LION2 submarine network consortium picks Ciena switching gear

LION2 is a 2,700 km-extension of the LION regional cable system. It connects two new submarine stations in Mombasa on the Kenyan coast and on the French island of Mayotte to existing stations in Madgascar, La Réunion, and Mauritius. In addition to upgrading services in the region, the new cable also offers an alternative route for broadband transmissions to Europe and Asia for other African countries.

Delivered in a turnkey deployment project, the CoreDirector FS nodes are meshed together and used as intelligent SDH interconnection equipment to aggregate local traffic into 10-Gbps submarine wavelengths. The nodes leverage the self-healing capabilities enabled via Ciena’s OneConnect Intelligent Optical Control Plane. In the wake of a failure, the control plane will enable the rerouting of services. The consortium will manage the network with Ciena’s management system.

The LION2 consortium includes France Telecom with three partners of the Orange Group – Mauritius Telecom, Orange Madagascar, and Telkom Kenya – as well as the African carrier Emtel Ltd. and Société Réunionnaise du Radiotéléphone, a subsidiary of the French telecommunications group SFR.

“The LION project is a truly pioneering enterprise, literally delivering broadband for the very first time to some of the Indian Ocean islands to connect them with the rest of the world,” said Yves Ruggeri, chairman of the LION 2 Management Committee. “Ciena’s intelligent networking technology, deployed in both phases of the project, is a critical element of the overall solution, offering unmatched resiliency and ensuring maximum network uptime for both the operators involved, and – more importantly – their customers.”

“The expansion of the LION project is excellent news for the population of Mayotte, the Indian Ocean Islands and East Africa,” added Eric Sele, vice president of sales, Southern and Central Europe, Middle East and Africa at Ciena. “The high-capacity services that can now be delivered to these regions will allow both local enterprises and individual consumers to benefit from significantly faster Internet speeds – a service that we have come to take for granted in the western world, but one which will no doubt have substantial economic impact on the region.”