Part of the Nova Principa Group (Luxembourg) SA  

Southern Cross Cable recently announced that it will be increasing its optical cable capacity.  In late March  Southern Cross lit up 260 Gbits of capacity on its two submarine fibre-optic cables that directly connect between Australia and New Zealand. This network further connects Australia to the US Internet via Hawaii. The company is targetting a completion of later in 2008 to reach a total installed capacity of 860Gbps.

Nortel, the vendor of the equipment  to Southern Cross, developed the technology using a modulation technique that is widely used in RF data transmission. The technique, known as DP-QPSK, has been adapted by Nortel to the optical domain to encode data on four different planes of polarisation of the optical signal within the lightpath.

CUDOS ((Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems) recently announced a breakthrough in development of the basis for optical switching and routing to be carried out at 640Gbps.

The device uses a particular combination of materials and configuration in what is known as a planar waveguide to "steer" light very quickly in the desired directions, without the necessity to convert to electronics first. This is the "holy grail" of optical engineering, and removes the "roadblocks" in the backbone networks that comprise the Internet.