ECFS Consortium Chooses Xtera for Upgrading Caribbean Festoon Subsea Cable System

Eastern Caribbean Fiber System (ECFS) Consortium has selected Xtera Communications Inc. (Xtera), a leading global provider of optical networking solutions, for the upgrade of its festoon subsea cable system.

ECFS subsea cable system is made of 10 segments, connecting Tortola in the British Virgin Islands to Trinidad at the south of the Caribbean arc. Xtera’s Nu-Wave OptimaTM equipment offers the possibility to mix 10G and 100G channel rates to support existing and emerging high-capacity services. Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) are used in cable landing stations to avoid or minimize the number of regeneration points for island-to-island connectivity.

The latest upgrade of ECFS, continues the consortium’s commitment to provide new and improved communication services to the region. The additional bandwidth will allow significant improvement in Internet access for residents, tourists and business customers. In addition, the network provides a robust backbone that allows wireless customers to communicate across islands and to the rest of the world. The participants of the ECFS consortium will enjoy increased flexibility to offer new bundled and unbundled services and are better positioned to take advantage in the growth of cloud services. “ECFS selected Xtera Communications for the upgrade not simply because of its technical expertise with high capacity submarine systems, but because of their increased presence in the region,” said Sam Wallerson, ECFS Chairman.

“Xtera is pleased to help ECFS Consortium upgrade its extensive subsea cable infrastructure throughout the Caribbean region. New capacity will be added during this upgrade by deploying our high-capacity, long-distance optical transport product, Nu-Wave Optima™,” said Jon Hopper, President and CEO of Xtera. “The use of this advanced, field-proven multi-purpose platform will allow ECFS Consortium to introduce 100G services when required by their market”.

Xtera’s Nu-Wave Optima™ platform is a unique modular optical transport system designed to lower the total cost of ownership by using a common, integrated set of modules for long-haul, unrepeatered and regional repeatered submarine applications.

Being the world’s first 100G equipment in the field since the second half of 2011 with soft-decision Forward Error Correction (FEC), Xtera’s Nu-Wave Optima™ offers the industry’s most advanced 100G solution that is available today for multiple optical networking applications. For terrestrial backbone networks, the Nu-Wave Optima™ equipment delivers an unrivaled line capacity of 15 Tb/s on more than 3,000 km. For unrepeatered applications, a capacity of 34 x 100G was recently transmitted over a cable attenuation exceeding 74 dB.

The proven Nu-Wave Optima™ multi-purpose platform offers unparalleled 100G WDM performance in real network conditions based on the combination of the industry’s most powerful 100G technology and unique line equipment to face different span configurations. Some examples include:

– A N x 100G 1,350-km route including a 250-km / 60-dB span;

– The longest N x 100G all-optical link ever deployed with a reach of 2,500 km, including 24 spans, and going through 9 ROADMS; and

– 7 Tb/s per fiber pair on a 350-km / 65.5-dB unrepeatered link.

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Press Release, May 01, 2013