Telstra Deploys Major Upgrade to Network Services in Asia Pacific

Telstra and Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN) on Sunday unveiled a major upgrade to Telstra’s network services in Asia Pacific for a significant increase in fibre capacity to its subsea infrastructure using Infinera’s Infinite Capacity Engine 4 (ICE4).

As quoted in the press release:

As part of an ongoing partnership, Infinera’s fourth-generation ICE4 optical engine is being rolled out across Telstra’s Asia Pacific subsea infrastructure, increasing the capacity, agility and reliability of Telstra’s network.

The ICE4 subsea solution allows Telstra to rapidly activate new capacity for customers, delivering multi-terabit capacity with low power consumption and high reliability.

ICE4 increases Telstra’s fibre capacity by 160 per cent and port density by 140 per cent, while also decreasing power consumption, allowing Telstra to continually improve network services for customers.

Telstra is one of the largest providers of 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) network services globally and the ICE4 technology positions the company to support customers’ future connectivity demands, activating capacity per wavelength of up to 200 Gb/s.

Telstra’s Network Planning Principal, Andy Lumsden, said that Telstra was committed to continually developing its network to support the increasing demand for data right across the Asia Pacific region.

“Our commitment to our Asia Pacific customers means we are always adapting and creating capacity where it is needed. This means we are continually working to deploy new technologies that enhance our existing network and complement our latest capacity investments,” Mr Lumsden said.

“With Infinera’s ICE4 optical engine, we are deploying the latest technology across our network. We can now provision new services faster than ever before, which is critical in a region when capacity demand on our international networks has almost doubled over the past two years.”

Telstra has the largest subsea cable network in the Asia Pacific, reaching more than 400,000km and enough to circle the world almost 10 times.

Infinera’s Vice President of Sales, Andrew Bond-Webster, said early testing on the rollout had delivered strong results.

“ICE4, our latest optical engine, enables Telstra to deliver multi-terabit capacity cost effectively with low power consumption and with the reliability required for subsea networks to perform,” Mr Bond-Webster said.

“We have partnered with Telstra for a decade, and work collaboratively to co-create solutions that respond rapidly to changing data consumption and the growth of bandwidth-heavy applications.”

Telstra’s ICE4 network upgrade will be completed in the coming months.

Click here for the full text release.