The Columbus III Consortium has awarded Xtera Communications, Inc. a contract to upgrade the transatlantic segment of the Columbus III Submarine Cable system between Hollywood, Fla., and Lisbon, Portugal.

The acceptance testing was completed on Sept. 30, 2009, and the system is ready to be placed in service, with Xtera’s advanced 20 Gbit/s Differential Phase Shift Key Submarine Line Terminal Equipment, offering an increase in capacity between the United States and Portugal to 160 Gbit/s initially, thus improving service to other countries, such as Africa.

The consortium parties participating in the upgrade are AT&T, PT Communications, TATA Communications, Telkom SA Limited and Verizon (News - Alert) Business.

“The Columbus III system spans 7500 km, more than any other Trans-Atlantic link and it is a major accomplishment to provide an N x 20 Gbit/s solution on line plant originally designed for only 8 x 2.5 Gbit/s,” stated Jon Hopper, CEO of Xtera. “We are very pleased to be selected by the Columbus III consortium for this strategic upgrade.”

The Columbus III network was initially placed in service in December 1999 to connect Portugal, Spain, Italy and the United States. It was designed to offer reduced latency from the southern United States and the Americas to points in southern Europe and beyond. The introduction of 10 Gbit/s technology allows a direct high capacity diverse route from the southern United States to southern Europe and allows the Columbus III owners to offer alternative landings to the Northeast corridor in the United States and the UK and France landings in Europe.

Xtera’s submarine upgrade solution, the NXT system, is highly optimized for operation on submarine cables. It provides monitoring capabilities, including monitoring existing submerged repeaters, supports detection of faults in the existing plant, low power consumption, high reliability sealed clam-shell circuit packs, and NEBS Zone 4 earthquake compliance.