New Hawaiki upgrade with Ciena GeoMesh goes live

Hawaiki has gone live with an upgrade to its Oregon point-of-interconnect on the US West Coast, deploying Ciena’s GeoMesh submarine network solution.

“This route previously went from Kapolei (Hawaii) to Pacific City (Oregon) where an optical-electrical-optical regeneration was required to allow protection on the terrestrial link to Hillsboro,” Hawaiki chief executive officer, Remi Galasso said.

“We upgraded this part of our network with the deployment of a multi-span trunk switching solution from Ciena, enabling optical regeneration only. This allows the link to be extended right into the Hillsboro POP with optical protection while eliminating the need for costly regeneration and reducing latency in our cable landing station.”

Hawaiki Submarine Cable LP owns and operates a submarine cable of the same name spanning 15,000km to connect over 350 million users in Australia, New Zealand, American Samoa, Hawaii, and the United States.

Shortly after the commercial launch in mid-2018, the cable was upgraded with Ciena’s GeoMesh solution allowing Hawaiki to offer the lowest cost per transported bit, while evolving to a total 67Tbps of capacity, enabling design capacity to be increased by 53 percent.

The new upgrade delivers Hawaiki’s customers in the region improved reliability and availability as well as lower latency, and comes as the company begins a major capacity upgrade to cope with customers’ growing requirements.

“We now offer a broad range of customer solutions, scaling from 1GbE, 10GbE and 100GbE services over 200Gbps, 250Gbps and 300Gbps wavelengths today,” Galasso noted.

“Our increased investment and deepening collaboration with Ciena couldn’t come at a more important time, with organisations, communities and people across the Pacific – and globally – now so completely dependent on fast, reliable connectivity to maintain operations and quality of life during the current pandemic.”

Rick Seeto, vice president and general manager of Asia-Pacific and Japan, Ciena, added: “Ciena’s industry-leading solutions equip Hawaiki’s submarine network with greater flexibility and faster delivery, enabling them to better serve increasingly diverse customer needs.”