Three major submarine projects delivering hitherto unserved capacity and throughput across Africa and the Middle East have been revealed, satisfying surging digital demands regionally, as well as cost-effectively improving connectivity to Europe, the Americas and Southeast Asia.
EASSy, the 10,000km submarine cable system traversing Africa’s east and south coasts, is now using Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme, powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optical technology, to increase capacity and performance in sub-Saharan Africa. With the new deployment, EASSy is doubling network capacity from 18Tbps to 36Tbps across the system to maintain pace with voracious and ongoing bandwidth growth.
By using its latest coherent technology, Ciena said EASSy is adding intelligence and efficiency to its cable system, maximising fibre capacity and substantially reducing the transported cost per bit. The network is managed by Ciena’s Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller. By adopting a software-driven, automated approach, EASSy is said to be able to gain maximum operational proficiency and service agility while reducing OPEX.
The upgrade is designed to help EASSy satisfy surging digital demands regionally, as well as cost-effectively improve connectivity to Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. EASSy is also using Ciena technology to implement the hardware upgrade, including migration of legacy traffic, as well as to manage and support its network operations centre (NOC) in South Africa.
