Xtera Upgrades ECFS, Intros New Repeaters

The network infrastructure vendor Xtera is on the move beneath the waves this week, with both a new contract and a new product hitting the news.

The Eastern Caribbean Fiber System Consortium, or ECFS, is upgrading its festoon subsea cable system. This is the cable at the very eastern edge of the Caribbean that hops from island to island starting in the British Virgin Islands and ending all the way down in Trinidad off the coast of Venezuela. They’re using Xtera’s Nu-Wave gear to increase capacity, with the ability to mix 10G and 100G wavelengths and having ROADMs in many of the cable landing stations to reduce regeneration points.

Meanwhile, over at SubOptic 2013 this week, Xtera also unveiled a new generation of repeaters for the submarine cable market. Their approach includes a modular optical design that can be tailored to regional or trans-oceanic cases, a more efficient approach to power, and also a variant that increases overall bandwidth by extending well beyond the normal EDFA C-band.

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Categories: Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables