Alcatel-Lucent Upgrades MAYA-1 Submarine Cable Between Florida and Colombia

Alcatel-Lucent is to upgrade the MAYA-1 submarine cable system – which spans 4,400km distance in a collapsed ring from Hollywood, Florida, US, to Tolu in Colombia – quadrupling the activated data capacity to address growing demand for bandwidth-intensive services, as well as position the Caribbean as a critical hub for communications between North and South America.

The 40 Gigabits per second (40G) subsea system will use the high scalability of Alcatel-Lucent’s market-leading single carrier coherent technology to lay the foundation for potential upgrade to 100G capabilities in the future.

Donnie Forbes, Chairman of the MAYA-1 Upgrade #4 Working Group said: “Investing in new capacity on the Maya-1 system will enable the system owners to address the persistent demand for capacity allowing us to satisfy current demand and giving the flexibility to upgrade the system in the future to 100G to keep pace with ever-growing capacity requirements.

Philippe Dumont, President, Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks, said: “The communication infrastructure in Central and Latin America must be able to cope with increased broadband access requirements and with secure content delivery. Our solution offers scalability for staged upgrades that meet significant bandwidth increments over time, while protecting investments in the subsea plant.”