13 July 2022

Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) Consortium, which owns one of the world’s largest consortium cable systems, has selected Infinera’s ICE6 coherent 800G solution Infinera to boost connectivity across European, Asian, African and Middle Eastern markets.

Optical networking solutions business Infinera says AAE-1’s submarine upgrade will double the current capacity, providing in excess of 100 Tb/s and making it the largest-scale submarine upgrade in history.

AAE-1’s cable system spans 25,000 kilometres of submarine and terrestrial networks, connecting 19 countries led by a consortium of 19 leading operators. Infinera has been charged with increasing its submarine network capacity and provide diverse, resilient connectivity across the three continents.

Unlike other cable systems, AAE-1 terminates at two points of presence in Singapore for enhanced route diversity and is the only next-generation cable that extends farther into Asia via diverse terrestrial routes across Thailand to provide connectivity to Vietnam, Cambodia and Hong Kong.

This unique routing enables AAE-1 to deliver one of the lowest-latency routes between Hong Kong, India, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.

Infinera further adds that by upgrading with its fifth-generation ICE6 technology on the GX Series Compact Modular Platform, AAE-1 can leverage a submarine optical network solution that features the highest level of spectral efficiency, long-codeword probabilistic constellation shaping (LC-PCS), Nyquist subcarriers, and the ability to seamlessly upgrade its line system to enable L-band transponders on some of its terrestrial network segments.