After a claimed world record in subsea transmission, delivering 800 Gbps on a single wavelength across the trans-Pacific Bifrost Cable System, optical connectivity provider Ciena’s technology has been used by cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) network infrastructure platform Lightstorm to quadruple client service capacity of its Japan-Guam-Australia (JGA) submarine cable system.
Ciena said that demand for the internet and digital capacity is at its highest point, buoyed by AI, new cloud services and other emerging technologies. It added that as AI-driven demand accelerates, subsea cables are the backbone of the AI era.
The comapny stated that work on the Bifrost Cable System forms a milestone that shows how hyperscalers are scaling them for the next wave of global compute – that is, hyperscalers require submarine infrastructure to support the vast datasets needed for AI training and global cloud services.
Together in their trial, Ciena and Meta said they set a new world record in achieving unregenerated single-carrier 800 Gb/s across the 16,608 kilometre-long transpacific submarine cable, delivering high-performance terrestrial and subsea connectivity spanning from Singapore to California. Based on Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) coherent optics, the project is said to redefine capacity, efficiency and sustainable global connectivity at a global scale.
Ciena regards the achievement as reinforcing the “800G everywhere” value of WL6e, demonstrating that ultra-high-capacity wavelengths can perform reliably across the longest and most demanding subsea routes. The trial delivered 18 Tbps of total fibre pair capacity with excess operating margin to spare, housed in a Submarine Line Terminal Equipment (SLTE) footprint of 10 rack units (RU). This is said to provide a 50% reduction in watts/bit when compared with the previous generation of coherent modems.
In addition to regarding the results as “exceptional” from a scale perspective, Ciena said they are “remarkable” in terms of space and power efficiency – a critical advantage in subsea landing stations where every rack unit and watt matters.
Ciena stated that such performance milestones are more than technical achievements, as they reflect the evolving network requirements of AI and cloud-scale innovation. This means managing an internal network with high capacity and ultra-low latency across continents to better train and deploy AI models and associated services.
As it works with Meta to push the submarine cable system to its limits, Ciena anticipates setting new benchmarks for capacity and efficiency. “This is more than a new world record – it’s a glimpse into the future of global connectivity, where submarine cables are the backbone of the next industrial revolution: artificial intelligence,” said Brian Lavallée, senior director, market and competitive intelligence at Ciena.
Ciena believes that the technology “firmly positions” organisations such as Meta to manage an AI-ready infrastructure over long distances while building a power and space-efficient platform that supports unprecedented demands while also delivering numerous environmental, social and governance (ESG) benefits – for example, lowering power consumption and reducing space requirements translate into a smaller carbon footprint that supports Meta’s net-zero goals.
Meanwhile, Lightstorm has upgraded its JGA submarine cable through the use of Ciena’s WaveLogic coherent optical technology to support 400Gbps services, enabling next-generation cloud and AI connectivity between Japan and Australia.
With assets spanning India, Southeast Asia and strategic international submarine routes, Lightstorm is a digital infrastructure platform delivering high-capacity terrestrial fibre and subsea connectivity across Asia-Pacific. Designed to support the next generation of AI, cloud and hyperscale workloads, the company’s network enables deterministic, low-latency and high-throughput connectivity across distributed compute and data ecosystems.
JGA is being built to provide a “compelling” alternative to traditional Asia-Pacific routes that transit the South China Sea, offering 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. The system is designed to enable organisations to benefit from higher bandwidth, lower latency and more scalable connectivity, supporting the performance and resilience required for next-generation digital infrastructure.
By increasing fibre-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. These capabilities are regarded as increasingly critical as cloud and AI workloads drive sustained, multi-terabit demand between major Asia-Pacific compute regions.
Ciena said the move from 100Gbps to 400Gbps client traffic between two major datacentre hubs 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.
The upgraded JGA system is already supporting large-scale, multi-terabit deployments for a leading global cloud platform, carrying production traffic between Japan and Australia. These deployments are attributed with validating the system’s readiness for the most demanding cloud and AI use cases operating at hyperscale.
Lightstorm worked with Ciena Services to deploy Ciena’s industry-leading coherent optics across the JGA system. Lightstorm is also using Ciena’s Navigator Network Control Suite for consistent, end-to-end management of its network, to drive operational efficiencies, and ensure high spectral efficiency, long-haul performance and “seamless” scalability.
