Products & Services

Xtera^® is an innovative provider of subsea and telecoms technology. The company supplies both unrepeatered and repeatered systems, using its high performance optical amplifiers to deliver traffic directly inland to cities and offering flexibility in working with selected partners to provide the optimum technical and commercial package.

Xtera consistently challenges industry norms and creates novel solutions that are suited to each individual customer whether that be for the provision of a system, an open architecture design or individual network elements. We are a flexible supplier who works with a variety of partners to create the best solution for each project with a proven track record of delivery. Contact Xtera today at [email protected] to see how we can help you to build exceptional systems. Download our corporate brochure and product data sheets below:

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Xtera Products

Repeater

Branching Unit

Network Management System

Open Systems

Terminal Equipment

Unrepeatered Systems

Line Monitoring Equipment

Repeater

Xtera’s advanced submarine repeater unit has been designed with reliability and performance foremost, allowing us to deliver a highly optimised and robust transmission system. Our hybrid repeater uses Raman technology to reduce line noise, which allows us to offer long-span, high-bandwidth systems. The repeater features a light-weight and compact titanium design that can be plough-buried. Simple and rapid monitoring of repeater optical levels, pump health, internal temperature etc., is provided via the Line Monitoring Equipment.

Xtera’s repeaters also have an in-built accelerometer that allows us to monitor repeater handling during marine operations, and the system owner to track any unexpected movement after installation.

Key repeater features are:

C and C+L band variants with optical bandwidth up to 70nm
Depth capability qualified to 8,000m
2,4,6 fibre pair variants
High reliability design, with redundancy in pumps and controllers
Per amplifier tilt control, removing the need for separate tilt equalisers.
Active supervisory & C-OTDR compatibility

Branching Unit

Xtera’s branching unit leverages many of the advanced mechanical features of the repeater. The current release supports fibre routing and fixed OADM. The branching unit power switching is controlled via the supervisory, which has the following advantages:

Simpler to configure than current-steering
More stable; only changes state when a command is sent
Can be locked for safety
Can be powered up from a single leg
Can isolate a leg for insulation testing

The branching unit has been designed to allow hot switching without damage. Maximum deployment depth, using standard Light Weight cable, is >5,000m.

Network Management System

Xtera’s NMS manages the wet-plant, Nu-wave™ Optima and PFE, automatically logging alarms, events and performance data and allowing an operator to monitor and control these units. Users login via a secure password system and their access is controlled by a profile set by the System Administrator.

The system can limit users to access only certain equipment, or give the ability to monitor, but not control/change system parameters. The NMS is a Client-Server architecture, based on a LINUX/ SUN server and PCs as clients. The NMS manages the equipment in several sites
and supports multiple clients.

Open Systems

Xtera has a number of products designed to support Open systems, facilitating separate supply of terminal, power feeding and wet plant equipment.

Our Open system family provides active supervisory of the submerged plant and allows monitoring of the PFE via the NMS. In the Open System Gateway (OSG) fibre pairs are independently controlled and isolated from each other.

Additionally, units may be fitted to allow the bandwidth of a fibre to be shared, effectively creating virtual fibre pairs with users completely isolated from each other. High reliability amplifiers control power levels and loading modules fill unused bandwidth, avoiding the problems that would occur if a terminal were to fail or be disconnected. The OSG is fully managed by the NMS.

Terminal Equipment

Xtera’s Nu-wave™ Optima platform provides a common, modular platform that can serve terrestrial, unrepeatered and ultra-long span submarine applications. The Optima employs the latest technology, including QPSK, 8QAM and 16QAM transmission with coherent detection and soft-decision FEC (SD-FEC). The Optima offers high equipment density, low power consumption and a responsive, easy-to-use Management System that manages all Xtera products.

Key features are:

Extended reach through Raman amplification
Common, integrated set of plug-and-play modules
Fully tuneable line units over the entire bandwidth
High power Raman and ROPA for industry-leading spans without repeaters
End-to-end unified network management system
A range of simple and cost-effective protection schemes
Repeater LME supervisory
Data Communications facilities
Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexer (ROADM)

Unrepeatered Systems

Xtera is the industry leader in unrepeatered applications, experienced in both equipping existing links and complete build systems. Xtera uses combinations of forward and backwards Raman pumping and ROPAs for maximum unrepeatered reach. The Nu-waveTM Optima has demonstrated 100Gbit/s transmission over a 627 km fibre span.

Line Monitoring Equipment

The Nu-Wave LME provides a complete solution for submerged plant implementing either ‘active’ or ‘passive’ monitoring. The LME-A (LME-Active) provides the ability to interrogate Xtera submerged plant, both repeaters and BU, together with legacy submerged plant available from other Suppliers. The LME-P (LME-Passive) provides the means for monitoring submerged plant from other suppliers who implement only a ‘passive’ plant monitoring scheme. The LME is accessible from the Nu-Wave NMS.

The LME-A allows the monitoring and control of submerged plant based upon low-frequency optical signaling to the submerged plant. The modulation schemes implemented handled both Xtera submerged plant – which is binary PSK-based, and competitor submerged plant – which varies between OOK and binary PSK, which depends upon the system in question. All submerged plant is provided with a unique address, during manufacture, which allows each repeater/BU to be interrogated or controlled on an individual basis, using a command and response protocol.

The LME-P allows the monitoring of submerged plant which provides no active means of interrogation or control, only passive optical loopback of transmitted signals. The loopbacks with the submerged plant are implemented as High-Loss LoopBacks (HLLB) which feeds back a portion of the ‘transmit’ signal onto the received signal within a fiber-pair.