AAG Cable Network to Upgrade with 40G

Tokyo, November 11, 2011-- Mitsubishi Electric announced Thursday that it has signed a contract with the Asia America Gateway (AAG) consortium to upgrade the AAG Cable Network by incorporating coherent 40 Gbps DWDM and increasing its design capacity to 5.2 Tbps. The upgrade will involve installing submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) in eight countries. The AAG 40G upgrade is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2012.

The AAG Cable Network is the first submarine cable system linking South East Asia directly with the U.S., was launched for service in late 2009 and initially designed with 96x10 Gbps DWDM system. (click here for more technical information the AAG cable system). The AAG cable network has been running quite stable on its trans-pacific span linking Hong Kong, the Philippines and the U.S, although there has been frequent outages in its Asian spans in the past two years.

As a result of the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in March 2011, demands on the AAG cable network soared. There is now hard to get a single 10Gbps wavelength on the AAG cable network, especially on its trans-pacific spans. Urgent upgrade of the AAG cable network was almost unanimously agreed by all the AAG consortium members.

A field trial conducted on the AAG Cable Network has proved that Mitsubishi Electric's coherent technology can enable 40 Gbps DWDM transmissions beyond 6,600 kilometers.