In response to increasing bandwidth demands, Hibernia Atlantic announced this week that it had upgraded its undersea data transport span from Boston to Halifax to 40G capacity.
Hibernia, which provides secure international network connections to enterprise clients through a 12,200-kilometer fiber-optic submarine cable system that runs across the Atlantic Ocean, teamed up with Huawei Technologies to upgrade its Boston-Halifax undersea span bandwidth capacity from 10G to 40G. The company’s original 10G undersea international cable link was built in 2000.
Huawei supplied a 192-channel, 40G Huawei’s 40G transponder system. The company says that this upgrade is significant because it is a native circuit that doesn’t depend on plugging multiple 10G streams into a 40G interface. The upgrade to Hibernia’s Boston-Nova Scotia span increases its total capacity from 1.9TB to 7.68TB.
Derek Bullock, Hibernia’s vice president of network operations, says that this increased bandwidth capacity will be key to meeting Hibernia clients’ demands in the coming years. With the advent of such high-bandwidth Web applications as video streaming and multimedia networking sites such as Facebook, Bullock says that bandwidth demands are expected to increase exponentially.

Bullock wouldn’t comment directly when asked whether Hibernia planned to upgrade its transatlantic spans to 40G as well, saying only that Hibernia customers should “watch this space” for future updates.
Hibernia is one of several companies to upgrade to 40G capacity over the past two years. AT&T and Global Crossing announced last summer that they were upgrading their MPLS backbones to 40Gbps OC-768.