Tata boosts its transatlantic internet cable to 40Gbit/s

Indian telecoms firm Tata Communications has gone live with a major upgrade of its transatlantic subsea internet cable, which will boost transmission speeds to 40Gbit/s providing greater bandwidth for carriers and businesses.

Tata has installed Ciena's WaveLogic optical processing technology on its TGN Atlantic cable system, which runs from Highbridge in Somerset to Wall Township in New Jersey. This has enabled it to quadruple capacity on the existing cable, without having to re-lay it.

According to analyst firm TeleGeography, which was cited in the announcement, demand for transatlantic capacity is set to increase nine-fold between 2010 and 2017.

“The compounding effect of demand growth requires carriers to make considerable investments to expand network capacity,” said Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography.

Tata intends to carry out further upgrades to its global network, which consists of more than 200,000km of terrestrial cable and 500,000km of subsea cable.

It plans to update many of its subsea cables with 40Gbit/s technology although this won't be possible for some of its Pacific routes.

"We've proved the technology works for cables up to 7,000km long," Matthew Ma, vice president of ethernet and transmissions engineering at Tata Communications told Computing. "But beyond that, the technology is not quite there."

Tata Communications will also start field trials with 100Gbit/s subsea cables in the second half of 2012, said Ma. 

The deployment of “40G” technology in the TGN-Atlantic cable “will bring maximum long-haul transmission bandwidth, lower latencies, higher uptimes and seamless scalability to carriers and enterprises,” said John Hayduk, president of Tata Communications' product management and service deployment unit.

The move highlights the growing interest in updating key parts of the internet's infrastructure, ensuring it is capable of meeting the lightning-quick speeds that next-generation services will demand.

Recently, cable operator Hibernia Atlantic announced it was to lay the first new transatlantic cable in a decade. The 100Gbit/s cable is dedicated to beaming financial data to traders on opposite sides of the pond.