Lightstorm Boosts Japan-Guam-Australia Submarine Cable Capacity to 400Gbps

en.Wedoany.com Report on Mar 24th, Lightstorm has announced it has quadrupled the customer service capacity of its Japan-Guam-Australia (JGA) submarine cable system, from 100Gbps to 400Gbps. This upgrade applies to the JGA cable connecting Tokyo and Sydney, utilizing Ciena's WaveLogic coherent optical technology, and aims to address the growing demand for cloud computing, AI workloads, content delivery, and low-latency applications.

The JGA submarine cable, a Pacific route connecting Japan and Australia via Guam, provides an alternative to paths through the South China Sea, enhancing route diversity and network resilience for carriers, cloud service providers, and large enterprises. The upgraded system has deployed multi-terabit capacity between Japan and Australia, carrying production traffic for global cloud platforms, indicating the link is supporting real-time business operations.

With the shift to 400Gbps customer service, the amount of traffic the route can handle between the two major data center hubs has significantly increased, while also improving fiber pair efficiency and lowering cost per bit, enabling capacity to scale more rapidly with demand. As cloud service providers expand infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region and AI training and inference require moving more data, demand for international submarine routes continues to rise, and operators also need to provide lower latency connections and maintain redundancy to handle disruption risks.

For Lightstorm, the JGA upgrade strengthens its network footprint in the Asia-Pacific region, where the company operates terrestrial fiber and submarine infrastructure. The route is tailored for next-generation network architectures used by hyperscale cloud platforms, AI workloads, and multinational corporations. Beyond the optical upgrade, Lightstorm also uses Ciena's Navigator network control suite for end-to-end network management to support the operation and spectral efficiency of long-haul submarine systems.

Submarine cable operators are increasingly relying on upgrading optical transmission equipment to boost existing system throughput rather than building new cables. Advances in coherent optical technology have increased capacity on long-haul links, improving the economics of existing assets. Higher-capacity services are designed to optimize for customers moving large volumes of data between Japan and Australia, including cloud companies, content delivery networks, and enterprises relying on fast-response applications.

"Upgrading JGA to 400Gbps customer traffic is a significant milestone in our mission to deliver AI-ready, cloud-optimized connectivity across the Pacific," said Group CEO and Managing Director Amajit Gupta. "As the newest and lowest-latency cable between Tokyo and Sydney, JGA provides a robust foundation for supporting cloud and AI architectures. Ciena's technology enables us to unlock greater capacity from our submarine assets while delivering higher performance and reliability."

Ciena's Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific, Japan, and India, Amit Malik, added: "Subsea operators like Lightstorm need scalable, high-performance optical solutions to meet the surging bandwidth demands of cloud and AI. With WaveLogic coherent optics, Lightstorm is transforming JGA into a platform that can deliver 400G services today and seamlessly scale to 800G services in the near future."