Seacom on Monday demonstrated new “five times 100Gbit/s-per-wave” fibre technology (500Gbit/s in total) as well as its new fibre connection between Teraco’s Johannesburg data centre and Seacom’s submarine cable landing station in Mtunzini in KwaZulu-Natal. The company says it hopes to use the technology to meet SA’s growing demand for bandwidth while remaining competitively priced.

Suveer Ramdhani, head of product strategy at Seacom, says 10 x 10Gbit/s of capacity is already operational, which is an improvement from the five that were previously in use. A further 10 wavelengths are expected to be added within a year. He says Seacom is “leveraging the Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) route to Mtunzini to augment existing routes”.

Seacom operates a high-capacity submarine cable that links SA with Europe and India along Africa’s east coast.

DFA, Neotel, hardware manufacturer Infinera, Teraco, the CSIR and Seacom were all involved in the 100Gbit/s project. Teraco demonstrated on Monday how it is able to operate 10Gbit/s signals simultaneously with 100Gbit/s technology.

The technology will be implemented commercially early in 2012.

Infinera senior product manager David Wolfson says bandwidth demands are growing rapidly worldwide, with video the biggest driver. He says the ability to “scale up” quickly and cost effectively is crucial for data centre operators, telecommunications operators and Internet service providers.

He says Infinera’s “photonic integrated circuits” are one of the solutions. Each circuit integrates five 100Gbit/s coherent channels of 100Gbit/s each onto a single chip, which is the size of a fingernail. “The next generation of 100Gbit/s chips are still the same size and consume almost as little power.” — Craig Wilson, TechCentral