Alcatel Wins $100 Million Southern Cross Upgrade

DALLAS, July 18 -- Alcatel has been awarded a contract worth more than $100 million by Southern Cross Cable Network to equip the third fiber pair in the Southern Cross network with 10 Gb/s of capacity per wavelength. Alcatel will supply undersea line dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) terminals and terrestrial synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) equipment. The upgrade will employ Alcatel's super Forward Error Correction technology for undersea terminals.
The contract covers two phases. The first involves adding 50 Gb/s to the initial total network capacity of 80 Gb/s. The second phase will add a further 110 Gb/s of capacity to reach a total of 240 Gb/s of fully protected capacity. The two phases are expected to be completed by early 2003.