Infinera, provider of Intelligent Transport Networks, announced the rapid recovery of network capacity on the submarine optical fiber cable connecting Australia, Guam and Japan, managed by Australia Japan Cable (AJC). AJC recently experienced a network path failure following a subsea cable fault in 7,000 meters to 8,000 meters water depth.
The Infinera team and AJC rerouted over 400 gigabit per second (Gb/s) of traffic from the impacted AJC section to alternate paths on the AJC optical fiber ring configuration. The rerouting utilized the capabilities of the Infinera DTN-X platform featuring Infinera's new on-demand Time-based Instant Bandwidth™ technology. The rerouting of the lost traffic was able to commence within minutes after receipt by AJC of the Time-based Instant Bandwidth license. This avoided a route outage while the cable repair ship was mobilized, transited to the repair site, and implemented in the challenging deep water repair.
AJC is a private submarine cable network and operates a 12,700 km link from Sydney to Tokyo via Guam. AJC experienced a subsea fault affecting services operating on the optical fiber route between Maruyama, Japan and Tumon Bay, Guam, including services on the Infinera DTN-X and other vendor platforms. Using Infinera's new Time-based Instant Bandwidth technology, AJC in collaboration with Infinera was able to quickly respond by activating network capacity over an alternate route consisting of one terrestrial and two subsea AJC segments to recover over 400 Gb/s of affected traffic. With this new technology, AJC was able to activate new capacity on an alternate AJC route because of the system's unique ring-based architecture and recover all of the traffic being carried via Infinera equipment.
An expansion of Infinera's Instant Bandwidth, which allows permanent software activation of line-side bandwidth in 25, 50 or 100 Gb/s increments depending on the application, Time-based Instant Bandwidth, enables the on demand activation of bandwidth in those increments for specified durations of time, with the deactivation of the line-side bandwidth at the end of the time period. The Instant Bandwidth technology takes advantage of pre-deployed optical network capacity enabled by Infinera's photonic integrated circuit (PIC) super-channel technology on the DTN-X platform.
"AJC's top priority is ensuring maximum availability in network services for our customers," said David Crofts, AJC CEO. "Our partnership with Infinera underscores Infinera's incredibly rapid response but also highlights the value of operating a network based on PIC technology, the DTN-X and Infinera's unique Time-based Instant Bandwidth capability, which enabled us to deploy software activated bandwidth incrementally in a very short period of time."
"We are pleased to continue our successful partnership with AJC," said Lonny Orona, executive vice president for customer support at Infinera. "Customer satisfaction is of utmost importance to us and we are committed to help in any way possible so they can, in turn, fully meet their customers' needs. Both the AJC and Infinera teams worked jointly with urgency to recover network capacity, minimizing disruption to the AJC network and services."
AJC deployed the Infinera DTN-X platform to deliver up to five terabits per second of non-blocking optical transport network capacity with 500 Gb/s super-channels. The high capacity super-channels are enabled by PICs developed and fabricated by Infinera -- the only supplier delivering 500 Gb/s of transmission capacity from a single line card today. The DTN-X platform provides the foundation for AJC's agile, flexible and resilient network architecture to enable quick activation of pre-deployed capacity. It features the Time-based Instant Bandwidth technology, which activates capacity for a defined time period for diverse situations including major network faults, natural disasters or planned short-term events.
With Intelligent Transport Networks, Infinera provides carriers, Cloud operators, governments and enterprises the ability to quickly deliver differentiated services by enabling a virtual pool of intelligent bandwidth.