Superloop teams up with Cisco for two 400G subsea cable deployments

Superloop used Cisco's gear for two deployments of up to 400G on its subsea cable lines that connect Singapore with Australia and Perth to Sydney.

Superloop used Cisco's NCS 1004 for its subsea routes as part of its fiber pair "open cable" design with new spectrum sharing technology.

The connectivity provider serves the Asia-Pacific region and Australia. The 400G trials took place on Superloop's 4,600-kilometer Indigo West cable from Singapore to Sydney and Indigo Central cable from Perth to Sydney.

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Superloop is building out critical core infrastructure for wholesale carriers and global content providers who require scalable and reliable capacity on-demand. It owns and operates more than 670 kilometers of carrier-grade fiber networks in Hong Kong, the Asia Pacific and Australia. All told, Superloop connects over 275 sites across its footprint.

“The Indigo cable system completes the next stage of our Asia-Pac network infrastructure," said Ryan Crouch, chief technology officer of Superloop, in a statement. "We are now the sole operator that owns fiber to buildings in Australia, Singapore and HK, placing it at the forefront of optical fiber connection and transmission technologies.

"Working with Cisco on the Indigo cable system was a logical extension of the partnership that helped create our Australian integrated backhaul network to the 121 points of interconnect. We are now truly positioned as the pan-Asia fiber operator to meet growing customer demand across the region."

Cisco's NCS 1004 supports up to 4.8 Tbps of client traffic, as well as 4.8 Tbps of trunk traffic. It also features a low power footprint across two rack units. Aside of subsea cable deployments, it can also be used for terrestrial long-haul deployments as well as metro data center interconnect applications.

In order to keep pace with increasing bandwidth demands due to video consumption and the low latencies that 5G will need, service providers, such as Verizon and AT&T, have been hot on the trail of 400G.