Southern Cross Cable
| Cable type | Fibre-optic |
|---|---|
| Fate | Active |
| Construction beginning | 1998 |
| Construction finished | 2000 |
| First traffic | 2000 |
| Design capacity | >6000 Gbit/s (Jan 2012, based on 40G Technology) |
| Lit capacity | 5.4 Tbit/s (June 2016) |
| Built by | Alcatel-Lucent/Fujitsu |
| Area served | Southern Pacific |
| Owner(s) | Southern Cross Cables Limited (Spark NZ (50.01%), Singtel/Optus (39.99%), Verizon Business (10%)) |
| Website | www |
The Southern Cross Cable, operated by Bermuda company Southern Cross Cables Limited, is a trans-Pacific network of telecommunications cables commissioned in 2000.
The network has 28,900 km of submarine and 1,600 km of terrestrial fiber optic cables, operated in a triple-ring configuration. Initially, each cable had a bandwidth capacity of 120 gigabit/s, but was doubled in an upgrade in April 2008, with a further upgrade to 860 gigabit/s at the end of 2008. Southern Cross upgraded the existing system to 1.2 Tbit/s in May 2010. After successful trials of 40G technology the first 400G of a planned 800G upgrade has been completed in February 2012, with the remaining 400G completed in December 2012. An additional 400G was deployed utilising 100G coherent wavelength technology in July 2013, taking total system capacity to 2.6Tbit/s, with an additional 500Gbit/s to be deployed per segment by Q2 2014, increasing total system capacity to 3.6Tbit/s.
The latest augmentation will also deploy Ciena FlexiGrid technology, increase Southern Cross potential capacity to 12 Tbit/s. Southern Cross offers capacity services from STM-1 to 100Gbit/s OTU-4, including 1G, 10G and 40G Ethernet Private Line services.
The network comprises 12 segments (length of segment in brackets):
The network topology is configured to have redundant paths and be self-healing in case of physical damage.
In the cross section diagram shown:
In 2013 the New Zealand Herald reported that the owners of the Southern Cross cable had asked the United States National Security Agency to pay them for mass surveillance of New Zealand internet activity through the cable. In May 2014, John Minto, vice-president of the New Zealand Mana Party, alleged that the NSA was carrying out mass surveillance on all meta-data and content that went out of New Zealand through the cable.
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Wikipedia