Subsea cable firm Flag (Fibre-optic Links Around the Globe) has confirmed it will deploy Ciena's WaveLogic 6 Extreme technology on the Echo subsea cable system.
This will see Flag launch new 400GbE and 800GbE services between Asia and North America.
Flying the Flag for subsea connectivity in the AI era
Flag, the company formerly known as GCX has a new name and is honing in on serving AI data centers
Flag first acquired capacity on Google’s Echo cable in December of last year. For Flag, the Echo pair adds a new trans-Pacific route to the company’s global network.
The subsea cable, announced in 2021 and owned by Google and Meta, will span more than 17,000km. EdgeConneX is building a cable landing station for the Californian landing point in Eureka.
The Waveserver platform that has been deployed on the cable is equipped with WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) 1.6 Tb/s coherent optics, along with an RLS line system on its more than 16,000km (9,941 miles) dedicated fiber pair of the ECHO subsea cable system.
According to the company, this upgrade will help "maximize the performance of one of a limited number of direct cable routes between Singapore and the United States."
"Our investment in Echo enables us to transport rapidly growing volumes of AI, cloud, and enterprise traffic across one of the world's most important digital corridors," said Brad Kneller, chief network officer, FLAG. "Using Ciena’s leading coherent optical technology, we can rapidly bring new 400GbE and 800GbE services to market while delivering the scale, resiliency, and performance our customers require as AI and cloud traffic continue to accelerate."
"High-capacity subsea routes such as Echo are essential to supporting the surging digital traffic moving between Asia and North America,” added Amit Malik, vice president, Asia Pacific, Japan, and India, Ciena. "WL6e enables Flag to extract greater value from its Echo fiber pair by optimizing capacity, improving network density and efficiency, and accelerating the introduction of new services.”
Beyond the Echo subsea cable, Flag also offers capacity on the FA-1, HAWK, Falcon, MEDEX, FEA, IEX, and FNAL systems.
The announcement today (September 21) comes as Ciena also confirmed that it has provided its WL6e technology for the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) cable system, which connects Western Europe, West Africa, and South Africa.
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