Southern Cross is bringing in the New Year with a bang, announcing new sales of US$310m for the last 6 months of 2006 and plans for a major network upgrade to cope with a continuing upsurge in the demand for capacity.
The fully protected Southern Cross Network was commissioned for service in November 2000 and connects Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii to the US Mainland, which is still the source of around 70% of all internet content.
Ross Pfeffer, the company Sales and Marketing Director said “We have now sold more than 50% of our current network capacity. Very strong demand for Southern Cross over the last few years is now intensifying due to ongoing rapid broadband subscriber growth and an upsurge in the volume of data downloaded by broadband subscribers”.
“Factors such as much faster broadband access speeds with large data entitlements and increasing video downloads are now strong drivers of capacity demand. These trends are set to continue as more and more of our world moves to a video dominated online world requiring very high access speeds”
“An assured future market for capacity combined with high network utilization means that the time is now right to upgrade so we can avoid any disruptions to existing customer traffic”.
A number of equipment suppliers have already confirmed that our network has the potential to expand total lit protected capacity from 240 Gbps to over 1.2 Tbps. This capacity expansion can be achieved simply by replacing equipment that is currently installed in the 10 Southern Cross cable stations. This new equipment will provide 10 Gbps dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology on all three undersea fibre pairs and it will significantly expand the number of available transmitting wavelengths from 16 up to 40 per fibre”.
“We expect to issue a tender by the end of March 07. A final decision on the upgrade is expected by the middle of the year and the upgrade work should begin in Q3, taking just six to nine months to complete” Pfeffer said. He added that “In anticipation of a major supply expansion at a low cost we are now developing attractive new pricing to be released in late Q2 07 and this will further support the move to very high speed broadband”.
“In combination with the natural Southern Cross advantages of lowest latency, inbuilt cable diversity and abundant capacity supply, Southern Cross is confident that its future pricing positioning will ensure that it is the preferred network for the transmission of the majority of traffic between the US Mainland and Australasia for many more years”.
Southern Cross completed its last major capacity expansion in January 2003 in anticipation of strong broadband subscriber growth taking total equipped and protected capacity to the current level of 240 Gbps. The Southern Cross Company is jointly owned by Telecom NZ (50%), Singtel-Optus (40%) and Verizon Business (10%).
For further information contact:
Ngaire Vanderhoof
Media Manager
Southern Cross Cable Network
Tel: +64 4 496 3243
Click here to email Ngaire
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