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.