The Pacific Fibre System
Cable Length and Routes
Pacific Fibre will have two subsea cables with a combined length of 12,750km (7,920 miles).
The trans Tasman cable, linking Australia and New Zealand, will be 2,150 km (1,355 miles) long and the trans Pacific cable, linking New Zealand to California, will be 10,600 km (6,585 miles) long.
Landing stations are planned in Sydney, Auckland and California, with the exact proposed locations still commercially sensitive. As the trans-Pacific cable may pass near Samoa, Tonga and American Samoa, Pacific Fibre has the opportunity to provide landings using branching units for those locations.
Points of Presence (POPs)
Pacific Fibre’s system, unlike traditional systems, will offer customers POP to POP access. The currently planned handoff POPs are Equinix in Sydney and one or more of Equinix in San Jose, PAIX in Palo Alto and 1 Wilshire in Los Angeles. The New Zealand POP is yet to be determined, but will be aligned with the industry demand for a resilient international POP, and with the emerging requirements of the UFB program.
Capacity Design Specification
The Pacific Fibre cables are each planned to have two fibre pairs each with a design capacity of at least 5.12 Tbits/sec. Each fibre pair will have a minimum of 128 wavelengths with a capacity of 40 Gbits/s per wavelength.
We have asked vendors to allow for upgradability of technology. Currently in the third generation (3G), the industry will be moving to fifth generation (5G) technology over the next decade, which could deliver up to 100 wavelengths x 100 Gbit/s per wavelength, giving additional future capacity over the original two fibre pairs.
The baseline configuration includes new build beach manholes (BMH), cable landing stations (CLS), and dual path connections from each CLS to each POP. We are also looking at the possibility of additional fibre pairs for one or both paths.
Initial Capacity
Pacific Fibre’s system will be initially lit with at least 120 Gbit/s per fibre pair, which is likely to be increased given the demand from customers.
Latency
Pacific Fibre’s system will offer the lowest latency to the US from Australia or New Zealand, particularly when measured as a POP to POP solution. The current information is as follows, with competitor figures derived from their respective publications:
Sydney to USA:
• Pacific Fibre: 67 ms (via NZ - POP to POP)
• Endeavour: 69 ms (via Hawaii)
• Southern Cross: 70 ms (via NZ/Hawaii - landing station to landing station only)
• Southern Cross: 72 ms (via Fiji/Hawaii
- landing station to landing station only)
• PPC-1: 87 ms (via Guam/Hawaii)
Auckland to USA:
• Pacific Fibre: 56 ms (POP to POP)
• Southern Cross: 61 ms (via Hawaii - landing station to landing station only)
Interconnecting Cable Systems
Pacific Fibre proposes having interconnection arrangements with other cable systems in Australia and the USA for on-going traffic.
Resilience and Diversity
The Pacific Fibre system takes advantage of industry improvements in reliability and performance, and following industry norms is a single span system. The system N +1 protection is offered at the 40 G wavelength level, ensuring protection is in place to cover card failure, which is the most likely and common fault.
This and the significant improvements in subsea cable standards will help ensure the system is very robust and reliable.
Pacific Fibre anticipates entering into capacity swaps with other systems and being able to offer diversity products.
Service Offerings
Pacific Fibre will offer services from Sydney to Auckland, Sydney to Los Angeles, and Auckland to Los Angeles.
Bandwidth Products
Pacific Fibre will provide interfaces to SDH, Ethernet and wavelength services compatible with the ITUs recommendations for Interfaces for the Optical Transport Network [ITU-T G.709].
Services that will be offered will include:
• OTU-1
• OTU-2
• OTU-3
• STM-256/OC-768
• STM-64/OC-192
• STM-16/OC-48
• 40GigE*
• 10GigE*
• N x Gbit/s where N<=40
Purchase Options
Please contact us to discuss your requirements.