Undersea Cable Solutions

Undersea fiber-optic cables provide the vast majority of the intercontinental bandwidth of the Internet. Remotely Creating, Monitoring and Protecting the lightpaths on these fibers is increasingly important to the New Optical Internet. With the rapid growth in the amount of traffic carried on undersea cables, the outages seen in the past caused by cable breaks and equipment failures are no longer acceptable.

Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Switching solutions greatly improve availability and reduce capital and operating costs by facilitating flexible “Lights Out” landing sites.

Diagram of Undersea Fiber

Create

Glimmerglass switches provide a full non-blocking, transparent crossconnect. In milliseconds a lightpath can be created between any fiber input and output. At a landing site, this connectivity permits new lightpaths between the wet side and dry side to be rapidly and remotely provisioned with a few clicks of a mouse using the Glimmerglass ClickFlow GUI interface or with a few TL1 commands. Since the lightpaths are fully transparent, the newly created lightpath will transport any data format and speed.

Monitor

Continuous input and output power monitoring, combined with transparent switching provides the landing site operator with a superior tool for monitoring the health of the wavelength transponders and for rapid fault isolation. In addition to monitoring the optical power of live wavelengths, tapped lightpaths may be directed to more specialized equipment for monitoring and analysis. In milliseconds, loopback paths may be created to help isolate any fault to a particular piece of equipment. All of this can be performed remotely with no on-site intervention required.

Protect

In the event Glimmerglass power monitoring detects a failed wavelength transponder, traffic can be automaticly routed through a standby transponder. This N to 1 protection results in significant savings in sparing and permits repairs to be performed on a scheduled instead of emergency basis.

With the ability to rapidly transfer massive data streams from one set of lightpaths to another, Glimmerglass switches are also the ideal solution implementing full mesh cable protection.

High Density, Low Profile

Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Switches have the highest fiber density in the industry. Up to 190 fibers (95 x 95) are supported in just two rack units (3.5” or 8.9cm) and up to 380 fibers (190 x 190) in 4 rack units. Weighing only 20 to 38 pounds (9 to 17kg), power consumption ranges from 35 to 80 watts and requires no special cooling.

Future Proof

Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Switches fully transparent crossconnects. Once installed, the undersea cable operator is ready for any future data rate or format. No changes are required to migrate from GE to 10GE to 100GE or from OC-48 to OC-192 or even OC-768 SONET/SDH. Upgrade the transmission systems, not the switching fabric.

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