Lightstorm quadruples speed of APAC subsea cable

Lightstorm, a digital infrastructure platform delivering high-capacity terrestrial fiber and subsea connectivity across Asia-Pacific, has quadrupled the client service capacity of its Japan-Guam-Australia (JGA) submarine cable system, boosting speeds from 100Gbps to 400Gbps.

Powered by Ciena’s WaveLogic coherent optical technology, the upgrade represents a "significant increase" in efficiency, scalability, and economics for customers supporting hyperscale cloud services, AI training and inference workloads, content distribution, and latency-sensitive enterprise applications, according to the company.

By increasing fiber-pair efficiency and lowering cost-per-bit, the JGA cable upgrade is intended to allow Lightstorm to rapidly scale capacity, while maintaining high levels of network performance, resilience, and route diversity. 

The upgraded JGA system is already supporting large-scale, multi-terabit deployments for a unnamed global cloud platform, carrying production traffic between Japan and Australia. 

JGA provides an alternative to traditional Asia-Pacific routes that transit the South China Sea, claiming to offer improved end-to-end latency between Tokyo and Sydney, along with enhanced operational and geopolitical diversity for global carriers, cloud service providers, and large enterprises.

Lightstorm worked closely with Ciena Services to deploy Ciena’s coherent optics across the JGA system, with the company also leveraging Ciena’s Navigator Network Control Suite for end-to-end management of its network.

“Upgrading JGA to 400Gbps client traffic is a major milestone to us delivering AI-ready, cloud-optimised connectivity across the Pacific,” said Amajit Gupta, group CEO and MD at Lightstorm.

“As the newest and lowest-latency cable between Tokyo and Sydney, JGA provides a powerful foundation to support cloud and AI architectures. Ciena’s technology enables us to unlock greater capacity from our subsea assets while delivering greater performance and reliability.”

“Subsea operators like Lightstorm require scalable, high-performance optical solutions to meet surging cloud and AI bandwidth demands,” said Amit Malik, VP and GM of Asia Pacific, Japan and India at Ciena.

“With WaveLogic coherent optics, Lightstorm is transforming JGA into a platform capable of delivering 400G services today and seamlessly scale to 800G services in the near future.”