the event has concluded, and only pay for actual 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 centers on the US West Coast – Seattle, Portland, San Jose, and Los Angeles – 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 complete with customer-facing portals and service delivery node control, that allow for broadened revenue streams and the ability to meet end-customers’ traffic demands.

In addition to Blue Planet V-WAN, the Gigaflex service using Ciena’s 5400 and 8700 Packetwave platforms, as well as its network management solution that provides multi-layer network monitoring, rapid and efficient service turn up, and troubleshooting.

“Our new 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,” said Craige Sloots, Marketing & Strategy director for Southern Cross.

“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.”

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