Infinera, Telxius Partner for On-Demand Terabit Capacity on SAm-1

Infinera, a provider of Intelligent Transport Networks, announced that Telxius, the global telecommunications infrastructure company created by Telefónica, now offers its customers on-demand software-defined terabit capacity subsea service activation on Telxius' SAm-1 subsea network between the U.S., Brazil and Puerto Rico. These on-demand services are enabled by Infinera's Instant Bandwidth software, activating capacity on the Intelligent Transport Network deployed by Telxius.

SAm-1 Cable Map

Source: Telefónica

Telxius manages a 65,000 km international network of high-capacity fiber-optic subsea cables, of which 31,000 km are owned by Telxius. Telxius owns and operates the SAm-1 subsea network connecting the U.S. with Central America and South America, where Infinera solutions are deployed, as well as in the terrestrial backhaul associated with them. The 25,000-km SAm-1 subsea network provides capacity and IP services to major service providers aiming at having the best access to more than 300 million Telefónica subscribers.

The Infinera DTN-X XTC Series provides the foundation for the Intelligent Transport Network, delivering terabit per second transmission capacity for Telxius. The XTC Series simplifies network operations with high-capacity optical super-channels enabled by Infinera's unique large-scale photonic integrated circuits and integrated packet-aware Optical Transport Network (OTN) switching, offering the flexibility to simultaneously address both subsea and terrestrial networks. With Infinera Instant Bandwidth, the industry's first software defined capacity (SDC) solution, Telxius can deploy bandwidth in 100 gigabits per second increments without having to pre-deploy additional line cards in the system.

"Our customers demand rapid activation of high-capacity services," said Carlos Dasi, CTO of Telxius Cable. "Infinera's Intelligent Transport Network with Instant Bandwidth enables Telxius to offer highly differentiated, on-demand subsea terabit service activation to our customers."

"Telxius' on-demand subsea service offering underscores the value Intelligent Transport Networks and Instant Bandwidth deliver to global service providers," said Scott Jackson, Infinera Vice President, Subsea Business Group. "We are delighted to work with Telxius and to enable innovative services that help them win new customers."

Infinera Instant Bandwidth is used by over 60 customers around the world and is the industry's first SDC solution. Infinera Instant Network, the next generation of SDC for cloud scale networks, enables service providers to automate optical capacity engineering and scale optical capacity in minutes by using Infinera's Xceed and Digital Network Administrator (DNA) software. SDC provides the foundation to deliver cognitive networking and enables network operators to rapidly provision additional capacity with an on-demand, success-based business model. SDC helps service providers differentiate their offerings by shortening provisioning times, accelerating service delivery and reducing time to revenue.

Source: BNamericas

ANALYSIS: “SAm-1” (“South America-1”) was commissioned in 2001 by Telefónica as one of a number of next-generation submarine cables connecting Brazil to the United States in anticipation of exponential broadband demand growth which actually took five more years to materialize. Even today, the jury is out on whether Brazil is truly going to deliver on the enormous amount of investment that has been made there over the past fifteen years. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the population continues to drive demand growth in excess of 30% per year.

In response to this growth, “SAm-1” and its competitors, “SAC” (South America Crossing) owned by CenturyLink, “GlobeNet” owned by BTG Pactual, and the “Americas-II” consortium, have been gradually upgrading the design capacity of these systems from 10 Gbit/s technology, through 40 Gbit/s, to 100 Gbit/s. However, beyond 100 Gbit/s technology, the yield of additional capacity that can be achieved from these 17-year old systems starts to look uneconomic.

Consequently, a new wave of construction on the North America-South America route is in progress with systems originally designed to accommodate 100 Gbit/s wavelengths and with the potential to be upgraded to perhaps 1 Tbit/s per wavelength. These systems are: “AMX-1”, owned by América Móvil and partially in service; “Seabras-1”, owned by Seaborn Networks with RFS August 2017; the “Monet” consortium, led by Google with RFS August 2017; and “BRUSA” owned by Telxius (Telefónica) with RFS 1H 2018.

Despite all this new capacity, Telxius has decided to upgrade SAm-1. The main reason for this is that Telxius / Telefónica are very familiar with the Infinera technology and its ability to upgrade both submarine and terrestrial systems. From 2009 to 2011, Telefónica upgraded its submarine and terrestrial networks throughout South America using the Infinera DTN platform, based on 100 Gbit/s photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and 40 Gbit/s coherent modulation. In 2013, Infinera migrated the SAm-1 system to their DTN-X platform, allowing access to 100 Gbit/s super-channels which can be concatenated to perform like wavelengths of >100 Gbit/s. All this reduces cost in an extremely competitive market.

Although, Infinera’s announcement is more an advertisement for their technology, rather than providing any information on the deal with Telxius, the net result of this latest upgrade is likely to be an increase in the amount of lit capacity on SAm-1 and not an increase in the design capacity potential of the system.

Pioneer estimates that, after the 2013 upgrade, the design capacity of SAm-1 was raised to 19.2 Tbit/s (4fp x 24λ x 100 Gbit/s) with 2.8 Tbit/s lit. At 30% per year market growth, this would suggest that the latest upgrade has increased lit capacity on SAm-1 to between 7 Tbit/s and 10 Tbit/s.

​Of course, the main burden of meeting demand from Brazil for connectivity to North America will, in future, be borne by “BRUSA” but SAm-1 will continue to provide redundancy and will also serve the markets not served by BRUSA or Telxius’ new Pacific Caribbean Cable System (“PCCS”), such as Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, which are also growing.