Orange’s Kanawa Caribbean submarine cable uses Infinera XTS 3600
Author Stephen Hardy
www.lightwaveonline.com
Editorial Director and Associate Publisher
Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) says that the Kanawa submarine cable that Orange has deployed between French Guiana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe uses its XTS 3600 platform on the Martinique-Guadeloupe segment. The optical communications technology supplier says Orange will use the Infinera Instant Bandwidth capability for rapid capacity turnup on the submarine network link.
Orange completed construction of the 1746-km Kanawa submarine cable this past January and inaugurated services the same month. The two-fiber-pair submarine network offers a total capacity of 10 Tbps via support of 100-Gbps wavelengths. Orange Marine, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Orange Group, laid the undersea cable, which connects with the East Caribbean Fiber System to offer a direct link between French Guiana and the American continent. Orange spent €35 million ($39.5 million) on the project. Capacity on the Kanawa submarine system will be offered to local service providers.
“French Guiana is experiencing rapid growth in digital technology,” said Jean-Luc Vuillemin, executive vice president, Orange International Networks Infrastructure and Services. “We needed to ensure the region keeps pace with the rest of the world, and Kanawa was our solution. Infinera’s cutting-edge technology enables Orange to increase capacity on demand and delivers the high performance we expected. Choosing to deploy Infinera’s technology is a significant benefit to us and our customers, providing us with an agile, scalable network.”
Orange has not announced who supplied the optical transmission equipment for the other legs of the submarine network. It named the undersea cable system Kanawa, which the company says means “large canoe” in the language of the native Kalina who once called the West Indies home, as the result of a contest among Orange employees.
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