The deployment enhances connectivity between Asia and the United States via the roughly 9,000km FASTER subsea cable, which links Japan with the US and serves as a key route for international data traffic across the Pacific.
The upgrade is designed to help the Malaysian operator scale network capacity as global bandwidth demand continues to grow.
By deploying Ciena’s latest coherent optical technology on the system, Time can increase traffic capacity across the route while maintaining the same space and power footprint within its facilities.
“The FASTER cable system is a vital contributor to transpacific connectivity. With global bandwidth usage more than tripling between 2020 and 2024 to approximately 6.4 Pb/s last year, we are working with Ciena to efficiently scale our network to address surging bandwidth demands,” said Ang Thing Jiun, Time’s NetCo CEO.
“Ciena’s best-in-class coherent optical capabilities, enables Time to scale data transmission to 1 Tb/s across a single-carrier wavelength on the FASTER cable system, with minimal operational impact to facilities being used.”
The FASTER system is one of the main high-capacity submarine cables connecting the Asia-Pacific region with North America, supporting cloud providers, enterprises and international carriers operating across the corridor.
According to Ciena, the technology deployed allows operators to expand capacity within existing infrastructure, improving operational efficiency while avoiding major changes to physical facilities.
“Time and Ciena have teamed up to improve connectivity across the transpacific corridor, upgrading its existing submarine network to support the new capacity needs of an AI era,” said Phil Rolle, regional managing director, subsea, Asia Pacific and Japan at Ciena.
“Supported by Ciena’s extensive experience in subsea cable deployments, Time has successfully laid the foundation for the next wave of AI and cloud computing technologies, all while maintaining current operational practices.”
The solution is based on Ciena’s single-carrier 1.6Tb/s coherent optical technology, designed to deliver higher performance and efficiency for long-haul and subsea networks as demand for cloud services and AI-driven workloads accelerates globally.
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