Pacnet has announced the deployment of an optical mesh network for wholesale customers and enterprises, with 100Gbps technology between Asia and the United States on its EAC Pacific fiber optic cable system.
That network is integrated with optical transport network (OTN) switching over its Asia-Pacific region’s high-capacity submarine cable systems. Pacnet can now offer 10Gbps, 40Gbps and 100Gbps services between Asia-Pacific and the U.S.
Pacnet’s 100G network upgrade is a significant move to address the increasingly growing demand for bandwidth throughout the Asia-Pacific region and all over the world. In 2017, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, global IP traffic is expected to reach 1.4 Zettabytes per year, or 120.6 Exabytes per month, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent from 2012 to 2017. IP traffic in Asia-Pacific will reach 43.4 Exabytes per month by 2017, at a CAGR of 26 percent.
“We are the first carrier to support 100G service between Asia and the United States,” says Andy Lumsden, CTO at Pacnet. “With this successful upgrade, we have significantly boosted our bandwidth capacity and scalability to serve the dynamic needs of carriers and enterprises that support compute-intensive operations in the region.”
Pacnet owns and operates EAC-C2C, Asia’s largest privately-owned submarine cable network at 36,800 km, as well as EAC Pacific, which spans 9,620 km across the Pacific Ocean. EAC-C2C connects to cable landing stations throughout the region including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines and China, while EAC Pacific is a trans-Pacific cable system providing connectivity between Chikura, located off the coast of Japan near Tokyo, to Los Angeles, California and other network Points of Presence (PoPs) on the West Coast of the United States. The two fiber pairs, collectively known as EAC Pacific, provide up to 1.92 Terabytes per second (TBps) of capacity across the Pacific Ocean.
The new backbone integrates subsea fiber infrastructure and terrestrial backhaul links supporting pure packet technology and OTN switching in the optical core, supporting Pacnet’s capability to offer customers network services between its inventory of interconnected data centers located in 14 cities across Asia-Pacific. The upgrade supports both Ethernet and OTN interfaces at a location, allowing customers to multiplex, scale up and down, amplify, groom, optically express, or switch individual data streams.
