To support growing demand for more bandwidth across the Asia-to-Europe route, SEA-ME-WE 4 (South East Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 4) recently completed an upgrade to its submarine cable system. Powered by Ciena's (NYSE: CIEN) GeoMesh Extreme submarine network solution, the upgrade enables a capacity increase from 65Tb/s to 122Tb/s on the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable system.

“Ciena’s cutting-edge technology is helping us in optimizing the resources of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, thereby enhancing its capabilities to address evolving connectivity demands through enhancement in network capacity, flexibility, and durability. This upgrade holds particular significance given the pivotal role of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable system in driving digitalization efforts across the diverse regions where the system is passing through,” said Sidheeque Machinal, Management Committee Chairman, SEA-ME-WE 4 consortium.

With GeoMesh Extreme, leveraging Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical platform, SEA-ME-WE 4 can maintain pace with voracious global demand for bandwidth, protect terabits of traffic, and ensure optimal network availability. Additionally, Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics help significantly lower costs by increasing the capacity per wave up to 450Gb/s. SEA-ME-WE 4 is also utilizing Ciena’s Navigator Network Control Suite for real-time visibility into and control of network performance.

“The Europe-to-Asia route, where SEA-ME-WE 4 is situated, is experiencing a major digitalization push, resulting in extreme capacity demands. With Ciena’s field-proven expertise in building critical submarine network infrastructure, we’re helping SEA-ME-WE 4 address rising capacity demands by making the switch to network architectures that adapt to leverage intelligence, scalability, and programmability,” said Thomas Soerensen, Vice President, Global Submarine Solutions, Ciena.

Operated by a consortium of 16 telecom operators, SEA-ME-WE 4 is an approximately 18,800 km submarine cable connecting Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, and France.