Intelligent CIO APAC Issue 69 | Page 31

CABLING
INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY

Lightstorm upgrades submarine cable to support connectivity between Japan and Australia

Lightstorm, a leading cloud and AI network infrastructure platform delivering high-performance terrestrial and subsea connectivity across Asia-Pacific, has announced the successful quadrupling of client service capacity of its Japan – Guam – Australia( JGA) submarine cable system. Powered by Ciena’ s WaveLogic coherent optical technology, the upgrade significantly increases capacity and performance across the JGA route. This enables scalable, ultra-low-latency connectivity between Japan and Australia, while providing improved Pacific network resiliency.

JGA is the newest, low-latency subsea cable system connecting Tokyo to Sydney, delivering an advanced Pacific route optimised for cloud, AI and dataintensive workloads. and geopolitical diversity for global carriers, cloud service providers and large enterprises.
Lightstorm worked closely with Ciena Services to deploy Ciena’ s industryleading coherent optics across the JGA system. Lightstorm is also leveraging Ciena’ s Navigator Network Control Suite for consistent, end-to-end management of its network, to drive operational efficiencies and ensure high spectral efficiency, long-haul performance and seamless scalability.
“ Upgrading JGA to 400Gbps client traffic is a major milestone to us delivering AI-ready, cloud-optimised connectivity across the Pacific,” said Amajit Gupta,
Group CEO and MD.“ As the newest and lowest-latency cable between Tokyo and Sydney, JGA provides a powerful foundation to support cloud and AI architectures. Ciena’ s technology enables us to unlock greater capacity from our subsea assets while delivering greater performance and reliability.”
“ Subsea operators like Lightstorm require scalable, high-performance optical solutions to meet surging cloud and AI bandwidth demands,” said Amit Malik, Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific, Japan and India, Ciena.“ With WaveLogic coherent optics, Lightstorm is transforming JGA into a platform capable of delivering 400G services today and seamlessly scale to 800G services in the near future.” n
The move from 100Gbps to 400Gbps client traffic between two major data centre hubs represents a significant increase in efficiency, scalability and economics for customers supporting hyperscale cloud services, AI training and inference workloads, content distribution and latency-sensitive enterprise applications.
By increasing fibre-pair efficiency and lowering cost-per-bit, the JGA cable upgrade allows Lightstorm to rapidly scale capacity, while maintaining high levels of network performance, resilience and route diversity. These capabilities are increasingly critical as cloud and AI workloads drive sustained, multi-terabit demand between major Asia-Pacific compute regions.
JGA provides a compelling alternative to traditional Asia-Pacific routes that transit the South China Sea, offering improved end-to-end latency between Tokyo and Sydney, along with enhanced operational
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