Southern Cross Subsea Cable Network Deploys Ciena's Granular Layer 1 Wavelength Product

Southern Cross subsea cable system is implementing ODUflex, which is a relatively new ITU standard that allows granular Layer 1 bandwidth. No longer are we limited to 100G, 400G, and 800G for either subsea or terrestrial networks. Interestingly enough, Hauwei proposed the new standard and was its primary champion. All wavelengths consist of optical containers and ODUflex allows optical containers to be stacked at 1.25 Gps intervals. So you can lease 1.25 Gbps wavelength up to 400G in 1.25 Gbps increments. Note that port sizes are still 10G, 100G, 400G or 800G. So to access a 150G transmission rate the customer needs 400G intefaces. Ciena is one of the the vendors to implement ODUflex along with Hauwei. More details here: https://lnkd.in/dZvNbubc. It is worth noting that granular bandwidth is being implemented on the newer cables which Southern Cross owns like Next. 

The commercial motivation is poor take up of 400G wavelengths. The only real customers for 400Gs are very big bandwidth buyers like Zoom or Google. So instead of a wholesale customer being forced to lease 2x 100Gs because its peak traffic is 140G,  it can lease the appropriate bandwidth, say 150G wavelength. This saves money over the 2X 100G rates plus the cross connect fees which are particularly hefty in Equinix data centers.




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